We could all use a Mary Poppins in our life; someone to swoop in with and save us from ourselves. Not to clean up our house (although that would be helpful as well), but to clean up our lives. Mary Poppins as conceived by P.L. Travers and as portrayed in the two films, both Julie Andrew’s 1964 edition and the current Mary Poppins Returns featuring Elizabeth Banks, is force to be reckoned with.
She is carried in on an easterly wind on her parrot handled umbrella to rescue George Banks and later his son George from single parenthood and financial ruin, restoring joy to the Banks household and to the world itself. Sound familiar?
In fact, the story is cut right of this week’s Torah portion, Vaerah, where Moses sans umbrella does the same thing for the Jewish people, only instead of a “spoonful of sugar” ten plagues are needed to get the job done. Both Moses and Mary Poppins represent a basic human need to feel the forces of evil will one day be vanquished by those of good. And while P.L. Travers never imagined her work as a religious one, an interventionist God can be the only real explanation for a place in which penguins tap-dance and Mary Poppins herself can sing a duet with her reflection in the mirror.
Today just as we did in Biblical times, we look in sadness at the suffering and inequality in the world, and dream about a “savior” who can come in to muster the necessary forces to transform life into the ideal we so desire. What is missing in the Torah is laughter. Two-hundred years of slavery is simply not funny, nor is a Pharaoh who drowns babies to preserve power. What matters is that God and Moses get the job done, inspiring countless stories of Exodus and redemption, from places as small as a house in London on 17 Cherry Tree Lane to those who currently live under the thumb of pharaohs today. May people continue to dream up such stories in 2019, and may the world be made better because of it.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex