Harry Potter and Judaism

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Back in October '04, a rabbi at the OU, involved in NCSY, the OU's teenage kiruv organization, claims that the themes in Harry Potter are Jewish.

I want to quote a few of the more interesting passages:

Harry is Jewish. His parents died so that he might survive and carry on their legacy. Voldemort isn’t an evil wizard, but he does represent the forces of evil. He is Egyptian slavery. He is the Syrian-Greeks. He is Haman. He is the Roman persecution. He is the Spanish Inquisition. He is pogroms and Crusades and the Holocaust and the Intifada. He thought he had destroyed the Potter family, but you know what? They survived in Harry, much the same way the Jewish people lives on in you.

At Hogwarts, Harry studies magic. His course of studies includes such varied courses as the History of Magic, Potions and Care of Magical Creatures. This is like our study of Torah. (This gets a huge lehavdil, which is what we say when we compare two things that really aren’t alike.) The Torah is not just a book of laws. It’s the history of our people. It’s self-improvement. It’s how to treat other people. Harry’s course of study is diverse and so is ours.

After drawing various parallels between the book and Judaism, the author concludes with this:

I could go on, but I won’t. You can draw your own parallels. A metaphor is just a metaphor. (Or, as I like to put it, “A metaphor is like a simile.”) Harry Potter is just a book. It may be well-written and critically-acclaimed, but at the end of the day it’s the product of human hands and imagination. Like all humans, J.K. Rowling is just dust and ashes. She may have her five Harry Potter books, but we have the five Books that G-d gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. (And we saw special effects far greater than anything ever shown on the silver screen!) Those are the books that count. As much as we can learn from Harry, Ron and Hermione, there is so much more we can learn from the examples of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov (our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). May we merit to spend as much effort analyzing the Torah, the true source of our real Jewish “magic.”

The only comment I can make is that, as with most other methods of attempted religious inspiration, the use of what people know is good but not even close to foolproof. I guess if it inspired even one person, then it was a good thing.

However, as a different angle on the use of Harry Potter, see Under the Spell of Harry Potter, by Yaffa Ganz, from the Winter 2001 issue of the Jewish Action. She argues that Harry Potter, as a book about wizardry, might be sending the wrong message to people, especially children, regarding the uniqueness of G-d and how the world functions.