The Avengers

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There’s an important lesson about the power of the Jewish People.

The Avengers, the new Marvel Studios movie starring everybody, is chock full of morals and characters arcs, and everyone walks away with something different. I walked away thinking that I live way too close to Manhattan.

In the movie, Nick Fury, the leader of SHIELD (a global peace-keeping organization) assembles a team of all of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, besides for Spider-Man, the X-Men, the blind guy, and the one who looks like he’s on fire, in order to save the world from aliens who want to destroy the Earth -- one building at a time, apparently. Hilarity ensues.

“Alone they are powerful. Together, they are unstoppable.” – Nick Fury

The aliens are led by Thor’s annoying little brother, Loki, who calls himself the God of Mischief. Like what’s he’s doing is “mischief”. (“Oh, that scamp! He killed 80 people! What’ll he do next?”)

“There’s only one God,” Captain America says. “And he doesn’t dress like that.”

At the beginning of the movie, Loki steals a super-powered cube (even the cubes in this world have super powers) from SHIELD, so he can use it to open a portal and... actually, the less detail I go into here, the quicker we can get to the action.

So the heroes band together and spend most of the movie fighting – well, each other. These are not new characters; they’ve each had their own movies, are coming from vastly different places in life, and they all have their own points of view. One comes to work with long hair and a hammer, while another likes to wear expensive suits. That fire tiny guided missiles. One basically wears a flag, and another likes to take off his shirt and fight big government.

“We’re not a team,” the latter observes. “We’re a time bomb.”

Captain America argues with Iron Man, who tackles Thor, who tussles with Hulk, who chases Black Widow, who repays Hawkeye for saving her life by literally beating the mind control out of him. And then they all turn against Fury when they find out that he’d been using the cube to make weapons.

The weapons were plan B. But to be fair, weapons don’t spend half the movie hitting each other.

And all the while that they’re fighting each other, Loki watches, amused. He knows he’s attacking a planet with heroes, and his best shot is keeping them from working together. Divide and conquer.

If “divide and conquer” is a good plan, our enemies have it easy. The Jewish people have no shortage of super-villains -- of aliens who want to breach our spatial borders and take our land and blow up our buildings and control our minds and ride around on flying jet skis and maybe take metaphors one step too far. Our villains have come and gone, but there are always sequels, featuring different villains.

That said, you’d think we’d stick together. We were brought together to be a team, right? But we’re more divergent than ever. We’re Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Chassidic, Yeshivish, Litvish, Zionist, Yerushalmi, Modern Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Secular, and all the combinations and permutations thereof. I would venture to say that there are more factions of Jews than of any other religion. I say this based on absolutely no research, but it makes sense. We’ve been playing telephone for longer.

And what do we do? We either: A. Spend all day fighting and debating each other over who’s right and who’s wrong (Hint: We’re right, the other person is wrong) or B. Going our own separate ways, and having our own adventures and praying in our own synagogues full of like-minded supporting characters, and trying not to think too much about the other people, because the fact that they’re different bothers us.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight each other. Fighting’s fun, and it gives us something to do until the aliens start pouring out of the wormhole. (There are actual worms in the wormhole too. Don’t ask.)

No one loves to argue more than us Jews. We come from a long tradition of people arguing. You can’t go two pages in the Talmud without coming across a major argument between two or more sages, with all of the other sages suddenly dropping everything they were doing to take sides. But that doesn’t make them enemies. They’re all still superheroes. At the end of the day, they can still all get together to have an all-night Seder and eat korech sandwiches. And what do you suppose they were doing at that meal that took all night? Not arguing, right?

They say that we only argue with the ones we love. Like our spouses. And the reason is that of all the people we know, it bothers us the most when they don’t see things our way. It bothers us that they like different foods, or that they don’t like our movies and maybe don’t have a real interest in seeing The Avengers with us. But we don’t want to watch the news with them either. That doesn’t make them our enemy. In fact, the fact that you each have different strengths and interests but are ultimately on the same side might make you a more efficient team. One of you takes care of the big picture and the other takes care of the details. One of you is good with your hands, the other with their head. One of you earns the money, and the other one spends it. Teamwork. You can spend all day arguing, but at the end of the day, your wife might be better suited to wake up with the kids in middle of the night, while you are in exactly the right place to keep an eye out for burglars from your position on the couch.

It might bother us when the people around us are not exactly like us, but minor differences are actually a strength. It makes for a more rounded team. And in fact, if we spend the time arguing, we become intensely aware of our differences, and we have a better idea of each other’s strengths so that we can rely on each other later. To get through challenges, you have to work as a team, and let everyone play to their strengths. We can’t all get lookout duty; nothing would get done.

A team is made up of people who are different.

There is a lot of Jewish diversity, and yes, at times we all find each other annoying, and we’re all probably right. And yes, there’s a whole huge army of aliens who keep pouring out of the other side of the universe, and there’s only like six of us. But an army is a group of people trained to be exactly alike. Individuality is discouraged (as it should be – otherwise there’d be chaos) and everyone has the same training and the same strengths. A team, on the other hand, is made up of people who are different. If we’re all the same, then all we are is a smaller army.

The Jewish People’s differences are not a disadvantage. They make us better suited to win. We don’t have to be the same, we just have to be united in cause. That’s why even though Fury did develop some weapons, in the end he decides that the best plan is Plan A -- to just have these disparate people, who can’t stop harping over their differences, put it aside and work together.

We’re all superheroes. That puts us on the same team.

“Alone they are powerful. Together, they are unstoppable.” – Nick Fury

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