In my work for the Menachem Begin Center and the Jabotinsky Institute, I don’t have a chance to see many movies. Reading the news headlines recently I noticed that the latest Steven Spielberg movie, “The Fabelmans” had been nominated for several Academy Awards. Certainly, I thought, with a name like that, a play on the word “fable,” certainly the director had something important to say about growing up Jewish in America.
The movie is billed as an autobiographical rendering of Spielberg’s youth and his love affair with the art of cinema. Besides the fact that Spielberg is arguably the top moviemaker of our time, he is also a Jew. Curious to learn what the famous director of “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.” “Schindler’s List,” and “Jurassic Park,” to name but a few, was up to these days, I asked the writer and director Tzvi Fishman if he had seen Spielberg’s latest film.
Besides being a good friend, Tzvi is the only person I know who made Aliyah from Hollywood where he sold several screenplays and taught in Columbia with a promising career ahead, before becoming a baal teshuva. The Hollywood director, Quentin Tarantino, married an Israeli woman and now lives in Tel Aviv but he isn’t Jewish. So I turned to Tzvi:
Do you still see a lot of movies?
“One or two a year,” he answered with a winning Hollywood smile. “During my first fifteen years as a baal teshuva I stayed away from movie theaters for reasons of tzniut (modesty). One day, my wife insisted we go see some film. So for the sake of shalom bayit, I looked for a movie that we could watch together. I found an advertisement for a film about a famous English novelist who suffered from dementia in her old age. Since my own mother was ill with Alzheimer’s, I thought maybe I could learn something about helping elderly people with the infirmity.
Right away I regretted my decision. The commercials before the film were anything but modest. “Fire!” I yelled out. Embarrassed, my wife sunk down in her chair and tugged at my arm to shut up. The movie began with the aging novelist gazing out of a window as if she were daydreaming. The scene flashes back to a memory of her youth. In slow motion, she walks through a verdant green forest until she reaches a pond. Before my eyes could blink, the actress stripped off her garment in one fluid motion and dove into the water. “Fire!” I yelled out once again. This time I stood up hurriedly walked down the aisle bumping into the kneecaps of disgruntled viewers. “Fire!” I called out again.
I left the theater and waited for my wife in the car until the movie ended. After that she stopped asking me to take her to the movies. When I started to make short films again, I went to see a few films over the next two decades to see what new techniques were in vogue. To Spielberg’s credit, his films are remarkably modest. Watching his latest film I only had to turn my face away from the screen once or twice. He deserves an award just for that.
What scene stands out in your mind the most?
“At the very end of the movie, the young Spielberg is interviewed for a possible job at a famous Hollywood film studio. When he steps outside to the back lot of the building he stands on the very same road where I parked my little MG sports car when I had an interview for a job at the same Hollywood studio over forty years ago.
I was stunned. There are moments in life when HaKodesh Baruch Hu suddenly seems to pull the curtain aside and reveal Himself in all of His wonder. Sitting in the dark theater in Cinema City in Israel, I gazed at the screen feeling that Hashem, the Director of Directors, had staged the scene precisely for me, knowing that one day I would watch the movie in Jerusalem and see myself forty years earlier, a young budding filmmaker like Spielberg, thrilled to be at the legendary MGM Studios at the beginning of a career that would surely lead me to join the gallery of the stars in America.
Then, in the very same instant, staring at the remarkable deja-vu on in the dark theater in Cinema City, the words of a Robert Frost poem which I had to memorize in high school flashed on the movie screen of my mind: ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence: two roads diverged in a wood, and I… I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’”
Meaning?
“Meaning here I am in the Holy Land leading a life of Torah while Steven Spielberg is still in Hollywood making movies with hollow liberal themes. Baruch Hashem that I chose the path less traveled by. If all of the seas were ink and all of the trees in the world turned into paper, who could exalt the kindness and praise of the Almighty for having brought me home to the Holy Land.”
Do you really mean that? Can you honestly say that you are not even a little envious of Steven Spielberg and all of the great movies he’s made?
“Let me answer with a small story. When Spielberg came to Jerusalem to film the last scene of “Schindler’s List,” I went to the hotel where he was staying and left a manilla envelope for him at the front desk containing a book about the teachings of HaRav Tzvi Yehuda HaKohen Kook which I had written with Rabbi David Samson - not for him to make a film from the book but to expose him to the Torah of Eretz Yisrael.
A few months later I received a very large padded envelope from Los Angeles. Inside I found the unopened envelope which I had left for Spielberg at the King David Hotel. An accompanying letter from his attorney explained that the director was not allowed to receive unsolicited manuscripts or books lest he be accused of copyright infringement. The poor guy was so guarded he couldn’t get even a glimpse at what life was really about for a Jew.
Similarly, when “Jurassic Park” became a huge box-office blockbuster, Time Magazine named Spielberg their “Man of the Year.” He was pictured on the front cover of the magazine surrounded by his dinosaur creations as if the giant non-kosher monsters had him captive in their impure grasp. Looking at the magazine cover I had the same feeling that Hashem had rescued me from the make-believe life of Hollywood and Jewish life in America. Baruch Hashem.”
You mean to say that if someone were to give you a budget of 200 million dollars to make a movie in Hollywood about Rabbi Akiva or the Maccabees you wouldn’t do it?
“I would do it in Israel, not Hollywood. After writing the script in a way faithful to the sources, I would bring Steven Spielberg here to direct the film. When it comes to the craft of filmmaking he’s the very best.”
Did you ever meet him in person?
“No, but I met his late mother. She owned and managed a kosher dairy restaurant in Los Angeles. I asked her if she could give her son a script I had written. She said no, she didn’t get involved in his business. She was nothing like the portrayal of Spielberg’s mother in the film. In real life she was a nice heimisha Jewish mamma – gefilte fish and blintzes, not the muse-like, adultery- minded wife pictured in the movie.”
What were your overall feelings about the movie? About its underlying message and depiction of Jewish life in America?
“Perhaps the main message throughout the story is that a person should be true to his or her inner desire. For an artist, like the young filmmaker in the movie, this means pursuing one’s art, even if one’s family is opposed. For a wife, like Spielberg’s mother in the movie, it means breaking up a family if she falls in love with her husband’s best friend. This liberal, express-yourself-freely creed can of course lead to many things which the Torah forbids.
Another message which bothered me was the attitude toward Christianity. The young Jewish boy of the movie is shy with girls. When a girl who is crazy about Jesus sets her eyes on him, he goes along with her Jesus frenzy in order to have a relationship with her. He doesn’t himself accept Jesus as his savior but he also doesn’t walk away. Toward the end of the movie, having fallen in love with her, he gives her a necklace with a cross.
Now this is a decision made by the director. Spielberg could have had his character give the girl a necklace with a heart or with her initials. But Spielberg chose a cross. This makes the viewer think that the character (and Spielberg) accepts the girl’s infatuation with Jesus as the proper liberal point of view.
Then when the Spielberg character wants to marry her, that gives the impression that intermarriage is OK. How unfortunate.”
In the article I read about the film, upon winning a “Globe Award” for his direction, Spielberg said he was sure that his mother was “kvelling up in Heaven over his achievement.”
More like rolling over in her grave if you ask me.