Indiana Jones and Jewish Life

So, I saw the final (?) installment of the Indiana Jones movie. I don't want to write a movie review, since that is not really what I do. Suffice to say that I enjoyed it, even if it rehashed some of the same themes and special effects of all the other Indiana Jones movies as well as E.T. But that is neither here nor there. What I found interesting is that there was a movie at all with Harrison Ford.

Last year 'Rocky Balboa' came out and was the sixth installment of the 'Rocky' franchise with Sylvester Stallone. He looked older, acted older and, of course, that was the main theme of the entire movie. The fight scenes in the last half hour were a culmination of the theme that expressed in the movie that the 'heart is the last thing to age.'

It was funny, because after 'Rocky Balboa' a few of us were listening to some younger kids who had no idea who Mickey was, or Adrian, or Paulie's story, etc. They just didn't get it. It was a movie that needed history.

The same is true for Indiana Jones. This, too, was a meditation on aging. And, in the same sense as 'Rocky Balboa' the search for the 'gold' in Crystal Skull really was the search for wisdom or treasure. The real search, the real goal, and one that can only be done in maturity and older age is to know what is really important. It is, quite often, the purusit of knowledge and of wanting to know 'why?'

The parallels in Jewish life are striking. Jewish culture has always treasured knowledge and considered the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake a great good. This is called 'Torah lishma' - learning Torah just because. Our tradition has never subscribed to the notion that Jews should only learn Jewish things. And so the pursuit of knowledge extends to the four corners of the universe. If something can be studied, it ought to be.

Maimonides knew Islamic law and culture. The rabbis of the Talmud studied the stars. Ibn Ezra wrote a treatise on chess. The mystics were fascinated by mathematics. And so on, and so on. The descriptions and fascination with the world of creation was to be found in more than Jewish books.

'Rocky Balboa' and 'The Crystal Skull' were meditations on knowledge and wisdom, of revelation and priority, of courage and determination. In other words, these two movies may have been entertaining, but they were really about what someone truly acquires in life. The answer to that question for the producers of these two movies was wisdom. It's the Jewish answer, too.