On the “Jewish Harry Potter” 

By Cindy Mindell

Rabbi Dave Mason

West Hartford native David Mason – now social entrepreneur and Rabbi David Mason of Nachlaot, Jerusalem – launched a new book series on his 40th birthday last week. The Lamp of Darkness, the first volume in the The Age of Prophecy series, goes back 3,000 years to the epic battle between the Israelite Kings and Prophets. Lev, an orphaned shepherd boy, begins a journey of discovery when he’s hired to play as a musician before the prophets. He soon learns that his father’s knife holds a deadly secret about his hidden past. As he is drawn deeper into the world of prophecy, Lev fights to unearth his true self while the clouds of war gather around him.

A product of Congregation Beth Israel religious school in West Hartford, Mason began visiting Israel during high school. Midway through his studies at Colorado College, he spent six months in Israel studying Hebrew and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a year after graduation at Yeshivat Ohr Someyach in Jerusalem.

He earned a law degree from New York University and worked for two years as an attorney in the National Resources Defense Council in L.A. before finally making aliyah in 2003. Mason lives with his wife and 9-year-old son in Nachlaot, a neighborhood he describes as the “Greenwich Village” of Jerusalem. It was there that Mason and co-author Mike Feuer unveiled The Lamp of Darkness (Lionstail Press).

Mason spoke with the Ledger about his inspiration for a “Jewish Harry Potter.”

Q: How did you and co-author Mike Feuer meet? 

A: Mike and I were at Colorado College at the same time but barely knew each other. We finally met when we were part of a core group that co-founded Sulam Yaakov Community Beit Midrash in Nachlaot. We were both desiring a different type of place to learn. The place was started in 2007, when I was describing to a friend what I wanted to create and a rabbi in the neighborhood overheard us and told me that we shared a vision and should discuss it further. Mike and I were study partners there and later, he went on to become one of the educators. It’s a different type of institution than most yeshivot, in that personal growth through Torah is a priority.

Q: What inspired you to write The Lamp of Darkness?

A: Two big things were coinciding in 2007: At Sulam Yaakov, I was learning the books of the early prophets and the inner workings of prophecy and I was blown away and wondered why I hadn’t learned them before.

The Jewish world doesn’t tend to study the Jewish books of Prophets and Writings very much; in the Orthodox world, students mostly learn the Gemara and Talmud, but I spent six years working on the book, and my inspiration came from the Prophets. Christians know the Old Testament better than Jews do. I was very intrigued by the stories and kabbalistic understanding behind them, and by how prophecy actually works.

The second thing is that I’m a Harry Potter junkie and I was finishing the seventh Harry Potter book for the third time, and I had a thought: if Hogwarts actually existed, people would be breaking down the doors to learn there, but here I was learning about all these magical powers in our own tradition and that wasn’t getting any attention in the way that Harry Potter and Hogwarts were. I thought that somebody should learn and write about the biblical equivalent of Harry Potter. Then I thought, who can I get to do it? I didn’t look at myself as a writer, so how could I persuade somebody else to write it? But I realized that you can’t give somebody else your ideas and get them to run with them, so I would just have to learn how to write the story and dive in. I spent the next six years writing the book. I deepened my study of the Prophets and when I started writing, all kinds of specific questions came up and I read book after book on the workings of prophecy.

Q: How does “The Age of Prophecy” compare to “Harry Potter?”

A: I envisioned the story line from the start as a series and I know where it’s going. In comparison to J.K. Rowling, I have both an advantage and a disadvantage: she can make up whatever she wants, but I feel a responsibility to be faithful to the Jewish texts, so I can’t make things up. At the same time, that gives me a story structure to work with; it’s already there, in the written text and in the oral or midrashic tradition that goes into the stories behind the stories. The whole setting for the book is the battle between Eliahu and Ahav, so I don’t have to make a choice of where it’s going. While the characters are fictional, any reader can open the Torah and see where the storyline is going next.

Q: What are your plans for the “Age of Prophecy” website?

A: It’s important to me that, when people have questions about the book, they can go more in-depth.

The book triggered questions among our Beta readers. For example, there’s a scene with a golden calf, in a story that takes place after the time of King David. Of course, the original golden calf episode takes place at the foot of Mount Sinai, long before King David. Most people don’t know that there are two later incidents. An Orthodox woman was surprised because she didn’t know about these later ones; she was upset and confused and told her husband about it and he said that it was heresy and that she shouldn’t continue reading the book. So even Orthodox people aren’t familiar with their past. The website is geared toward answering those questions that come up.

We’ll have video footnotes, forms where people can click on the questions that arise while reading the book and we’ll gear what we do toward those questions. We want to have fun activities for people, like a “test your knowledge” quiz about prophecy.

We’ll have “Prophecy School.” Prophecy is something the Jewish people don’t have anymore these days, but the steps that a person would take to become a prophet are still incredibly valid. Prophecy involves a very high level of self-perfection, and the process is still a valid way to enrich one’s life. The highest rungs may be inaccessible but every rung you climb can give you tremendous advantages.

For example, the act of prophecy only exists in joy, even though the prophecy itself can be dark. The patriarch Jacob is a prophet and is incredibly wealthy, so why doesn’t he redeem his son, Joseph, who is sold into slavery? It’s because he becomes depressed for 22 years while Joseph is gone and so he can’t achieve prophecy to figure out where his son is.

In a broader sense, we’re trying to reshape Jewish education. So much of the way we teach Judaism can be very dry and with a fiction book, we wanted to reach the type of person who would never pick up a Bible and start reading, even though it contains amazing stories.

For more information: theageofprophecy.com.

Comments? Cindym@jewishledger.com.