Lost in Translation: Judaism meets Hollywood meets subtitles
Lost in Translation: Judaism meets Hollywood meets subtitles
So I was helping with a ninth grade class and one of the girls asked if I was Christian, to which I replied, “no, I’m Jewish” – the girls gave me a blank stare so I tried a few descriptors, all of which failed – something about the precursors to Christians or the group that Jesus came out of. I knew they were familiar with the Sarvadharma Symbol – which is a sort of flower with different world religions placed in it (these have now been replaced with the five human values) but sometimes a Jewish star can still be found on this symbol around their school, so I found a paper and drew the Star of David – the girls said “ohhhhh” and I thought my pictionary game had worked, but then they started laughing and talking excitedly to each other in Thai. When I asked why, one exclaimed
“Teachuh!” (the title of all teachers, I’m Teachuh Lima) “You know Da Vinci code?” I laughed, I had heard the story read on tape (and slept through a lot of it) but remembered lots of symbolism. Yamini later told me that they were referring to the symbol from the movie which was supposed to represent a chalice and the womb of Mary Magdaline – so much for my lesson on Judaism, now they probably think I’m in the code of shion or whatever (obviously I don’t know the book very well, so I better stop now before I do just what they did – take a little bit of misunderstood information and try to make connections with it).
Tags: Travel
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