D'ohs and don'ts
Ben Bag Bag says: 'Turn it over, turn it over, because everything is inside of it.'
When I recently came across this mishna in Ethics of the Fathers, my first thought was, "Ben Bag Bag watches The Simpsons?"
(My second thought was, What was elementary school like for a kid with a last name like Bag Bag? Or is his first name Ben Bag?)
The Simpsons has been on the air for almost 20 years and more than 400 episodes. And not to compare it to the Torah or anything, but something that has been on the air that long comes to be almost talmudic in scope. There hasn't been a political, social, or cultural event or movement in the last two decades that hasn't been caught, etherized, and pinned to the collector's tray of this brilliant cartoon. Empires have risen and fallen, presidents have come and gone, but Springfield presses on, absorbing the changes and regurgitating them in bites of pithy, often definitive satire. The arrival this week of The Simpsons Movie seems either overdue or beside the point, depending on your perspective.
Of all the subjects in The Simpsons, few are done as well as religion. It's tempting to say that no other television show has ever handled religion so deftly, but the competition is pretty weak. "The real epiphany for me, as a long-time religion writer for daily newspapers," writes Mark Pinsky, author of the encyclopedic The Gospel According to the Simpsons, "was the surprisingly favorable way religion, in its broadest sense, was presented in the series, and what a central role faith played in the lives of the characters."
Favorable, you say? Doesn't the Rev. Lovejoy refer to the Bible as a "doorstop"? Didn't Homer once compare God to Barbra Streisand: "powerful, but also insecure"?
But as Pinsky points out, the Simpsons are regular church-goers. Next-door neighbor and evangelical Christian Ned Flanders may be Homer's foil, but he is clearly the more upstanding citizen. And what often sounds like mockery of religion is classic religious debate cloaked in wisecracks.
When Homer becomes a missionary and helps some South Seas islanders build a church, he declares, "Well, I may not know much about God, but I have to say we built a pretty nice cage for Him." That's not mockery (of God, anyway). God may even agree, especially the God who says (in Isaiah): "Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house which you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest?"
For Jewish viewers, this religious clowning has been a source of repeated delights. An episode called "My Son, the Clown," a send-up of The Jazz Singer, includes perhaps the most extended talmudic debate — quoting the actual Talmud — ever seen on network television. And an episode in which Krusty the Clown becomes an adult bar mitzva ends up, after the usual Springfield shenanigans (a yarmulke-wearing Mr. T utters the immortal line, "I pity the shul"), with a lovely coda in defense of tradition.
Jewish folkways and beliefs also get a workover in throwaway lines, as when we're told that a grizzly bear can tear through a tree "like a Jewish mother through self-esteem." Okay, that's cultural, not religious, stereotyping, but aren't mother jokes a Jewish tradition as well?
The Simpsons also manages to bring nuance to raging debates between religion and science. Eight-year-old Lisa is the town intellectual and skeptic. She is often called in to represent rationalism in the face of superstition. In one memorable episode, she is eager to prove that what the townspeople believe to be the skeleton of an angel is really just a fossil. She enlists paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in the debate. Eventually, the "angel" turns out to be a marketing gimmick for a shopping mall.
In the same episode, a judge decides to put a "restraining order on religion," keeping it "500 yards away from science." In 22 minutes, the episode captures the frenzy surrounding the Intelligent Design "debate" and the clash of worldviews that may never be reconciled.
Belief and disbelief are also the subjects of an episode called "Lisa the Iconoclast," in which Lisa discovers that her town's Daniel Boone-like founder was not the paragon of virtue the adults believe him to be. Lisa decides to expose the historical truth at the town's celebration of Springfield's birth, but in the face of the revelry decides there's nothing wrong with a little myth-making if it brings out the good in everyone.
That is a perspective missing from works by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and the rest of the "new atheists" charging their way up the best-seller lists. Their books are powerful statements of disbelief and deserve a hearing in an era when the fury of religious belief is again animating — and corrupting — world affairs. Harris is particularly devastating in showing the way magical thinking stifles advances in science, medicine, and public policy.
Lisa suggests what's missing from Harris' steely polemic: a sense of the way in which science fails to address the spiritual, even irrational, needs of individuals for meaning, narrative, and unifying "myths." Lisa, like Harris, is right that we should never allow religious dogma to impede the search for scientific truth. But anyone who sets out to tear down religion needs to understand the human yearnings that will remain amid the ruins.
And at this moment, I'm yearning to see The Simpsons Movie.
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