The Anti-Judaism of the New Doctor Who

I am a long-running fan of Doctor Who. One of the things I respected about the show has been its ability to be liberal in ways that were subtle and did not get in the way of smart storytelling for people of different ages and across the political spectrum. This was possible because the writers knew how to pick their shots and let their values flow from the narrative. Doctor Who, at a fundamental level, is a show about tolerance founded on curiosity about the other. The hero is a time-traveling alien, who takes people on journies across time and space. From this perspective, human concerns about race, religion, sexuality, and gender are going to seem rather provincial. There is no need to preach tolerance. On the contrary, the show's valuing of tolerance should emanate naturally from its very premise. This brings me to my problem with the newest season. While I was excited for Jodie Whittaker becoming the first female Doctor, as she was excellent in Broadchurch, the show has gotten into the habit of wearing its politics on its sleeve which is not only boring, it is also counter-productive for getting its message across.

This embrace of liberal polemics goes beyond giving the Doctor his usual humanist speeches in keeping with a character who is a talker. Furthermore, the show regularly used to turn its liberalism on the Doctor. From his own perspective, the Doctor is the liberal humanist that he is because he has seen the dark side alternative within himself when he became the War Doctor during the Time War and was willing to destroy his own people, the Time Lords, in order to rid the universe of the Daleks. This sense of guilt, most notable in Christopher Eccleston and more recently with Peter Capaldi, often allows the Doctor to empathize and try to reason with the villains. I cannot think of a show in which the "big scary monster" is more likely to not simply be a bad guy in need of being destroyed. This willingness to avoid easy answers was part of what made Doctor Who's lessons in tolerance so effective; it habituated viewers, in ways like no other show, to question the Manichean good versus evil framework that comes so naturally to us that ultimately is the root of intolerance.

This hard-earned embrace of tolerance is discarded in this new season in an effort to engage in virtue-signaling. Just in case anyone doubted where the show stood on race and gender, not only is the Doctor now a woman but she now has, as companions, a black guy, a Pakistani woman plus a middle-aged white man to provide some diversity. There are episodes dealing with Rosa Parks and seventeenth-century witch trials in England. The show "bravely" teaches us that racism and sexist witch-dunkings are bad. A useful contrast here is the last Capaldi episode which gets much of its humor from confronting the highly patronizing attitude toward women in the early incarnations of the show back in the 1960s.

I would like to focus on one particular incident from the Witchfinders episode, which, for all of its flaws, is partially redeemed by Alan Cummings' portrayal of King James I. The Doctor confronts a witch-hunter, who quotes from the King James Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18).  The Doctor responds: "In the Old Testament. There is a twist in the sequel, 'love thy neighbor.'" First, on a basic factual level, the Doctor is mistaken. "Love thy neighbor" comes from the Old Testament in Leviticus 19:18. The New Testament simply quotes the Old. The second but more disturbing issue here is that the show is playing into the stereotype of the Old Testament as the book of judgment in contrast to the New Testament with its love and tolerance. This is the true foundation for Christian anti-Judaism, far more pernicious than the notion that the Jews killed Jesus.

While Jews have been convenient scapegoats, Christianity has never truly needed to blame Jews for killing Jesus, particularly those Jews who were not alive during the first century CE. The real Jewish challenge for Christianity has always been that Christianity could never escape the fact that the New Testament serves to modify an already present scripture. Unless there was something wrong with Judaism that Christianity could realistically improve on (obviously, neither religion has ever lacked for pious hypocrites), Christianity makes no sense. For traditional Orthodox Christianity, the solution has been that the Old Testament lacked the Son of God dying to atone for the sins of the world. This, though, raises the question of what was the point of the Old Testament if it could not save. The answer is that the Old Testament teaches us about sin by showing us how we utterly fail to keep the Law (Romans 7:7-25). As such, Christians need to read the Old Testament as the law that condemns despite everything the Old Testament has to say to the contrary. If the God of the Old Testament knows that we are imperfect sinners but will forgive us if only we truly want it then there is no need for Jesus. On the contrary, Jesus becomes a denial of God's perfect forgiveness.

To be fair to traditional Christians, their anti-Judaism can be kept in check with an Augustinian embrace of man's total depravity. From this perspective, Jews, even as Christ-killers, can never be worse than depraved humanity as a whole. Any other group of human sinners would have failed God's test just as badly. At least the Jews have the advantage that God chose them despite their utter depravity.

With modern liberal Christianity, this problem of anti-Judaism actually gets worse. As Amy-Jill Levine argues in The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, liberal Christianity's desire to escape from traditional dogma easily turns into a backdoor for precisely the kind of negative stereotypes of Jews that it was supposed to have transcended. If the point of Jesus was not that he was the Son of God sent to atone for sin then it must be that Jesus taught a new value system. This means that the old system must have been really backward and in need of replacement. For example, if Jesus came to liberate women then Judaism must be some oppressive Taliban-like religion. If Jesus helped the poor then Judaism must be the religion of the greedy rich. If human beings are not all depraved then there was something wrong specifically with the Jews that caused them to reject Jesus' message of peace and love. 

If you think that attacking the Jewish scriptures is not an attack on members of the Jewish religion then consider what it means to attack the Koran. If the Old Testament (or the Koran) does not simply have problematic texts that believers have to struggle with but teaches hatred then that religion is tainted and its practitioners must be condemned as haters as long as they do not formally abandon their religion. We would not accept "moderate" Nazis with their "liberal" reading of Mein Kampf as anything other than a sick joke and a cynical attempt to make anti-Semitism acceptable in polite society. By contrast, we can easily ignore those Jews in the past who might have killed Jesus as not real Jews as they failed to live up to the "true" teachings of Judaism, which is peace.

The fact that Christians believe in the Old Testament as opposed to the Koran only adds to the problem. The Muslim reading his Koran is outside of the Christian framework and can, therefore, be ignored. The Old Testament practicing Jew as an opponent who is also part of the Christian framework all too easily becomes the embodiment of Christianity's failures, allowing Christians to pass off whatever they secretly hate about themselves as really being the fault of the Jews. Since this Jew is a Christian construct without any real connection to actual Jews, it can flourish even in the absence of Jews. Hatred of this theological Jewish construct could fester unconnected to people who actually practice Judaism until it manifests itself in the actual murder of Jews.  For example, the medieval unbelieving Christian, who could not accept that Jesus really was present in the Eucharist was transformed into a Jew in spirit. This, in turn, got actual Jews killed as host desecrators.

This same formula helps explain witch hunts. You start with the construct of the witch as a servant of Satan. Since this fantasy has no connection to real people, it can evolve into something ever more sinister, capable of literally committing any depravity no matter how heinous, until someone is made to wear that label and die for it. In the hands of Doctor Who, witch-hunters in seventeenth-century England (which officially had expelled its Jews in 1290) become people in funny hats who quote the Old Testament without seeming to realize that there exists a New Testament; in essence, they are Jews. This is dangerous because, despite the fact that Jews were not responsible for European witch trials, viewers are being primed to associate Jews, as followers of a "harsh" Old Testament law, with witch-hunting and ultimately with the forces of intolerance.   

To be clear, I do not think the writers of a certain British science-fiction show actively hate Jews or consciously meant any harm. Furthermore, I do not believe that I am some paragon of tolerance who never makes harmful prejudiced comments. I beg the indulgence of members of the practically limitless groups that I am not part of for my ignorance. You are human beings (or perhaps aliens) and my failure to treat you as such is simply an oversight on my part. If you are a member of such a group, feel free to point out where I have treated you unfairly. Since I am not claiming to be a tolerant person, just someone who tries to be, I have no reason to reject your criticism and might just take it to heart. Likewise, I should forgive the writers for not being on top of the history of anti-Semitism and its role in Christian biblical exegesis. There is plenty of evil out there in the world and I should not take it personally if writers wish to focus on other issues besides anti-Semitism.

Here is the problem though. The show has now made a point of its great tolerance, allowing itself the moral authority to treat those possessing the various failings of very real historical prejudices as caricatures. We are no longer dealing with a show in which tolerance is a tool for self-examination but a weapon to castigate others. If the writers believe that they are some model of enlightened tolerance for others to look up to then any demonstration of prejudice, even a small one, ceases to be innocent. We now have no reason to assume that they would accept that, even through oversight, they are guilty of prejudice as this would undermine the very moral authority that saves them from being Puritan Pharisee Jews, whose obsession with the prejudices of others has blinded them to their own prejudices.   

Just so we are clear, I have no objection to Doctor Who criticizing the Old Testament. It has many problematic passages. My problem is that the show did so in a way that is factually incorrect. Worse, it used this falsehood as a means of propping up the New Testament, making the central argument of Christian anti-Jewish biblical exegesis. This is not an innocent issue but one with real blood attached to it. The writers owe the Jewish community an apology and a commitment to educating themselves about anti-Semitism. Perhaps this can be the basis for an episode next season. Might I suggest that the Doctor team up with the Golem of Prague to stop a blood libel?

Midrash Doctor Who on Marvelous Midos Machine

One of the delights of parenthood has been the excuse to use the gargantuan music collections of iTunes and Amazon to track down and acquire childhood favorites to play for my son. Holding a place of prominence on my son's playlist is the Marvelous Midos Machine series. This series of tapes (three when I was growing up with a fourth added several years ago), tells the story of Dr. Midos, who invents a machine that can tell when Jewish kids are about to do something wrong and attempts to correct their behavior by projecting songs from nearby objects. In this endeavor, Dr. Midos is helped by three kids, Dizzy, Shnooky, and Shloompy. The series' many terrific songs and its ability to introduce children to basic concepts of ethical behavior are more than enough to make up for a ridiculous hole filled plot that often veers ironically into morally questionable territory. For example, where did Dr. Midos acquire the resources to put a satellite in orbit? How could he be so reckless as to endanger the residents of Brooklyn by sending up a rocket from a street corner? How was he planning on feeding Dizzy? What purpose did Dizzy serve in outer space, besides for being captured by Dr. Doomstein, considering that he is able to come home in episode two, after being rescued? Is not the depiction of the cannibal villagers of Mumbo Jumbo quite racist? Finally, are we really comfortable with a machine that allows for "1984" levels of surveillance? To answer such questions, I sought to turn to one of my favorite television shows, Doctor Who. This show features an alien with a police box-shaped time machine/spaceship, who goes around with a team of human allies saving the universe from all sorts of evildoers (including those shaped like pepper shakers). I find Who to be particularly useful as a means of explaining MMM, because the show often takes popular myths, such as Robin Hood and Santa Claus this season, and offers a science fiction twist so that the stories make an odd sort of sense (at least within the madcap universe of Who).

Dr. Midos is actually a Time Lord operating within the New York Jewish community during the late twentieth century. He is a "doctor," but what is he a doctor of? Clearly, like the Doctor, he is a doctor of everything. Dr. Midos owns a Kwisatz Haderach machine, which allows one to go anywhere in the universe and a time machine (contrary to what he tells Shnooky in episode three, it really is a time machine and not a sleeping machine, but more on this later). Put these two machines together and you have a fully functional TARDIS. Dr. Midos follows a Maimonidean brand of Judaism, which he interprets in a manner consistent with Time Lord values. As a Maimonidean, Dr. Midos values halakha and is scrupulous in his personal observance, not because he expects any reward from some deity, but because Dr. Midos believes that Judaism is useful in creating the sort of society in which specific true ideas about the ultimate nature of reality can be nurtured. This does not mean that most Jews have been enlightened with these ideas. On the contrary, most Jews are mired in superstition. It is, therefore, necessary to hide one's true beliefs from the masses by making it seem that you value ritual for its own sake and possess no loyalties that transcend Judaism. As a Time Lord, Dr. Midos sees two stages to enlightenment. The first stage is a universalized set of ethics that values all intelligent life. This moral enlightenment allows for a technological enlightenment in which one masters all of space and eventually all time. This must be done merely for its own sake. A Time Lord does not use his TARDIS for personal material gain, but merely seeks to help others and gain knowledge. As such, Dr. Midos hopes to train his Jewish students and even the wider Jewish world in universal ethics so that they would eventually be worthy of Time Lord technology to master space and time. Dr. Midos' attempt to make midos the center of Judaism presents a major challenge as Judaism is built on a particular ethic that values loyalty to the Jewish community over other humans. If "midos are the way we act and how we think and feel," then we cannot accept the premise that the "Torah shows us just what we should do." The later must be read as a question to be answered by "if you want to do what's right and really be a mensch, you have to have good midos through and through." Dr. Midos handles this problem simply by staying silent and relying on the fact that it is only the enlightened, who understand universal ethics. Thus, Dr. Midos can simply train people in midos and they will not realize that a consistent allegiance to midos will require a rejection of Judaism as understood by most people until they are ready for this knowledge.

Episode one has Dr. Midos sending his student Dizzy into space, officially to operate the Midos Satellite, but really to further his midos education. It is Dr. Midos' hope that getting a small taste of space will cause Dizzy to intuit the fact that he needs to think big. Not only are Jews a small part of the human race, but humanity is a small part of the entire cosmos. Back on Earth, Dr. Midos employs his new student Shnooky to help him. Dr. Midos hopes that eventually, once Shnooky has learned about midos, he too will be ready to go into space. Obviously, the rocket is not a conventional one, but one designed with Time Lord technology in Dr. Midos' possession; there was no risk of endangering Brooklyn with the lift-off. Dr. Midos' larger plan for Judaism relies on the MMM. On the surface, this machine serves to observe Jewish children and play songs. These songs, though, serve as cover for the machine's real purpose, which is to alter people's brains to make them more open to the song's message. This explains why the kids prove so willing to change their behavior. As can be demonstrated by the limited ability of the songs to actually change the behavior of listeners in real life over the past several decades, people are highly unlikely to change their behavior simply because they hear a sermon, even one framed in a catchy song.

This brings us to Dr. Doomstein. Clearly, Dr. Midos had previous encounters with Doomstein. This is because Doomstein was Dr. Midos' first student. Doomstein's break with Dr. Midos came about not because Doomstein rejected Judaism. On the contrary, Doomstein came to realize the threat posed to Judaism by the existence of midos. Midos require a completely different method of thinking and value system. Midos cannot be taught as specific commands of thou shall or shall not. It is impossible to ever demonstrate perfect midos. Midos apply to everyone and do not allow you to distinguish between Jew and gentile. On the contrary, midos force you to acknowledge the reality of Jews with bad midos and gentiles with good midos. According to Doomstein, he became "bad" because, when he was a little boy people told him he was no good and so he decided to become the nastiest person in the world. By this, he meant that Dr. Midos told him that he was bad because he could not accept the authority of midos over halakha. This caused Doomstein to respond by developing a Sith Lord brand of Judaism. (Dr. Midos had previously shown him Star Wars in order to get him interested in space.)

According to Sith Judaism, the only thing that matters is power. Jews can gain power by scrupulously following halakha and not getting caught up in valuing other things like midos or philosophy. Doomstein takes strength in this belief from the fact he was able to build a starship with technology he stole from Dr. Midos. The fact that Hashem would use a kofer like Dr. Midos to reward a true believer like Doomstein with such cargo, proves that Hashem wants Jews to reject midos and only follow the Torah. The fact that Doomstein was able to use his Torah knowledge to argue that it was muter to steal the intellectual property of an apikores demonstrates that the power of Torah encompasses all knowledge and therefore everything else is kefira.

Furthermore, according to Sith Judaism, Jews can best be protected from modern ideas like midos through hierarchical authority. There should be one supreme Sith Gadol Hador to wield the power of Judaism and one apprentice Sith Gadol Hador to crave that power. The Gadol Hador's power frees him from having to submit to consistent logical principles, which is the path to good midos (a terrible thing). Instead, he wields the power of absolute arbitrary decrees. Sith Gedolim wield light sabers that allow them to cut through all kashas. Regular people can connect to this power and protect themselves from midos by submitting themselves and their puny intellects completely to the will of the Sith Gedolim.

Doomstein needs to save Jewish children from being brainwashed by the MMM. He, therefore, uses his spaceship to hijack the Midos Satellite and kidnap Dizzy. He wants to turn Dizzy away from Dr. Midos by allowing to come to the realization that he and not Dr. Midos is the one truly loyal to Judaism. Dizzy will then destroy the MMM himself. For this to happen, it is of critical importance that Doomstein not simply come out and explain the situation to Dizzy. Since Dr. Midos operates with subconscious suggestions, any intellectual argument based on facts will fail. Dizzy will only be able to believe that Doomstein is the Sith Gadol Hador if Doomstein makes every effort to pretend not to be. He, therefore, leaves Dizzy in a cell and tells him that he is going to tack a nap, while he was really going to learn in order to harness his full Torah powers to be able to counteract the brainwashing of Dr. Midos and save Dizzy's neshamah. Note that Doomstein is a Litvak. He relies on the power of Torah instead of davaning.  

Dr. Midos' response is to contact a French Time Lord known as Professor Double Talk in order to get some invisibility spray. Double Talk is clearly a Time Lord as his name is obviously a cover and he has designed a hyperspace rocket engine and an anti-gravity umbrella. Dr. Midos then tricks Shnooky into spraying himself and agreeing to go on the mission to save Dizzy. He wants to force Doomstein into an intellectual trap, either harm a Jewish kid like Shnooky or allow Jewish children everywhere to be exposed to the kefirah of midos. The fact that Shnooky finds Doomstein sleeping instead of learning simply demonstrates that Doomstein was aware of his presence and therefore needed to pretend to be sleeping in order to maintain the fiction that he was not the Sith Gadol Hador. Dr. Midos' plan, though, succeeds as Doomstein finds himself with no choice but to pretend that his laser gun uses bullets, which can be replaced with bubble gum. He is left bemoaning the fact that he lacked the courage to harm Shnooky even to save Judaism and he would be the only "nasty" one around, the only one still willing to place halakha over midos. At this point, with Doomstein shaken in his emunas hachamim (mainly in himself), that Shnooky starts to play the tshuva tape, reformatting Doomstein's mind to transform him into a practitioner of midos. Doomstein starts to give in, but resists by telling himself "I am going to become a new man," meaning that to give in to Dr. Midos would be no different than committing shmad, becoming a Christian "new man." He continues by saying that is "going to do lots of mitzvoth," which is more important than midos. Doomstein turns to the Torah, whose laws encompass everything and render midos irrelevant. Finally, he offers to "try to have good midos." By this, Doomstein defeats the song by seeming to submit himself to midos. In reality though, Doomstein only vowed to "try," leaving midos as a handmaiden to halakah that one can choose to practice when convenient. You can study midos from a didactic legalistic text for a half hour a day, which defeats the point of midos anyway, while leaving the bulk of the day honing one's pilpul powers. Doomstein is then able to trick Dr. Midos into letting him escape to Yeshiva Aish Sameach in Jerusalem, where he plans to reach out to the kids that Dr. Midos has brainwashed and bring them back to the true path of Sith Judaism.   

Meanwhile, Shloompy wastes the only bottle of anti-invisible spray due to his inability to balance the midos directive toward cleanliness and the directive to not mess with other people's things. This means that Dr. Midos has to turn once again to Double Talk, who tells him that he must acquire some wooky jukie from the village of Mumbo Jumbo in 'Africa. Dizzy notes that going to 'Africa is "just as exciting as going into outer space" as they are not going to the continent of Africa but the planet of 'Africa, which houses the twenty-third century Neo-Victorian theme park village of Mumbjo Jumbo, designed to replicate a prejudiced nineteenth-century vision of an African village. The problem with this theme park is that robot villagers hewed to their programming of being Victorian era stereotypical pulp fiction Africans too well. They developed cannibalism and killed all the tourists. Abandoned, the planet fell through a time rift into the twentieth century. It was during the journey through the rift, that the planet was seeded with wookie jukie. Dr. Midos manages to avoid the fate of the tourists by playing on the robot's superstition that he could unleash the Mighty Shnooky against them. Dizzy then completes the task by introducing the robots to cholent, which creates a logical paradox in their circuitry trying to explain why anyone would eat such food and causes them to explode.

Unbeknownst to Dr. Midos, wookie jukie, as the product of a dimension existing between the spaces of time, gives the user temporary Time Lord powers. After coming home, Shnooky goes to sleep in Dr. Midos' time machine chair and accidentally sets it in motion. On this trip, Shnooky manages to convince George Washington to tell his father that he chopped down the cherry tree, before crashing in 1968 where he meets an earlier version of Dr. Midos. The reason for this crash was not a leak in the gas tank as time machines do not run on gas, but because of a time clamp placed on the machine by the Time Lords when they exiled Dr. Midos (as they did with the third Doctor) to Earth. Their reason for doing so can easily be surmised when you consider the host of questionable decisions made by Dr. Midos in this series. The present-day Dr. Midos uses the bein hazmanim radio in his attic to talk to Christopher Columbus before finding the 1968 version of himself. The fact that his house would not appear to have an attic demonstrates that Dr. Midos' house possesses Tardis technology and is much bigger on the inside.  Back in 1968, Dr. Midos realizes that the time machine only worked in the first place because of Shnooky and, because Shnooky was not trained as a Time Lord, it would only work if Shnooky subconsciously willed it to do so. Dr. Midos, therefore, tells Shnooky that he does not have any unleaded gas. In a panic that he would not get home for his bar-mitzvah, Shnooky falls into a trance and successfully wills himself home. When he wakes up, Dr. Midos tricks Shnooky by only telling him part of the truth. Obviously, Double Talk had previously spoken to him about the effects of wookie jookie, but Dr. Midos decided to only mention the part about dreams. He then dodges the issue about the attic. While Dizzy and Shloompy know something about the truth, which is in keeping with Dr. Midos' plan to interest them in time travel, he forces them to not tell Shnooky. The reason for this is that Dr. Midos wants to hone Shnooky's time-traveling abilities, which for now require his ignorance of their true nature, in order to escape from the exile he has been placed in.