"Is There a Jewish Way to Write Science Fiction Movies and Books?" Asks Yonatan Gordon, Founder of Kabbalah Site CommunityofReaders.org

Philadelphia, PA, July 17, 2013 --(PR.com)-- As Jewish educators seek to interest today’s youth, they are awakening to the need to reach kids with topics they are already interested in.

With the success of Jewish takes on the cinema, from Aish.com’s Jewlarious section, to JerusalemOnlineU.com’s “Cinema: The Jewish Lens” video course syndicated at over 300 college campuses and schools, one Jewish writer began work on developing a system for Jewish writers and educators to follow.

“I started offering authors advice on how to write science fiction according to Jewish tradition,” said Yonatan Gordon, founder of CommunityofReaders.org and former Jewish publisher. “But the questions only led me to try and systemize an approach further.”

Yonatan explains that the rendering of future events is something central to Jewish thought and experience. “The writings of Tanach are full or prophesies and predictions about the future. But as Maimonides also explains, we also shouldn’t involve ourselves with making predictions about future events.”

So what is a Jewish science fiction writer, interested in thinking about and depicting futuristic events, to do? Based on the idea that while a tzaddik lives in the future, his goal is the betterment of the present, Yonatan started thinking about how this genre affects the present-day.

“There is a powerful metaphor in Psalm 126, which begins “When G‑d will return the exiles of Zion, we will [see our experiences in exile] as having been dreamers,” said Yonatan. “I started to think of this idea in terms of fiction versus fact. Maybe we can also relate this idea to the realm of science fiction as well, where future truths may appear as present-day fiction.”

“If you look at the most successful science fiction movies in recent years--Matrix, Inception, Oblivion--they all contain a great deal of Kabbalistic and Torah concepts behind them,” said Yonatan.

Yonatan’s most recent article, “The Kabbalah of Science Fiction Movies,” presents the seven primary themes portrayed in these movies, according to a Kabbalistic model called a partzuf. “Every full set of concepts from the world, or from the human psyche, can be corresponded to the sefirot that God used to create the world. Once you know the system, then you can expand the discussion from there to include other examples, metaphors, etc.”

“Eventually,” said Yonatan, “I would like to expand this Jewish approach to writing Science Fiction to a full-length, but for the meantime, the main thing is to start getting these ideas out there so that writers can benefit.”

Yonatan’s article, “The Kabbalah of Science Fiction Movies,” can be read in full here:

http://communityofreaders.org/2013/07/15/the-kabbalah-of-science-fiction-movies/

About the Author:

Yonatan has spent most of his past 13 professional years in the world of Jewish publishing. He was the Marketing Manager at Kehot Publication Society (publishing arm of Chabad) for the better part of six years. He also founded Dwelling Place Publishing, which gave him the opportunity to meet many authors, educators, stores and others in the greater publishing world
The vision behind founding Community of Readers was to foster a Jewish approach to the disciplines of writing and publishing. Because these fields are so fundamental to a great variety of interests and pursuits, the outcome is often spontaneous and surprising.