New Zoom Series: Star Wars & Judaism

Having spent the past five Sunday evenings convening a Zoom chat during this Coronatine period, which is something that developed off of a suggestion from a Coronatine project of mine, I have been wondering this past week about doing a Star Wars & Judaism Zoom series.

Starting Something New
Today, I decided to stop wondering and decided to go ahead and do it. Partially inspired by Star Wars Day this week and seeing a lot of interest in these two beloved topics, this series will be taking place over the next 12 Sunday evenings at 8pm EDT (5pm PDT) on Zoom. And there is no charge.

Temporal Structure
My tentative idea is to start off with welcoming people, as well as letting people sign-on for the first five minutes, followed by 20-25 minutes of textual discussion, and finishing-up with 10-15 minutes of Q&A. This is based off a 40-minute Zoom call, but if we can work something out, it's possible to make it longer.

Texts
My plan is to look at both broad themes in these theatrically-released movies (e.g. hope, luck, revenge, anger, etc.) and particular statements (e.g. "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering"), then find relevant Biblical and Rabbinic texts to compare and/or contrast them. I know other people have used a much broader range of texts (e.g. Kabbalistic texts, Hasidic texts, philosophical texts, Mussar texts, etc.) in comparing/contrasting with Star Wars, but I will stick to my meat-and-potatoes texts of Biblical and Rabbinic texts. I will be sharing these texts on Sefaria, so anyone can view them and/or use them.

Open to Ideas
If you have any suggestions, ideas, etc., feel free to send them my way!