by Dr. David Sanders
Rabbi Sharon Brous, author of The Amen Effect and founder of IKAR in Los Angeles spoke this past Yom Kippur on the stories which we talk about ourselves, our people, and our society. In her analysis of one particular story regarding Abraham and his wives she concluded that our Jewish tradition warns us to be careful “lest we get stuck in a bad story that repeats over generations establishing an inescapable pattern…a story which becomes a motif assimilated into you or your people’s self (or communal) understanding.”
While one can question what determines a “bad” story or whether to even decide what bad stories are, (for all stories have some elements of good and bad), we can take her charge to examine the inherited stories that continue to influence us and need revision.
Gregory Maguire may not be a household name but the adaptation of his book, a Broadway musical for over twenty years and now a major motion picture, is known worldwide. “My take on Oz,” Maguire shared in an interview in 2013, “is sinister in some ways, but it is no less capable of salvation at the same time. In other words, my world is just as corrupt and just as redeemable as the real world in which we live.”
The amazement that is Wicked rests on the music and sets, but its foundation is a revision of the mythological story of the Wizard of Oz. In the original book by Frank Baum, Dorothy on her return to Oz scolds the wizard saying: “I think you are a very bad man.” The Wizard replies: “Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.” Maguire takes us well beyond the curtain that hid the Wizard in a massive revisionist rewrite, which, as the back story is revealed has us consider in a very different way who is bad and who is good. It is no longer the Wizard who is misunderstood, Maguire wants us to consider how we misunderstood everyone in the story.
Maguire realized he was playing around with fire, or perhaps in consideration of what melts the Wicked Witch, water, as an agent to dissolve one story and transform it to another. “I was playing around with sacred material, he said in the interview, “but not in any way to disgrace the original material, just actually to make it seem richer and to make its richness make more sense.”
Inspired by Wicked and by the charge to create new stories, I will be offering a course on the stories that have their own mythological power, the stories of the Torah. Maguire sets the stage for our exploration in highlighting a similarity between the text of The Wizard Of Oz and the text of the Torah. “The history of Oz is very sketchy. I wanted to deepen it and to enrich it, and I wanted to be able to have some sense of how the entire society had worked and was working and might work in the future, depending on how people behaved. The more I delved in, the more I got my hands dirty, the more I felt I could find answers either in myself…or the clues L. Frank Baum and MGM had left us.”
We will explore, as Maguire did for his revision, the clues left for us in the Torah text, which the Kabbalists have already brought to our attention, to tell new stories. None of these new stories will defy gravity, but they will defy foundational concepts that have kept us stuck in “inescapable stories” which no longer serve us.
Join Dr. David Sanders in a free sample class and series on the New Story for the Evolution of Human Consciousness, starting in January https://kabbalahexperience.com/newstory/
0 Comments