The Power of Story

Elie Wiesel once said “G-d created man because he loves stories.”

What I find so intriguing about that quote is that whether we take the “he” in that statement to refer G-d or to man, it is filled with power.

I believe in the power of story and story-tellers. Stories heal, define, inspire. The importance of creating stories extends beyond the creative suites of Hollywood and Madison Ave; each of us constructs our own personal stories to identify who we are, and frame what we believe. (It’s not for nothing that the world’s great religions present their ideology through narrative and not lists of rules.) We are hard-wired to experience our world through the stories we tell ourselves. Our stories explain and justify past actions and current positions. We organize ourselves into communities and tribes based on our stories.

And throughout history we have been willing to kill and die because of the legacies our stories create. Yes, they can be used to highlight what is most noble about us, but they have also been twisted to appeal and trigger our darkest anxieties. Much of a story’s influence stems from the way we choose to interpret it.

Take the story of the Fall from the Garden of Eden. Even the most casual non-biblical scholar knows the basic narrative elements at play here: A man, a woman, a warning not to eat from the tree of knowledge, the snake that facilitates the betrayal of this admonition.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this story is generally agreed to be a tragic event in human development. Yet removed from biblical context, the story has a completely antithetical interpretation. The snake is a creature that regularly sheds its skin and is often seen in mythology as a metaphor for change. Taken from this perspective, the tale can be seen as one acknowledging the inevitability of change, toward the shifting of consciousness from innocence to one of worldliness. This shift is a process that each and every human being experiences; we all grow from the naïveté of childhood to face the often harsh realities of the world at large.

The wonderful thing about a story that resonates across cultures and generations is that it is possible to hold multiple interpretations of the same story. Because the most important thing about the stories that endure is not their place in our cultural canon, but how they speak to us as individuals.

What we do with them is up to us.