Tatty: What are your reading?
Bochurel, turning it over: Eh...: It's about a ring
Tatty: Tolkien??!
Bochurel: Yea..
Tatty: Where did you get it? You know, we don't generally have books like this in our house.
Bochurel: I borrowed it from......
Tatty, thinking: So, what's it about?
Bochurel: It's about these things, hobbits and things, and they fight evil things, they are good things.
Tatty: Why are they good?
Bochurel: Because they are brave and heroic and they fight evil. And they are noble.
Tatty: Do they stand for anything, like, do they have any values for which they stand and they maintain?
Bochurel, thinking: Well, no, not really. It's just that they fight evil.
Tatty: ...so the thing that makes them good is that they fight evil.
Bochurel, getting the drift. Well, the evil ones are smelly and ugly and they are dark and hateful.
..and they fight the good ones.
Tatty: Do they have positive values for which they stand?
Bochurel: No. Just for being noble, and heroic and aristocratic. They fight for their king.
Tatty: So, they stand for fighting and the other ones stand for fighting. Is the difference just that these ones are heroic and good looking and the other ones are dark and smelly.
Bochurel, smiling: Yes, I guess so.
Tatty, smiling: Sounds like standard Eisav stuff to me. Fighting because it is heroic to fight and then portraying the beautiful as 'good".
Bochurel, serious: I never thought of it like that.
Tatty: OK, keep on reading... and let me know how it ends. It's been a long time... I forgot.
Bochurel: OK
FWIW, Lord of the Rings is more morally clear than the bachur is portraying it.
The "bad guys" are bad because they enslave the good looking species. Their leader wants to obtain the ring in the title in order to extend that empire to include everyone. In a period before the main books, this guy was the high priest of a god whose nickname was "the lord of the dark", and the religion involved human sacrifice. BTW, Tolkien named the god "Melkor", and so it sounded to me like a (perhaps subconscious on Tolkien's part) connection to the Canaanite "Molekh". People he enslaves turn over to his side and go ugly, but clearly the subservience they exercise is not a state they want before being taken over.
Whereas the leaders of the good guys lead by public acclamation, not suppression of dissent.
Anyone who gets the ring gets so obsessed with power that they lose sight of everyone and everything else and spend their lives pursuing the ring and its power. A major bit of the moral is that the protagonist himself becomes unable to complete his mission of destroying the ring because of that corruption, and in the end the mission succeeds more due to its previous owners self-destructive greed for it.
In any case, I read the book (IIRC, this is going back to my own youth) as a morality play about power and a heavy handed restatement of "Power Corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Power is defined as suppressing others' free will and self-identity -- in the books literally changing their species.
Yes, the bachur was just getting an Edomi message from the book. And your story well defines the flaw of Edom. BTW, perhaps of Yefes, "yaft E-lokim leYefes" may mean that confusing chitzoniyus for substance is more a danger in Hellenic culture than inherent in Edom (had they not imitated the Yevanim). But that's not the book's fault.
-micha
Posted by: micha | December 23, 2009 at 12:43 PM
I can't believe someone as deep as you could misunderstand Tolkein so badly. LOTR is (for me) the closest I have ever seen a non-Jew come to chassidus
micha: melkor = amalek. and it matches the silmarillion myth almost exactly
Posted by: ben yissachar | December 23, 2009 at 02:34 PM