The Torah According to Potter

This a fascinating look at the world of Potter. It will be shared in several parts... take a look

The Torah According to Potter
Rabbi Isaac Serotta
Yom Kippur 5766

The past two summers at camp I have had the opportunity to witness a unique phenomenon. I have been at Camp Olin-Sang-Ruby on Harry Potter Day. Even those of you who have not read the books or seen the movies are probably familiar with the cultural juggernaut of Potter-mania, but it is really something to see it first hand with hundreds of children.

The Potter books tell the story of a boy becoming a man against the backdrop of Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. This magical place is an imaginary location in the real world but hidden from the non-magic eye. Camp is also a magical place. In the world of Hogwarts, wizard mail is delivered by owls who come flitting in with packages and letters attached to their legs. At camp, the more prosaic delivery service is FedEx. 24 hours after the Potter books are released, hundreds of packages arrive at camp at once, as parents send their children books by overnight mail. Those who don't have copies of their own, bide their time and wait for a friend to finish and then devour the books for themselves. One boy I saw, shared his book by reading chapter one, tearing it out of his book and passing it on to his friend so that they could read the book in one sitting together nearly simultaneously.

I have never seen anything read with more enthusiasm, or absorbed more fully by young people than these books. On the one hand I could wish that our children would have the same hunger for the stories of Torah as they do for Harry Potter. But, on the other, the joy is infectious. I have been sharing these books one by one with my own son Hudy. Now he is old enough to read them on his own, but the ritual we've established is so firmly entrenched that he still allows and in fact desires that I read it to him at night, chapter by chapter. I suspect that once the last Potter book is done next year, that will be the end of an era for me as well, as I may be done reading aloud to my son as well.

These books are not the greatest literature ever written. They are not even the greatest children's books, but that doesn't mean that they're not good. They are far better than many of the books that offer children little encouragement to think. They are filled with fun and fantasy and they are stories that generate conversations well worth having.

And, in a way, they open minds to faith and Torah as well. They certainly appeal to the imagination. And imagination is crucial to religious faith. We cannot explain religion in scientific terms. We are called to believe in an invisible God, battle unseen forces, and even to do good to those who harm us. This is stuff that really requires a religious imagination. We must see more than the eyes can see. We are asked by faith to believe in more than our senses can apprehend. Such imaginative openness to life's possibilities may well require a cultivation of imagination. The Harry Potter books do exactly that. They cultivate in us a willingness to look for the things that are unseen, but not unreal. Magic is real in the books, but the real magic of them is that they tell remarkable tales of friendship, valor, and virtue. These stories can be a gateway that allows religion to be plausible rather than implausible. If you can suspend disbelief for the magic of Harry Potter, then the stories of miracles in the bible that are the backdrop for the moral lessons of Judaism can be open to the whole Harry Potter generation.

-- by Rabbi Isaac Serotta --