Din Djarin Is Off The Derech
By: Elsie Platzer
Tags: The Mandalorian, Orthodoxy, Religion, Star Wars, Judaism

Din Djarin Is Off The Derech

NOTE: Big spoilers for everything in S1 and S2 of The Mandalorian.

As it turns out, I am not the first person to watch a series about an ancient religious nation thrown into diaspora and come away thinking, hey, those guys are pretty space Jewish! But beyond general commonalities between our two cultures, I’m fascinated by the way The Mandalorian portrays the minutiae of religious experience—especially for protagonist Din Djarin, whose strict adherence to tradition reminds me of my own Orthodox Jewish upbringing.

Spoiler: I am not Orthodox anymore, and also spoiler: maybe Din isn’t either, not after the events of the season 2 finale. Lame as it may be, I want to lend my own first-hand knowledge on the subject to talk about Mando’s relationship with religious observance, Jewish ethics, and the complications inherent in leaving the fold.

A Short Summary of the Show, In Case You Only Know Baby Yoda

Din Djarin and his tiny alien son. All of the series images and gifs are © Disney, just to get that out there. I am not well funded enough to enter a legal battle with a megacorporation.

It’s Star Wars. Mandalorians are a nation of religious bounty hunters living in scattered culverts after the razing of their homeworld, Mandalore. Din Djarin, main character extraordinaire, was adopted into a particularly fundy Mandalorian sect as a child and now lives according to their Creed, also known as The Way. The Creed/Way has a lot of rules about the importance of duty, honor, etc., but perhaps the most relevant rule is that he’s not allowed to remove his helmet at any time, or show his face to another living being.

One day, Din receives an assignment to collect some mysterious, extremely valuable bounty — and of course it turns out to be Baby Yoda, OMG!! Din’s latent Dad instincts activate, and for the next 15 episodes we get to watch him deconstruct the notion of nuclear family, befriend an endless array of warrior lesbians, and suffer from what is commonly known as “Jewish guilt.”

Din Djarin Is Djewish

From antifasera on Tumblr.

Intellectually, I understand that The Mandalorian is not meant to be a Jewish work, but a space-age take on old western and samurai genres. Mando’s ethical Creed mirrors the honor systems practiced by Bushido warriors, who took bounties to stay alive in stressful political times.

Cool, but let me ask you this: if Din’s not a practicing Jew, then why did he pull the ultimate Jewish move in Chapter 3, i.e. going to a restaurant and ordering nothing? While Din’s hesitation to eat in public revolves around his Creed’s dictate to never show one’s face, and ours is due to a collection of strict food-related laws called kashrut, the result is the same. We are rejecting a larger cultural norm, accepting the social cost of separating ourselves out. I’m sure many observant Muslims, Hindus, and people of other faiths have felt the same.

Religious precepts like kashrut are often useful in creating a sense of shared identity, but they also introduce a fundamental barrier between you and the so-called “secular world.” Even if you consider your tablemates neighbors or friends, these laws forcibly remind you that you are not with your people, that this is not where you belong. Of course, it’s a warning in subtext, a missive from ancestors too often betrayed: remember, these goyim could turn against you for any reason, or no reason, at any time.

How often did I experience this specific brand of isolation during my own religious childhood? I thought back on the lunchbag cheese sandwiches, the vacuum-sealed airplane meals, the kosher table at the party with its sad, lone aluminum tray. Like Din, I knew what it was like to feel the distance, to sit apart.

Tilting just the bare edge of the helmet up for sippie soup.

Those moments of identification kept coming. When strangers prodded Din “Is it true you never take off your helmet?” I remembered my classmates’ bewilderment upon learning that my family observed the Sabbath, being asked why I couldn’t just “skip synagogue” for track meets, sleepovers, or the State History Fair. When Din claimed Bo-Katan couldn’t really be a Mandalorian with her armor off, and Bo-Katan shot back by calling him a “religious zealot,” I thought of similar tensions cropping up between Reform and Orthodox congregations. And when Din finally removed his helmet in a crowded Imperial mess hall, to complete a facial scan that would allow him to locate Baby Yoda’s vicious captors, I was reminded of the rabbinic concept of pekuach nefesh, which allows — actually, encourages — Jewish law be broken in order to save a life.

Most protagonists, especially in mainstream blockbusters, position themselves according to principles of universal morality— and by “universal morality” I mean both morality that generates broadly applicable rules for ethical behavior and morality that is universalizing, assimilating, meant to coerce or convert the other characters alongside the viewer. In the model of Western Christianity, these moral codes rely heavily on binaries between purity/evil or sin/repentance, but also introduce contradictions, such as when violence is discouraged in theory and then utilized (frequently, without much justification) in practice.

It is rare and pretty intriguing, then, to watch Mando swear fealty to his own unique constellation of ideals that have nothing to do with “universal” rights and wrongs. Like Judaism, the Creed emphasizes the importance of family and community, is action-based (prioritizing deeds over faith, to borrow these Christological concepts), and, vitally, remains inscrutable to the audience for the entirety of the show. Din does not explain the reason why he’s forbidden from removing his helmet, beyond his catchphrase “this is the Way.” When uttered around outsiders, that expression acts as a rebuff against invasive curiosity. Among Mandalorians, though, it’s passed back and forth as an affirmation and cultural identifier, a sign of mutual submission to the Creed. The ingroup/outgroup duality is important in establishing the tenor of Din’s religious landscape. Notice he never attempts to convince his non-Mandalorian friends that they should adopt his Creed as their own.

Yes.

Perhaps theological dialogues which contradict my theories are invoked in other, more obscure Star Wars works that I’ll never watch or read. Personally, though, I hope that the Creed exists in the same way the Torah does, as a collection of stories and laws that Jews continue to stubbornly follow, perhaps because God said so, but moreso because it has defined us, because over centuries and millennia it has become us. Our Ways have historical meaning but are also continually re-infused with meaning: our piles of stones, our flames left burning, the parsley stems we plunge into salt water, our cantors’ voices wavering at the alter. We push on because it is tautological. Because it is, in the end, what we have.

Going Off the D(j)erech: Must A Jew Believe in Anything?

When an Orthodox person stops observing or practicing traditional Judaism, we say they have gone “off the derech” (“OTD” for short). In a surprising little equivalency, derech is the Hebrew word for path; you could just as easily say someone had “left the Way.” As Din travels the galaxy and continues to re-evaluate his relationship to his culture and his community, I believe that might be where he’s headed.

In Episode 16, Din takes his helmet off to say goodbye to Grogu (that’s Baby Yoda’s name, as we learn) before the child is swept off by Luke Skywalker to complete Jedi training. He does this for no other reason, I think, than to give his son one final chance to see his face. And this is a scandalous step out of bounds compared to the last two face reveals! In Chapter 8, the season 1 finale, he’d let a single robot (“I am not a living being,” as IGN-11 so helpfully pointed out—hey, that’s basically a Talmudic justification!) lift the helmet to apply space goo to his actively bleeding brain. Definitely acceptable grounds for bending the rules. Then there was the incident with the face scanner in Chapter 15, but that was to save the Child, so it had to be done. But removing his helmet in a room full of people, in clear view of some strange Jedi, just for a hand on the cheek, an emotional goodbye? Going OTD is not a one-time event, of course, but in my view this represented a significant shift in Din’s attitude towards religious observance.

At first, I was upset. I felt this final scene had cheapened Din’s sacrifice in the Imperial cafeteria in Chapter 15, a moment which beautifully captured the depths of Din’s religious tensions, his difficulty resolving dual commitments to fatherhood and Creed. Approaching the scanner, knowing it wouldn’t work without facial input, he still tried one time, one futile time, to scan the helmet. He knew in the end he’d have to break his vows, and really break them, as opposed to exploiting a loophole as he’d done in the past. But to do so he had to be absolutely sure he’d exhausted every other option. For me, that might have been the most Jewish moment of the whole series.

So when, one episode later, he goes and tosses his helmet aside without a second thought, I was like, shit! All that emotional work, all that buildup, wasted!

This was very sad tho.

Of course, you must be wondering: why am I so invested in Din staying true to his Creed when I have discarded my own? I could make some argument about “religious representation,” how it’s important to show smart, sympathetic characters (i.e. not cultists or terrorists) retaining their traditional beliefs. Or I could say the truer truth, which is that if the writers do eventually make Din discard his religion, I worry they aren’t going to do it right. They aren’t going to make him earn it the way I earned it, the long years I spent disentangling myself from the Orthodox world—spacing out in my Torah classes, checking my phone under the Shabbos table—a slow, ragged severing that, like many bad breakups, has found no satisfying resolution.