Category Archives: Action/Adventure

I began to study Talmud seriously when I entered Yeshiva University, which had just started a program for college students who did not attend Jewish day schools. It was a challenging subject and at first I had very mixed success. My Talmud teacher summed it up when he wrote on my evaluation the following remarks: “Earnest and studious, has been plodding along with unusual diligence and, as a result, has made fine progress especially in his ability to master texts. Analytic grasp is still weak, tends to repeat some ideas mechanically without fully understanding them. But on the whole has made highly encouraging progress.” Frustrated by my difficulty analyzing such complex material, I thought it would be wonderful to be able to take a pill and suddenly become an analytical savant. I did not do this, but Eddie Morra in the intense drama Limitless does.

Eddie Morra is a writer with writer’s block. He has a contract with a literary agent but cannot summon the intellectual energy to write his book. His life is falling apart financially. His girlfriend rejects him, and he is threatened with eviction from his apartment. Things change, however, when he meets his ex-brother-in-law Vernon, who offers him a new brain drug that will get him out of his lethargy. Eddie takes it, feeling things can’t get any worse, and experiences an intellectual epiphany. He sees everything with brilliant clarity and now is able to write freely. Immediately, he cranks out several hundred pages with ease and impresses his agent.

Eddie returns to Vernon, wanting more of the drug, which is called NZT48. Finding Vernon dead, he searches his apartment for the drug and finds cash and a large stash of NZT48. Overwhelmed with his new-found abilities, Eddie takes the pill regularly and quickly amasses huge amounts of money as a day trader on the stock market based on his uncanny ability to predict the success of many companies on the exchange.

His success in the market leads to a meeting with Carl Van Loon, a major player in the corporate merger world, who senses that Eddie can be a valuable member of his negotiating team in an upcoming merger deal. Meanwhile, Eddie’s supply of NZT48 is dwindling, and Eddie is having relapses which stymie his smooth presentations to Van Loon. How Eddie tries to be sharp when his supernatural analytic skills are growing dull is the plot conceit that drives the story forward.

There is a mesmerizing conversation between Eddie and Van Loon, which highlights the different paths these men have walked to arrive at their current positions in life. Eddie’s path is serendipitous: Carl’s is deliberate. When Eddie informs Carl that he is looking to be on his own, Carl reminds him: “I mean you do know you’re a freak? Your deductive powers are a gift from God or chance or a straight shot of sperm or whatever or whoever wrote your life-script. A gift, not earned. You do not know what I know because you have not earned those powers. You’re careless with those powers, you flaunt them and you throw them around like a brat with his trust-fund. You haven’t had to climb up all the greasy little rungs. You haven’t been bored blind at the fundraisers. You haven’t done the time. You think you can leap over all in a single bound. You haven’t had to bribe or charm or threat your way to a seat at that table. You don’t know how to assess your competition because you haven’t competed.” It is a classic case of the callow wisdom of youth pitted against the sage wisdom and experience of age.

There is an insightful comment about the perennial conflict between youth and age found in The Ethics of the Fathers. The Sages write: “He who learns from young men is like one who eats unripe grapes and drinks new wine from the winepress. He who learns from old men is like one who eats ripe grapes and drinks aged wine.” Clearly, Jewish tradition favors the learning from old men who combine the wisdom of life experience with intellectual power. Limitless showcases the smarts of youth and the acumen of age, and lets the audience see the virtues and faults of both.

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Several years ago, I went to a wedding of a friend in the Midwest. There I met a number of teachers who taught in the local day school. One introduced himself and reminded me that he was once a student at Yeshiva High School of Atlanta and had actually dormed at my home for half a year. I did not immediately recognize him, but when he told me his name, a flood of memories rushed through my head. I remembered that he came from a small Southern town and that his parents wanted him to take advantage of high school Jewish education and so they enrolled him at my school. Although he did well academically, he never subscribed to the ethos of the school and regularly challenged authority. Upon graduation, I felt sure that he would abandon whatever Judaism he possessed.

But my prediction was all wrong. At some point, he was “born again” and blossomed as a student of Torah. Never would I have guessed that he would eventually make his career Jewish education. The entire encounter reminded me that one snapshot in time is not a reliable indicator of one’s future success or failure. The future is ultimately unknowable.

Minority Report, a dark and very tense science fiction thriller, suggests the opposite, that you actually can know the future of person and can even intervene to prevent him from committing a crime. In the year 2054, there is a “PreCrime” program that is operational in the nation’s capital In Washington, D.C.  John Anderton and his team of “PreCrime” police officers are able to act on information obtained from “precogs,” three mutated humans who can see into the future. They can predict the time and date of the crime, the culprit, and the intended victim. Once this is known, the data is forwarded to the police who proactively intervene to prevent the crime.
Because the country is poised to take the program nationally, the United States Justice Department sends its own investigator, Danny Witwer, to evaluate the program. Danny discovers some internal inconsistencies in the program and determines that PreCrime is flawed and subject to human manipulation. At first he sees John Anderton as the prime suspect, but eventually his attention turns elsewhere as he doggedly pursues his leads. The film raises the provocative question of whether one should take action against people you view as criminals, even if they have yet to commit the crime.

Interestingly, the Bible speaks of a pre-crime scenario in which capital punishment theoretically is meted out to one who will commit a crime in the future even though in the present he may be guiltless. This is the instance of the “wayward and rebellious son” who is brought to the court by his parents for capital punishment. Although his behavior at present is gluttonous and he is guilty of thievery, he has not yet murdered anyone. Yet the Bible prescribes the death penalty.

The Talmud, however, in the final analysis is inconclusive on this matter, stating that the case of the “wayward and rebellious son” never actually occurred and, indeed, will never happen. Then why, ask the Sages, do we have the law on the books?  One answer is that the passage teaches us lessons about parenting and serves as a warning to children to listen to parents and to voices of authority in general. Minority Report, which explores the notion of pre-crime punishment, concludes that no one can truly know the future; and, therefore, we can only respond to infractions in the here and now, not future ones. This, indeed, affirms the Torah value of judging people as they are now, not as the villains they may become.

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