Excelsior!

Like an archeologist unearthing a long-forgotten artifact, I ventured into the deepest corner of my apartment’s storage locker to unearth a treasure that has not been touched since we arrived ten years ago. The dust-covered object is a nondescript white box whose contents, though they may not have any monetary worth, have sentimental value – at least to me – beyond measure. Inside the box are hundreds and hundreds of comic books – comic books I collected week after week, year after year, for about three years of my preteen life. Spider-Man, Captain America, the Avengers, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, X-Men – among other titles – the sacred scripture of my early adolescence. Every Friday afternoon after school I would skateboard to the local comic book store, buy the new titles of the week, and, Slurpee in hand, skateboard home. I would read each comic in a specific sequence, saving my favorite till last, and then ritually slip each comic into its own polypropylene protective bag – until I removed them to read again and again and again. To this day I can recall my parents’ combination of curiosity and disdain as I poured my time, money, and brain cells into a fantasy world of superheroes and villains. When Debbie and I moved into our first apartment in Chicago, my mother unceremoniously shipped my box of comics to me with a Post-it® attached saying something to the effect of “Mazel tov on your new home – now get your stuff out of my house!” I suppose I should be grateful that she didn’t throw them all out, but extended me the courtesy of storing them myself, which is exactly what I have done ever since.

Until this week. Because this past week, in the midst of election recounts, snowplow fiascos, California fires, and rockets raining down on Israel, a momentous passing occurred: the death of Stan Lee at the age of 95. For those of you who don’t know, Stan Lee was perhaps the central player in the rise of the comic book industry as we know it today. Hired in 1940 by Timely Comics as the first issues of Captain America were being prepared, Lee rose rapidly from errand boy to proofreader to storyboard writer and eventually editor and art director. In the 1960s, under the leadership of Lee and the late Jack Kirby, Marvel Comics launched a successful slew of titles including the Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, Daredevil, and many, many others. Whether or not you yourself have ever read a comic book, the cultural imprint the comic book industry has had on American popular culture is hard to deny: the comics themselves, the billion-dollar juggernaut of a movie industry, the comic conventions, video games, merchandising, and most of all, the millions of imaginations stirred each week. Subjectively, objectively, by any metric, one can easily make the case for Stan Lee as one of the towering generators of American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Which is why – in this Sanctuary, on this Shabbat – I want to take note that Lee was a Jew. Lee’s given name was Stanley Lieber; his parents were Romanian Jewish immigrants who settled in the Bronx. Lee was a graduate of DeWitt Clinton High School, a setting that gave rise to people like Lee, Richard Rodgers, and Ralph Lauren – some of the most remarkable Jewish shapers of the aspirational American dream. The aforementioned Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg to a family of Austrian Jews who settled on the Lower East Side. Kirby and Lee collaborated with Joe Simon, the creator of Captain America, born Hymie Simon, also to immigrant parents. From Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both sons of Jewish immigrants and creators of Action Comics’ Superman, to Al Jaffe of Mad Magazine fame, born Abraham Jaffe, the Jewish role in the American comic book industry is undeniable and cannot be overstated.

I raise the fact of the Jewish roots of the comic industry’s founding fathers not in order to play the always fun and awkwardly self-congratulatory parlor game of identifying Jewish exceptionalism. There are, frankly, many people – my mother included – who may wonder whether humanity would have been better served had all that Jewish brain power been better directed. I raise the fact of the Jewish origins of the comic book industry because it begs the question of “Why?” Why is it that so many Jews found their home in this world of heroes and villains, superpowers and secret identities, alter egos and alternate realities? With two exceptions that I know of – Kitty Pryde of the X-Men and Benjamin Grimm, one-quarter of the Fantastic Four – none of the heroes were explicitly Jewish. Notwithstanding the barriers that prevented Jews from entering the more respectable side of American publishing, what exactly was the gravitational pull that drew so many of our kinsmen (and they seem to have been all men) into this realm of creative endeavor?

Some of the connections are more obvious than others and predate Lee himself. In 1938 when Siegel and Shuster created Superman, they did so in response to “hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany.” (Brian Klotz, “Secret Identities: Graphic Literature and the Jewish American Experience,” p. 21) At risk of stating the obvious, what is the story of Superman if not the story of a baby Moses – Kal-El sent away in a vessel from a world facing annihilation only to be discovered in a rural setting, raised with a hidden identity, until that fateful day when this stuttering gentile Clark Kent goes to the metropolis to discover the fate of civilization resting on his shoulders. The plot line is also reminiscent of the Golem, the mythical creature from Jewish literature which – whether Siegel, Shuster, and others were familiar with it or not – certainly offers the precedent of a legendary figure of superhuman strength capable of saving the Jewish people time and again in crisis. The backdrop of World War II is omnipresent in these early years. Not just bank robbers and aliens, but Nazis too became the embodiment of evil. The 1941 debut issue of Kirby’s Captain America features our red-white-and-blue hero, surrounded by an ethnically diverse platoon, delivering a right hook to Hitler’s jaw – not an insignificant statement given the isolationist sentiments of many of our countrymen who were then actively discouraging America’s entry into the war. (Klotz, pp. 12-13)

Lee’s significance is that he did not just receive the literary tropes established by his predecessors, but developed them to reflect the changing sensibilities of his era. The stiff gentility of Superman’s Clark Kent was replaced by the shlemazel quality of Spider-Man’s Peter Parker. So too, the comic patter of Spider-Man’s crime fighting, Daredevil’s vigilantism, and the Hulk’s uncontrollable rage reflected altogether different notions of what constitutes heroic behavior. Unlike his predecessors, Lee gave his superheroes and their alter egos texture and flaws, always playing with the way in which the two sides of their double identities informed one other. And, of course, what all the story lines shared was not only the success or failure of any one superhero mission, but also the ongoing struggle of that hero to fulfill a mission while balancing the tug-of-war of his own identity. The implicit drama of Stan Lee’s universe is that the humanity-saving deeds of our heroes can only be performed when the flawed or marginalized private citizen dons a mask, thus enabling his or her superpowers to come to the fore.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not at least make passing mention of my personal favorite and the most commercially viable of Lee’s creations: the X-Men. In 1963, Lee and Kirby developed the premise of the X-Men, a category of human beings endowed with a variety of abilities that manifest themselves right around the time of bar mitzvah. The subtext of the entire series is the degree to which these uncanny outsiders – who save humanity time and time again – will ever be accepted by the very host society that depends on their heroics. The villainous mutants are led by Magneto, a Holocaust survivor whose war against humans reflects his cynicism regarding the ability of the mutant minority to achieve peace with the human majority. It is the genteel and gentile Professor X and his multicultural mutant team who repeatedly put themselves on the line in their forlorn hope of peaceful coexistence. Could these themes have been developed by non-Jews? Perhaps. Certainly their wide and warm reception by the general public suggests that there is nothing necessarily Jewish about them. As with all great art, the lines are not always clear and the subtexts not always explicit. But even the most conservative reader would have to concede that the nature of these storylines seems to run parallel to the very anxieties of the American Jewish experience in a post-Holocaust America.

In fact, one could even go so far as to suggest that Lee’s vision reflects a typological struggle that long predates the ‘60s and ‘70s and dates back to the very beginnings of our people. Ever since last week’s Torah reading and the wrestling match within Rebecca’s womb, competing possibilities for our people’s identity have been present: Jacob, a Peter-Parker-like dweller of tents, versus Esau, a muscular outdoorsman, formidable and fierce. Ever since this week’s Torah reading, Jews have wondered just how long we can dwell in the house of Laban before losing our distinctiveness and having our hosts turn on us. And ever since next week’s Torah reading, Jews have dreamt of that momentous wrestling match between the competing notions of our self-understanding with one emerging victorious – limping but shalem (whole), renamed as Israel, proudly unmasked in the fullness of our being. As I have noted on many occasions, the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s were fascinating years of transition for an upwardly mobile and increasingly accepted post-Holocaust American Jewry, contending with age-old issues of identity, a sovereign state, and power in new, fascinating, and sometimes uncomfortable ways. Consciously or unconsciously, Lee’s oeuvre draws on the most traditional tropes of our people in the medium of a comic book, a modern midrash on the transformations he witnessed in American Jewish life.

All of which brings us back to the question of our own moment. This week I picked up the phone and called a dear old college friend who spent some years working at Marvel. He shared with me that while he does have Jewish colleagues, the comic book industry is no longer the Jewish industry it once was. The changes in the comic industry reflect all that has changed in the world and in the Jewish world since Lee’s heyday decades ago. Jews are no longer “the other,” but “just another,” and in the symphony of American life there are now other “others” seeking entry into the American dream as we once did. And while it has been years since I have purchased a comic book, as Rabbi Witkovsky taught us all on the holidays, these days the requirements for heroism have changed. A hero’s world-saving power is no longer contingent on his or her willingness to put on a mask. We not only may, but we must save the world with both our powers and identity on full display.

So as I watched my thirteen-year-old son flip through my dusty old comics with curiosity, I thought about all that changed since I bought them years ago. And I also realized that as much as all that has changed, there is much that has stayed the same. We are still in need of heroes – maybe more than ever. None of us need look far to see a world in need of being saved, a world in need of tikkun, repair. Ours is an era in desperate need of heroes capable of fighting for truth and justice. Perhaps more than anything, ours is an era in search of hope, which – when all is said and done – is what I think comic books are really all about. For as long as Jews have been Jews, our calling card has been that hope – to be an exemplar and a light unto nations – and here in America we have the wherewithal to exercise that power openly. As Uncle Ben once said to his nephew Peter Parker, “With great power, comes great responsibility” – in those days as in ours, a call to action to which we must pay heed.

May the memory of Stan Lee be for a blessing.