The first Star Wars film came out forty-five years ago this year. I remember very well seeing it in a cinema in Los Angeles where we were living at the time– those rolling titles in the middle of space, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, it was a time of civil war… “ – then the titles rolled away into space and this huge space ship appeared. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I especially remember that in Star Wars, unlike Star Trek the nearest thing I had ever seen, space ships were allowed to be messy and to need a good wash– like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon.
There have been nine main Star Wars films all together and several spin-offs creating a business which has apparently so far turned over more than $40 billion dollars. They have a huge cultural and entertainment reach.
At this point I should admit that despite all the hype and hoo har, I have still only seen one of the films, the first one. No particular reason, just hasn’t been my scene. But that first film is enough to set you up to get the cultural references that the Star Wars franchise has brought into our everyday speech. Two are at the centre of this sermon: the Force, that mystical power which drives the goodies in Star Wars to do the right thing and have the power to do it, and the Jedi, the knights of whom Sir Alec Guinness, as Jedi knight Obi Wan Kenobi, was the first known to world audiences.
In the first year that a question asking you to identify your religion was included in our census, being a Jedi Knight briefly became more popular than being a Jew, Buddhist or Sikh in the United Kingdom. In 2001, 330,000 Britons did what we love to do, take the mickey, and wrote on their form that they were Jedi. Only 263,000 Britons, said they were Jews.
In recent years, however, the lure of Jedi doctrine seems to be losing its force. The Jedi are doing rather worse than the Church of England, for example, and by the 2011 census the numbers of Jedi had almost halved with only 176,000 people answering in the census that they are Jedi. . The 2021 Census results are not yet released in such a broken down form, only the major religion stats are out, but it looks like the Jedi have all but disappeared. Of course what had happened is that it was a good joke once, maybe even twice, but three times was a bit silly
Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was to do with state persecution of the Jedi in the UK. In March 2016 an organisation which called itself the Temple of the Jedi Order applied to the Charity Commission for England and Wales for registration as a charity, as religious groups, like Synagogues, Mosques, Gurdwaras and Hindu Temples are entitled to do. It enables them to be tax exempt in a number of respects, to collect gift aid on donations and to other administrative advantages.
The Temple of the Jedi Order told the Charity Commission (Charity Commission report 16th December 2016) that its purposes were to “Advance the religion of Jediism, for the public benefit worldwide, in accordance with Jedi doctrine.” Jediism was defined in the application as “a religion based on the observance of the Force, the ubiquitous and metaphysical power that a Jedi believes to be the underlying fundamental nature of the universe.”
The questions facing the Charity Commissioners were: Could a religion based on a fictional film franchise be a charity? Could it apply for funds on that basis? Was it really a religion? Should donations be effectively tax deductible? The judgement of the Charity Commission makes fascinating reading on what the nature of religion is, especially in multicultural society such as ours where a particular set of beliefs does not define religion.
By the way the question had already come up in New Zealand where their Charity Commission had, one year previously, declined to register the Jedi Society as a charity on the basis that “Jediism is not sufficiently structured, cogent or serious to advance religion; nor to advance moral or spiritual improvement in a charitable manner.” The New Zealand judgement continued: “the (Jedi) belief system is merely a collection of interconnected ideas based on the Star Wars universe, rather than structured cogent and serious religion.”
The British Charity Commission rejected the Jedi too – on the basis that it could not be a charity as it could not prove public benefit, nor a promotion of moral or ethical improvement required of a religion for registration. The Force may be with them but not access to Gift Aid.
Did you hear that term in the New Zealand judgement – ‘Serious religion’ – what is that? How can officialdom judge a group’s licence to say that it is a religion or not? These decisions do have to be made periodically because in various ways our society privileges religions and not only in the matter of tax deductible charitable status. For example, can a Synagogue which says out straight that its members and clergy do not believe in the existence of God be part of a mainstream Jewish denomination? This issue was tested in 1994 when a Midwestern American congregation which functioned otherwise like a normal Synagogue, with a Hebrew Union College trained Rabbi, a cheder, services and more, applied to join the Union for Reform Judaism. They were turned down because the constitution of the Synagogue stated that this was a Synagogue where there was no recognition of God. In an article on theology in Judaism the editor of Sefaria and of My Jewish Learning, Rabbi Daniel Septimus wrote memorably: So, must a Jew believe in God? In a sense, it depends how you define four words: “must,” “Jew,” “believe,” and, of course, “God.” https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/must-a-jew-believe-in-god/ Weasel words perhaps but just answering no to the God question means that your Synagogue cannot join even the most radical wing of American institutional Judaism.
In 2009 another way of defining Judaism as a religion fell foul of British law, with far reaching implications for the entire Jewish day school system. That was when the Court of Appeal told JFS, the Jews Free School, that they could no longer hold that Judaism was an ethnicity passed down by through the mother’s line as their criterion of entry, when they refused admission to the school of the child of a woman who had converted to Judaism through Reform Judaism. From June 2009 onwards all Jewish Day Schools have to use what is called the “faith test” – based on attendance or participation in Jewish life, not on birth, which was ruled contrary to the Race Relations Act. It does seem very odd that the criteria now for entering a Jewish Day School as a Jewish child are solely that you or your parent have attend a few services on a few occasions in a particular period, which is how you get the fabled CRP points – but it is out of this change that Jewish day schools have now been opened up to so many.
For Jews ourselves, I feel that Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan’s definition of Judaism as a religion works very well – being a Jew he wrote (q in Neil Gilman, Sacred Fragments, p xvii) is our own particular combination of Belonging, Behaving and Believing – that we feel part of the Jewish people, that we do Jewish things and that we have a measure of Jewish belief. At different points in our life and depending on our own Jewish decisions we experience changing levels of all three – but as long as some of all are there we are genuinely experiencing Judaism. We are a people, a way of life and a faith.
The Book of Exodus begins with the words “Eleh Shemot Bnei Yisrael” – these are the names of the Children of Israel who came down to Egypt. These words which open Exodus with the existence of the Tribes of Israel, is a repeat of exactly the same passage in Genesis chapter 46 in our portion today – where the names of the Children of Israel are listed. This is a deliberate literary device to show you that the group of people who were just a family, Jacob’s family, travelling down to Egypt to live there at a time of famine, became the tribes of Israel who are the spiritual ancestors of the Jewish people. This enables us to say that we all stood at Sinai, all received Torah and all have heard it as we personally can and can thus interpret Torah for ourselves.
We are members of a serious religion insofar as our combination of belonging, behaving and believing is ever evolving, questioning and developing. At the turn of the secular year may we find the strength to do so and the will to activate the force within us. May the force indeed be with you!
