In the 3rd narnia it says that the furthest east anyone can go is the end of the world- Aslan's country. What does that mean with relationship to the idea that we keep moving eastward as we get worse?
Obviously we can't compare ourselves to the Narnia books or movies but I wanted to point something out. For those that have read or seen Narnia, you all know that the books/movies have a very close correlation to Christianity and Aslan is like G-d/ישקי. If the furthest east one can go is Aslan's country, that's the exact opposite of what we do right? Every time we were bad, we moved eastward away from 'ה and גן עדן. Do the Christians think that moving away from גן עדן brought them closer to ישקי? If going as far east as you can is a good thing, is that contradicting our idea of going back to גן עדן in the west? How do we reconcile the Narnian/Christian idea of moving east towards "Aslan's Country" with our idea of moving east away from 'ה and גן עדן? Or should we even try? Is it wrong to try to reconcile the two? If not, how would any of you explain the difference?
I don't want this to be a discussion about Christian theology, but I would like to respond to Mirel's post. I personally don't think that the idea of moving east in the Narnia books is meant to be the movement away from Hashem. I think the directions always have to with the vantage point. Aren't we trying to move east? Don't we daven towards the Beit Hamikdash, which is in the east? Maybe the idea of moving east is the idea of moving towards a better and more spiritual place. This is an idea that both Christians and Jews share.
ReplyDeleteSo that goes back to my original point. Is moving east bad or good? We said that it was bad earlier because every time the people were bad they moved east. Now we face to the east towards ירושלים. That brings up a problem, though. We only face east because that's where ירושלים is. But is that where גן עדן was? It must not be, because we moved east AWAY from גן עדן and we have to move further east to get to ירושלים. That creates ANOTHER problem. If east is bad, why are we moving in that direction to get to where the בית המקדש was? Basically, should we just forget about the whole east/west idea as far as it relates to geography today? Maybe the world changed, maybe our ideas of god/bad are different, or maybe גן עדן wasn't really supposed to be a physical place in general. Then I just have the question of why it talks about moving in a certain direction to a certain (probably physical) place.
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