Reflection: Children of God

Why is Sophia Jewish?

It's a question I've been mulling around in my head over and over again. And along with the question, my brain started supplying this Yiddish song called "Donna, Donna," the lyrics of which I only know in English. In particular, the third verse:

Calves are easily bound and slaughtered
Never knowing the reason why.
But whoever treasures freedom,
Like the swallow has learned to fly.

The song was written during the days of Nazi Germany (I believe in 1940 or so) and that notion of human beings as cattle, to be ignorantly bound and slaughtered, is a Holocaust motif that I think runs very deep in Sophia's psyche. She sees the Runa sacrificing their children to the Jana'ata and she does not see population control, she sees a travesty--she sees Nazis, rounding up men and women and children like cattle and shipping them off to Auschwitz. Since World War II, it's been an inherent part of Jewish cultural memory, and one can hardly blame her for it. But I think, in a way, it runs deeper than that.

Sophia is the only one in the first landing party that comes from a religion that does not proselytize. And yet she is the one to take serious action. I think this comes, in part, from the Jewish belief that good deeds are not buying time in the afterlife, but are important for their own sake, here and now. Jews don't believe in Hell, and notions about the afterlife are generally fairly ambiguous. Sophia therefore comes from a long line of people who act. She mentions Warsaw; my mind thought of things like Masada, Judah Maccabee, Miriam. I thought of Moses, killing the Egyptian slavemaster. And most of all I thought, as I believe I mentioned in class, of Abraham and Isaac, and the message of the story of Isaac's near-sacrifice: We do not kill children.

Phil mentioned in his post about the Jana'ata and the Garden of Eden. I thought about this too, in a way, because Jews don't believe in original sin. The Jewish concept of the Garden of Eden is as a spiritual paradise, not a physical one, and it's a place to which we can return only when we have become righteous. And even so, it does not trump good deeds done while living. The afterlife (or the possibility of an afterlife) is absolutely secondary to human action and life itself. So when Sophia steps out into that world, when she acts, she believes she is doing what is right, regardless of the logistics of population control, environment, etc.