Hello Rabbi,
I am sitting in the Denver, Co. airport writing to you about a fascinating seatmate I had on the flight, who informed me of something that really brings out your point from two weeks ago about the need for a literary component to Torah if its abstract contents are to be successfully translated into the cultural identity necessary to form an Am.
Ah! Big sentence. My friend hails from New Zealand, and we talked all about that country’s interesting history. One of the points he mentioned to me about the natives (whose name I cannot recall) was that they were an incredibly advanced people with regards to their command of oceanic navigation. Apparently the peoples of the Pacific Rim knew how to travel hundreds of miles on the high seas in canoes, and this is how they migrated, with knowledge of currents, winds, and other relevant science. Thing is they didn’t have a written language. So, what they did - instead of having a large corpus of complex oral knowledge – was encode their science in literary form, in stories that they would pass on generation to generation!
Amazing no?
-David
That is a great example of the mashal character of mesorah. I have copied an article on Joseph Campbell which I think explains this well. You can immediately see however, the need for clear ikrim to delimit the meaning or peyrush of Mashal. If there were not these ikrim, people would mistake the imaginings of their hearts for wisdom! This, sadly, is what happened to Campbell himself, as you will see.
Joseph Campbell and Myth
A fundamental belief of Campbell's was that all spirituality is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. This elemental force is ultimately “unknowable” because it exists before words and knowledge. Although this basic driving force cannot be expressed in words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of "metaphors" - these metaphors being the various stories, deities, and objects of spirituality we see in the world. For example, Genesis in the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of actual events, but rather its poetic, metaphorical meaning should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence.
Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various, culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. Indeed, he quotes in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names."
Campbell was fascinated with what he viewed as basic, universal truths, expressed in different manifestations across different cultures. For example, in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he indicated that a goal of his was to demonstrate similarities between Eastern and Western religions. In his four-volume series of books "The Masks of God", Campbell tried to summarize the main spiritual threads common throughout the world. Tied in with this, was his idea that many of the belief systems of the world which expressed these universal truths had a common geographic ancestry, starting off on the fertile grasslands of Europe in the Bronze Age and moving to the Levant and the "Fertile Crescent" of Mesopotamia and back to Europe (and the Far East), where it was mixed with the newly emerging Indo-European (Aryan) culture.
Heroes and the monomyth
The role of the hero figured largely in Campbell's comparative studies. In 1949 The Hero with a Thousand Faces introduced his idea of the monomyth (as stated above, a word borrowed from Joyce), which outlined some of the archetypal patterns Campbell recognized. Heroes were important to Campbell because, to him, they conveyed universal truths about one's personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relationship between the two.
Campbell's influence on cinema
George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to openly credit Campbell's influence. Lucas stated following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977 that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell's. The linkage between Star Wars and Campbell was further reinforced when later reprints of Campbell's book used the image of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the cover.[9] Lucas discusses this influence at great length in the official biography of Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind by Stephen and Robin Larsen:
- I [Lucas] came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is...around the period of this realization...it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books (Larsen and Larsen, 2002: 541).
It was not until after the completion of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1983, however, that Lucas met Campbell or heard any of his lectures.[10] The 1988 documentary The Power of Myth was filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. During his interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell discusses the way in which Lucas used The Hero's Journey in the Star Wars films (IV, V, and VI) to re-invent the mythology for the contemporary viewer. Moyers and Lucas filmed an interview 12 years later in 1999 called the Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas & Bill Moyers to further discuss the impact of Campbell's work on Lucas' films.[11] In addition, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored an exhibit during the late 1990s called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which discussed the ways in which Campbell's work shaped the Star Wars films.[12] A companion guide of the same name was published in 1997.
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