Arrival

Saturday night we finally saw the movie “Arrival”. The automatic violent and scared reaction to the alien presence in the movie reminded me of what I’ve seen increasing signs of since 9/11 and even more so in the past year of election fever and vitriol that’s been spouted since. It reminds me of a midrash by Rashi, a 12th century Jewish scholar and commentator. In the Torah portion Shelach L’cha we read about Moses sending in twelve spies to check out the land of Canaan. Joshua and Caleb come back with positive reports and the others all negative which forces God to have the Israelites wander in the desert for forty-years (it probably would’ve been less if Moses had an iPhone and GPS). Rashi’s midrash goes something like this. When Moses is going to send the spies out, he tells them to see what kind of country it is..because there are countries who produce strong people and countries who produce weak people… and then if the people live in fortified or open cities…open cities mean that they are a strong people, whereas fortified cities show them to be weak. What I see are weak people living in a fortified country. I mean, were talking of building physical walls on our borders. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be vigilant. There is a real the danger of terrorism. But now everyone is viewed with suspicion, especially strangers, who are often threatened with violence. We walk around armed to the teeth. We are afraid in our own country. We are afraid of the truth, especially scientific truth. It’s natural to fear what we don’t understand. It’s a modern to fear change. Alvin Toffler talked about that forty-seven years ago in his book, Future Shock. We do have natural instincts to fear and run from things we don’t understand, and in the passing millennia since man crawled out of the cave, we’ve become more sophisticated, but not more mature, nor have we mastered our primitive instincts. And, unless we do, I fear that we will go the way of our primitive ancestors.