Page - 116 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

116 | Thomas Hausmanninger www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 105–121 for biblical characters, motivates tsaddikim to enlighten community members about their past lives and spurs a quest to detect and eliminate dybbukim. in the two latter instances the goal is to enable a person who is experiencing psy- chological dissonances to find inner coherence and to overcome social disso- nances between an individual and that individual’s community. the person is to become whole by righting past wrongs, including those that have affected social constellations. in that respect, the similarities between past and present constellations join the contemporary iteration of relationships between souls that were connected in the past in enabling evolution toward a better end, which in the hasidic context is often helped by a tsaddik. in the lurian Kabbalah in particular, the soul’s task includes working for the elevation of all things, of the whole world, into holiness by fulfilling the commandments and, in case of reincarnation, rectifying the wrong constellations of the past.67 the Kabbalah there takes up the more general Judaistic topos of healing the world as the specific task of God’s chosen people. Both the redemption of the soul and the elevation of the world are called tikkun, which can be translated as “rectification“, “restitution” and “completion”.68 thus the identity ques- tion is answered with a specific task that can be recognized by being informed about one’s past life and that gives one’s present life its specific meaning and fulfillment. Through the connection with the tikkun of the world, that task in- cludes working for the betterment of the present state of the world and of that world’s social relations. Finding one’s identity thus always means finding one’s social place and specific task in the world. On the subject of identity, Judaism thus differs significantly from modern (Western) thinking: since rené Descartes and immanuel Kant’s epochal turn that made subjectivity the foundation of philosophy, identity in modern West- ern culture has been conceptualized as an autonomous act of the rational sub- ject – or, more pointedly even, as the construction of a human individual on the basis of his or her inner processes of self-constitution alone. Freedom rather than relationship is thus the modern conditio sine qua non for finding identity, a position that is not part of Judaism (which in the case of the United states is more in line with communitarian concepts than with modern and postmodern individualism). in the comics Captain America is his own tsaddik, for he is aware of his past life and thus knows the knots it contains. As a tsaddik he is his own spiritual guide and master. He must find, however, his place in the present and thus his identity in new social circumstances. his quest for identity is not undertaken as a solitary inner act of self-constitution; from the outset it is situated in the ex- 67 scholem 1956, 107. 68 Pinson 1999, 53.