Redeeming Attachments
Across the nine-film Skywalker Saga, there is a movement away from seeing attachment only as a cause for destructive fears and toward seeing attachment as a means to confront those fears. This can be seen in how, in each of the trilogies, Jedi masters have different responses to the attachments of their students.
In The Phantom Menace, the Jedi Council initially bars Anakin Skywalker from being trained as a Jedi because he is attached to his mother Shmi and afraid of losing her. “Fear is the path to the Dark Side,” Yoda says, and therefore Anakin’s love for his mother is considered a liability. In Revenge of the Sith, Yoda once again warns Anakin against being attached to others. When Anakin comes to Yoda to confess a fear of losing someone else, Yoda’s counsel is: “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” The only way Yoda knows to overcome fear is to deny attachments.
But during his exile, Yoda must have spent much time reflecting on the causes of Anakin’s fall, because when he reappears in The Empire Strikes Back to train Anakin’s son, Luke, he reacts to attachment differently. When Luke abandons his training because he fears for his friends, Yoda doesn’t denigrate his attachments but uses them as the grounds for his appeal to Luke to stay put: “Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.” Rather than discouraging Luke’s love for his friends, Yoda implies Luke will love them best by not acting on his fear for them. Yoda seems to have accepted that attachments are unavoidable, so his alternative is to discipline them, putting them in service to a higher cause (“all for which they have fought, and suffered”). He allows for attachment as a tool for resisting fear, instead of rejecting it as an inevitable prelude to falling to fear.
The idea that attachment can be opposed to fear moves from being inconceivable in The Phantom Menace to being a concession in The Empire Strikes Back, and finally it becomes a celebrated conviction in The Rise of Skywalker. In that film, it is revealed that Luke and his sister Leia trained Rey even though they knew her to be Palpatine’s granddaughter, and despite her vulnerability to the Dark Side. They help her resist her fear of the heredity that tempts her toward evil not by discouraging her from forming attachments but by adopting her as family. “Some things are stronger than blood,” Luke tells Rey, and her spiritual attachment to the Skywalkers proves more powerful than her biological attachment to Palpatine. Despite what the Jedi of earlier generations were taught to think, Luke and Leia’s love for Rey and her love for them shows that attachment isn’t something to shun, or something to subordinate, but something to seize as a powerful weapon in the fight against fear.
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Characters: Anakin Skywalker / Leia Organa / Luke Skywalker / Rey / Shmi Skywalker / Yoda
Films: Episode I: The Phantom Menace / Episode III: Revenge of the Sith / Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back / Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker
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Concepts: adoption / attachment / family / fear / friendship / love / teachers and students / training
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