The Trouble With Sequels

Last night I went to the cinema and had the odd experience of realising, trailer after trailer, that I already knew every story waiting for me. Another Star Wars film. Another return to The Hunger Games. Another reboot of something I vaguely remember already being rebooted once before. I do not even mean that critically. Some of them I will probably end up seeing. But sitting there in the dark I found myself wondering how much contemporary culture now depends on familiarity. We seem increasingly reluctant to imagine genuinely new worlds. We return instead to inherited ones because at least we already know how they work.

Maybe imagination feels harder than it used to.

Yesterday there were two marches in London. One marking Nakba Day. One orbiting around Tommy Robinson and the increasingly confident world of far right nationalism gathering around him. Both carried rhetoric that I found difficult in different ways. Both revealed something unsettling about the moment we are living through. Everything now seems to reward retreat. Fear narrows people. Political language narrows people. Communities become smaller and more guarded. The pressure is always towards your own side, your own grief.

The Movement for Progressive Judaism issued a statement after the attack on the mosque in Blackburn because it seemed impossible not to. Not because communities are interchangeable. Not because all forms of hatred are identical. Simply because if a mosque is attacked and Jewish leaders say nothing, something inside society has already begun to fail.

Part of what unsettled me this week was watching antisemitism itself becoming folded into a much larger political project that has very little to do with Jewish safety and even less to do with Jewish ethics. There were people yesterday genuinely frightened about antisemitism. Of course there were. Many Jews are frightened right now. But there was also rhetoric about migrants, Muslims, national betrayal and civilisational decline that carried its own kind of danger. Tommy Robinson’s movement has never hidden the fact that it understands the world through enemies and threats. Eventually that way of seeing consumes almost everyone.

And yet the Nakba march too carried moments where complexity collapsed into slogan and certainty. There were chants and images that many Jews experience not as abstract politics but as a denial of our own history, fear and belonging. What leaves so many people exhausted now is the demand for total moral clarity. You are expected to arrive already sorted into camps. Empathy becomes conditional. Ambiguity starts to look like betrayal.

I kept thinking this week about something James Baldwin once wrote about the role of the artist: to “illuminate that darkness and blaze roads through the vast forest.” Baldwin understood that imagination is not escapism. It is one of the ways human beings resist becoming trapped inside fear. Once you stop being able to imagine another person’s humanity, or a future meaningfully different from the present one, everything starts hardening very quickly.

Perhaps that is partly why Shavuot feels so important this year.

The Torah arrives in the wilderness to people who are technically free but still think like slaves. They carry panic with them. Complaint. Nostalgia for certainty. Revelation does not solve that. If anything it makes the argument larger. The rabbis imagine Torah being heard in seventy languages, refracted through multiple understandings all at once. Every generation returns to the same words and somehow hears something different in them.

Judaism never really behaved as though revelation settled the conversation.

Over the past few weeks I have been reading Bring Hersh Home by Rachel Goldberg-Polin. What stays with me is not only the grief in the book, though there is almost unbearable grief there, but the refusal to allow grief to flatten the world entirely into certainty. Again and again there is a reaching back towards complexity, towards other people, towards language that still leaves room for humanity after trauma. I think that too requires imagination.

The same instinct sat behind our recent book Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel. We knew people would disagree with parts of it. Some strongly. But the point was never consensus. It was to resist the shrinking of Jewish conversation into slogans and approved positions and exhausted binaries where people either repeat the right sentence or stop speaking altogether.

Walking out of the cinema last night, I realised that what unsettled me was not really the sequels themselves. Judaism understands repetition perfectly well. We build entire calendars out of it. But the point is never simply to repeat.

You are meant to return changed somehow.

Otherwise eventually the words just become familiar in the wrong way.