First—happy Friday, friends! I was interviewed for Australian national radio! You can listen to an entire “Disney and religion” episode of ABC’s Soul Search, which is hosted by a historian Dr. Meredith Lake, over here. It was a great conversation and I SO enjoyed it. If you’ve found “Faith in Disney” by hearing it—welcome, friends from down under!
And now, this week’s essay.
Every week, Jewish Shabbat services include ritual torah reading. The torah scroll is taken from the ark, and a portion of it is chanted out loud in Hebrew. Blessing, chanting and especially hearing the torah reading out loud is a ritual that spans generations.
This week’s portion (parasha) is Vayakhel-Pekudei. Coming near the end of the book of Exodus, it describes how the Israelites, while wandering in the desert, gathered together both their objects and their skills to create beautiful clothing for their priests and beautiful adornments for their tabernacle (mishkan).
To some readers, this section of the Torah is kind of “meh.” It reads like an instruction manual—with way more detail than you get from IKEA— a list of building materials and specifications. No parting seas, no battles, no sibling rivalries. Yawwwwn.
But it’s one of my favorites, and not just because I wrote a book about Jewish crafting and art— for which these passages are crucial. It’s my favorite because it is about the magic in the details, in constructing in community.
Which is also very, very Disney.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is no Disney anything without the labor of many hands and minds. And Disney fans like to gaze inside how the magic is made. Most fans loved The Imagineering Story (2019)— a six-part documentary on Disney+ that delves into world of the imagineers, the artists/engineers/dreamers who make all of the physicality, sounds, smells, and light of Disney spaces possible.
Narrated by Angela Bassett (who was robbed of an Oscar last Sunday, but I digress), the film discusses the birth of audio-animatronics. Walt Disney famously wanted the birds not just to look good, but to seem to really breathe— the essence of life. In Disney design down to this day, the divine is in the details.
And it’s collaborative. In the book of Exodus, we can real about Bezalel, the chief artisan of the tabernacle, and his assistant Oholiab. But in Exodus 35, it’s really the people as a whole who are moved to come with their gifts, and to do things like… spinning.
Tomorrow, I am helping with the torah chanting at my synagogue. Two of the verses I am reading are Exodus 35:25-26. In the JPS translation on Sefaria, these lines read:
But I like the literal nature of some other translations, particularly in two spots. What’s translated as “skilled” is two Hebrew words: hochmat lev, wisdom (hochma) of the heart (lev). I love this connotation— that in craft and creation, there is a deep connection to our hearts and minds. It’s not just about our hands. It’s also about our very being and the life we imbue in our creations. The breath we breathe into the tiki birds, if you will.
And then, at the end of second verse— in Hebrew— the literal words are “tavu et ha-izim”— it says that the women “spun the goats.” This leads to an absolutely fabulous Talmudic passage, in which the rabbis speculate that perhaps some of the women may have washed and spun the goat’s hair while it was still on the goats. (Shabbat 74b:6, on Sefaria).
It sounds, to me, like a fairy-tale. This was probably not the goal of the Talmudic debate, which was about whether or not one was permitted to spin yarn on the Sabbath. But the thing about rabbinic literature is that it defies genre. Legal texts also contain within them fantastic imagery (this week’s parasha also has a rare word, tachash(im), that leads to discussions of unicorns in the medieval period. Spoiler alert: it probably wasn’t unicorns).
But I feel like women spinning beautiful blue, red, and purple yarn* off of the goats themselves is very, very Disney. I picture them, drop spindles in hand, the goats somehow happy about this. Everyone is singing a Howard Ashman/Alan Menken tune. The goats do a fantastical ballet in the sky. The women lift them up, because they are strong like Luisa in Encanto. The yarn flies off the goats and then the spindles painlessly. It glitters in the sun.
In my interview on Soul Search, I talked about magic. Specifically— I talked about my childhood longing for it. As a Jewish kid, I had no Santa. So Disney became a site for magic. Hebrew school did not seem like the most magical place on earth. I didn’t know— as I do now— that the history of Judaism, magic, and the fantastic is much, much more complex—and fantastical—than what I had learned when I was six. Or eight. Or thirteen.**
Both the Exodus tabernacle (and the ancient temple on which its descriptions might be based) and Disney are sites of special feeling—one from a long time ago, one from the last century. Knowing about the level of work that goes into them— the details of their construction—- doesn’t make either one of them less extraordinary, or less sacred. Human hands do the material labor. But human communities and human hearts—perhaps touched by sacredness from community, perhaps touched by sacredness from something supra-human (or both).
The details provide a place for the sacred to breath- and to gleam.
*Yes I know the translation of the color words is more complex than this, too, I’m going with simplicity here. “Blue-green”, “crimson”, “scarlet red”, is maybe more accurate.
**Jews, magic, and the supernatural is a huge field of study, connected in ways to Jewish mystical traditions—getting the bibliography right on this in the short time I had today is not possible, but here’s one older essay I read in college. I also wrote about Jewish children’s literature and the concept of the fantastic in my first book. And no, I don’t usually link out to my books. It just happened this week).