Three essays down in this series (if you haven’t figured it out, I’m examining the Judeo-Christian Bible via analogy to a galaxy far, far away), and it seems like I’m getting the hang of clickbaity titles. Now to monetize this…
Just kidding. We’re actually going to talk about all three aspects of my title, despite how similar it sounds to a “three people walk into a bar” joke. Like Parts 0 and 1, I’ll be considering how we might apply our thoughts on Star Wars to the Bible and why it might matter.
Let’s start with the first person to walk into a bar: Jar-Jar. (He would actually be more likely to trip, stumble, or ride in backwards on a Trade Federation tank, but I digress.) Jar-Jar Binks is incontrovertibly the most controversial figure in the Star Wars mythos. Opinions of Jar-Jar are as varied as the number of planets named “*-ooine” in the Star Wars galaxy. The divergence of opinion on Jar-Jar isn’t solely about personal preference, either — it ramifies into the very meaning of the saga.
Yes, indeed — I am referring to the infamous “Darth Jar Jar” theory. First proposed on Reddit in 2015, the theory goes something like this: “Jar-Jar appeared stupid in The Phantom Menace only because he was a practicioner of a ‘Drunken Fist’-esque style of Dark Force-wielding, and in fact twisted every buffoonish coincidence (see every one of his fight scenes) to his ultimate benefit. This is why Jar-Jar was never detected as the true mastermind of the Sith, and why he will reveal himself as Supreme Leader Snoke in The Force Awakens.“
So, obviously the theory was a little off base there, but it was plausible in 2015. (Personally, I never bought it, even in 2015 — by the time this essay series is finished, I hope I’ll demonstrate that George Lucas simply didn’t care about the “logicality” of a character inspired by Charlie Chaplain’s “Tramp” and made for the sake of 10-year-olds.) To preempt falling into a black hole of counterpoints here, I will redirect you to the Full of Sith podcast, which contains the literal best discussion of Jar-Jar I’ve ever heard. Just don’t try to listen to all 400+ episodes in one sitting.) But, again, the point is not to split hairs on fan theories, but to see how much room the Star Wars mythos holds for personal opinion. Charlie Chaplain analogue, or Sith mastermind? Both are equally valid interpretations of Jar-Jar (at least until December 2015 happened).
As for Star Wars, so it is for the Bible: History manifesto? Religious tract? Hoax? Guidebook for society? Solace to comfort you during hard times? A secret code destined to uncovered by Tom Hanks? Again, the opinions vary as widely as people named “*-ites” in Joshua. We may think we’ve unlocked the “true meaning” of the Bible, and then a year passes and we’re as far off-base as that poor Reddit user was for Darth Jar-Jar.
Just like disagreeing about Darth Jar-Jar doesn’t make you a “fake Star Wars fan”, disagreeing about the interpretation of the Bible doesn’t make you a fake/bad Christian.
In summary? We finite, short-sighted humans will never get a monopoly on the meaning of (Star Wars, and also) the Bible. At best, we converge slowly, but our opinions will always fall short of the truth, like a painter seeking to represent 3-D reality on a 2-D canvas. And even when we do suss out some facet of a monolithic Truth from the text (either Star Wars or the Bible), there’s no way in Mustafar/hell we can reliably convince others! I’ve spent thousands of words on it already, and let’s be honest, you already quit two essays ago if you disagreed!
The realization that “objective” (and provable) truth doesn’t exist in any galaxy or text, regardless of how far, far away, can be a bit depressing. But it doesn’t have to be, and for an example of this I’ll turn to a community that’s been living well for a really long time: the Jews.
Did you know that the largest body of Jewish religious text isn’t actually the Tanakh (what the Christians in the house know as “The Old Testament”)? Not by a long shot! That distinction goes to the Talmud, which, as far as I can tell, is the 5,000-page instruction manual for the Tanakh’s GameBoy — the Tanakh has all the fight scenes and explosions, and the Talmud breaks it down button-by-button, trawling over every square of each level to find every Easter Egg. But the Talmud isn’t the only extra-biblical text Jews hold dear — there’s also the Midrash, which, to continue my prior analogy, is the transcript between the thirteen joint owners of the GameBoy as they squabble, quibble, write fan-fic about, and argue over the game they’re playing. The Midrashic authors seem to have opinions on everything in the Tanahk, from riffing off classic stories like Jacob and Leah/Rachel to passionate discourse on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and boy, do they seldom agree!
It begs the question of why the Jews even bothered preserving all that dusty argumentation. Rachel Held Evans, the late and beloved public theologian, first put me on the trail of this idea in her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and later Inspired, where she puts it like this: “While Christians tend to turn to Scripture to end a conversation, Jews turn to Scripture to start a conversation.”
And as to why Jews prefer to discuss and start these conversations? R.H.E.’s got us covered: “The biblical text comes alive in the context of community, its endless shades and contours revealed in the presence of a diversity of readers… The sacred text becomes a crucial point of contact, a great dining room table, erected by God and set by God’s people.” (Y’all, go read Inspired right now.)
“the biblical text comes alive in the context of community…”
Rachel Held Evans
It’s a beautiful idea. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of the times when my brother or a friend and I would whittle away literal hours asking each other what our favorite Jedi/Sith/spaceship/bounty hunter was in Star Wars, sometimes arguing (passionately!) over “who would win in a fight” but ultimately cherishing what we learned from the other. Learning why the saga is compelling to my friends or family is still my favorite thing about Star Wars. (To take a negative example: the lack of publicly visible, mutually respectful, generative conversation is what makes contemporary Star Wars fandom so toxic. /rant)
In this paradigm of Star Wars conversation — following in the footsteps of Jewish midrash, however unintentionally — divergent opinions are all well and good if they lead to respectful conversation and communal enlightenment. It doesn’t matter if you subscribe to Darth Jar-Jar theories in the end, as long as the conversation we have about it fuels our individual growth and our communal commitment to our favorite fantasy.
You see where I’m going. Just like disagreeing about Darth Jar-Jar doesn’t make you a “fake Star Wars fan”, disagreeing about the interpretation of the Bible doesn’t make you a fake/bad Christian. In fact, the conversations we have about the Bible can deepen both our mutual understandings of faith, just like adding infinitesimal fractions together converges (eventually) to unity. My favorite Biblical conversations are the ones where two different opinions converge through conversation on a truth too transcendent for one opinion alone.
So let’s promise each other — next time we hear a Biblical theory as crazy as Jar-Jar being a Sith Lord, instead of gut-reacting with conversation-squelching moral absolutes, we’ll instead listen and discuss, so that we both gain a little bit of wisdom out of the exchange. (And then, of course, we’ll probably decide to watch A Phantom Menace to unwind a bit after a tense conversation, and seeing Jar-Jar will start it up again…)