A Fair Trade Book (for how long?)
Title: Climbing the Mountain
Title: Climbing the Mountain
Illustrations: black and white photos
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: 1997
ISBN: 0-684-84415-X
Length: 269 pages including 13-page
index
Quote: “But we were alive in the
tangled wreckage. David and Lee were dead in the smoldering
remains...Why did they die? Why was I alive?”
When Kirk Douglas was seventy-four, his
editor found him alive in the burning wreck of a helicopter. About
this experience he dryly observed that if the “long tunnel with a
blazing white light at the other end...was there, I missed the show.”
Acute pain, he was told, was a good sign—he wasn't paralyzed. And
he started thinking about God and what, if anything, he believed.
Writing books about one's “personal
relationship with God” has generally been a Protestant thing.
Jewish tradition has been more modest, wary of mysticism, fearful of
provoking persecution, and shy about misrepresenting either God or
Judaism; Jewish writers usually write about their personal
relationships with living people, Jewish or otherwise, and let that
testify to whatever they believe about God. This has been both good
and bad. Sometimes non-Jewish readers wonder whether Judaism is still
a religion or merely a cultural tradition, and, if it's a religion,
what its practice is like...and that's what Climbing the Mountain
has to tell us. Kirk Douglas had
already outlived many of his friends and co-workers; after his own
near-death experience he did some serious thinking about life and
death and faith and gratitude and similar things.
Of course, it would
not be possible for him to have done this thinking without a fair
amount of serious, personal consideration of famous people; that's
who his friends were. When he thought about disabilities, he thought
about Burt Lancaster. When he thought about sudden death, he thought
about Mike Todd. When he thought about his legacy, he thought about
Michael Douglas...and so on. Many people enjoy the paintings of Marc
Chagall, and so did Kirk Douglas, but in a more personal way: “I
met him...Chagall and my father left Russia the same year.” He
hadn't been especially religious, before the helicopter crash: “I
didn't observe any Jewish religious practices, except for fasting on
Yom Kippur,” which made it “difficult making love to Lana Turner
on an empty stomach; of course, nobody knew it.” (If a man touches
a woman who's not his wife while he's fasting for religious reasons,
doesn't that count as a violation of the fast? Granted they weren't
“really” having sex, but still, I thought that if anything Jews
were stricter about touching than Christians...there's always more to
learn.)
So
there's plenty of twentieth century Hollywood history in Climbing
the Mountain. But this book
doesn't read at all like the standard Hollywood memoir. It's more
personal—the actor known as Kirk Douglas started life as a poet,
and wrote his own books—and much more serious. This is a book that
people who take Sabbath/Sunday observance seriously can read on their
day of rest-as-spiritual-retreat.
It's
tasteful. Douglas observes that “There can't be another place like”
Lourdes; “Let me put it another way—I hope there isn't.” His
description of Lourdes is too long to quote here and too good to
miss. Read the book. “I'm quite willing to believe that a sweet,
innocent girl did have a vision...then how—in good conscience—can
they put that little girl's sacred experience on a key chain or a
T-shirt?” Douglas asks, noting,”We all would prefer a God we can
see, touch, put in our back pocket—on a key chain.” He is writing
about something more meaningful than
that. “Judaism holds that faith means bubkes if
you cheat your neighbor...you don't have to be a member of any
particular religion to get to God, but you have to be a good person.”
Considering
the number of countries where the computer shows that this web site
is read, let's add a note about Douglas's use of Yiddish words. One
indicator of the influence Jewish actors and other entertainers have
had on U.S. culture is that non-Jewish Americans understand, and
use, words like bubkes
(“nothing”). There's no official rule on spelling (bubkes
is also sometimes found as bupkis and
so on) but everybody learns these words by hearing them in the media. For those who've not shared this U.S. cultural
experience, The Joys of Yiddish is a good read, anyway, and
recommended. Words like bubkes, kvell, shtetl, tzaddik are
used without explanation in Climbing the Mountain.
Yiddish and Hebrew words that are not standard U.S. slang, but are
used in religious contexts, like Shema (“Hear!”;
“the Shema,” the
Bible text translated as “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the
Lord is One”), Halakhah
(“the path”), and lashon hara (“evil
speaking”) are explained.
Douglas's
“road back” to serious Jewish practice began, he says, “Here's
a shocker—with Jesus.” Not in the sense that he became a
Messianic Jew (he didn't), but that he was somewhat surprised to
learn that Jesus “was not only a Jew, but a rabbi who gave sermons
on the Torah. Do Christians know that?” It's right there in the
Bible, but many so-called Christians are so clueless about the Bible
that they may well not know
that. I take exception to Douglas's (typically Jewish) claim that St.
Paul “added a number of Pagan rituals” to Christian practice—Real
Historians say the Pagan rituals crept in gradually, many of them
during the lifetime of the Emperor Constantine—but apart from that
throwaway line, pages 118-124 of Climbing the Mountain
should be required reading for
all Christians. We're supposed to have
been told all these things by Christian pastors. Too many of us
weren't, or maybe we were just sleeping late the day they were
discussed.
The
next chapter discusses charitable gifts, which in Hebrew (including
biblical Hebrew) are classified as “justice.” The Bible says
nothing about equality. Having more than someone else is not only an
individual's right, but often described as God's reward for the
person's good life. But that someone else doesn't have enough
to live decently is a lack of
“justice.” People have a right to choose, either directly, or
indirectly by choosing to do less or lower-paid work, to carry things
around in an old shopping bag rather than a Gucci bag. (I mention
this because in the summer of 2014, when I wrote this review, I was working in a store that sold Gucci bags
and carrying my knitting around in a canvas shopping bag.)
But if they're willing and able to work and still don't have a place
to leave the bag,
injustice is being done and every decent person has the
responsibility to address this injustice. Christians need to hear
more about this than most of us do, also.
Douglas
shares firsthand experience with the ways big government becomes part
of the problem. “I got the idea of building a park in...an empty,
ill-kempt lot...I offered to pay the full cost...to put up all the
money. Then the bureaucracy kicked in. You can't just give
something to the city...In the
end, frustrated by it all, I told them, 'Let's make everybody
happy—let's forget it.'” But, he says, he and his wife then
dedicated money to the cause of building parks in poorer communities,
in the U.S. and in “the Moslem Quarter inside the walls of the Old
City of Jerusalem. The poorest of the poor live here.”
He
moves on to a consideration of stories in the Bible, including a
sample of midrash,
individual commentary on a Bible story. Midrash are
subjective, non-authoritative, and often funny; Douglas's version of
the story of Joseph and his brothers are chortle-worthy.
“Jews have a
prayer for everything,” Douglas observes, commenting on
post-biblical aspects of his tradition. “[T]here is a commandment
to get drunk during the festival of Purim...to drive home the point
that evil and good work hand in hand in God's unfathomable plan;
often, we choose good only when confronted with evil.” And so,
after quoting a series of well-known non-Jewish authors' tributes to
what Judaism has given the world, “So why have we been so
hated?...In a strange way, anti-Semitism is responsible for the very
survival of Judaism...When things are going well, we have a tendency
to forget our special obligation to bring the light into the
world...to slip quietly into the comfortable womb of assimilation.”
(The tendency exists for Christians too...consider all those European
Pagan rituals that crept in when European Pagans like Constantine
were getting on well with European Christians.)
The
commercial media's harassment of celebrities fits into a sermon on
the sin of lashon hara,
“evil speaking.” “Did President Clinton have an affair years
ago? I don't know and I don't care,” Douglas said. Bill Clinton's
sexual behavior did matter
to women writers investigating his performance of his public duties.
Men who think a man's sexual misbehavior is “private” may not
consciously mean “Women don't count. Lying to women is in a
different category from lying to other men. Women who want to be
protected from sexual predators, or even spared from sexual bores,
should stay at home with the curtains drawn,” although that is
the system they're perpetuating.
And in fact the way Bill Clinton treated women was, in a larger
sense, remarkably like
the way he treated men: no loyalty, no gratitude, no shame, just a
giant oaf with a monster-size need for attention. But what about the
exaggeration of anything that sounds remotely scandalous, when
there's no need to protect anybody, merely to sell tabloids? “If I
were his/her wife/husband, I'd get a divorce,” says a former
employee, resenting someone's demand that he stay awake on the job,
and next week the headlines scream “Inside Source Says They'll
Divorce.” Considering the story Douglas tells about Carol Burnett shows why lashon
hara is a sin just like the
drunkenness, adultery, and fraud of which every issue of some
tabloids accuses someone or other, with or without a basis.
Withholding financial support from the worst offenders is an easy way
to help Hollywood's professional “evil speakers” reform. Helping
the local busybodies in our neighborhoods should only be so easy.
The
chapter after the one about the sin of “evil speaking” contains a
few more stories in which Douglas holds up acquaintances as bad
examples. “I'm a sinner,” he explains, counting on readers to say
that, if it's true, if it explains a more hurtful story someone else
may have told about how you and a former friend fell out or explains
something about you that your present-time friends need to know, it's
not all that evil. Why
did Billy Wilder become a former friend? Douglas says he has no idea.
What about Henry Kissinger? That, Douglas can explain.
How
did Douglas, the newly religious Jew, feel about his editor's
conversion to Judaism? Jews do not officially encourage conversion.
“[A] very efficient worker who is a constant thorn in your side,
reminding you of your own failings as a Jew” and “taking a lot of
time off” (for Sabbath and the holidays), Douglas grouses, and
“Then, of course, she will only eat in kosher restaurants.” These
days, however, when few publishers pay editors to do real editing,
it's not just any writer who can find a good editor. No matter how
satisfactory our marriages may be, the writer-editor relationship is
equally passionate, only on a different level. We can understand why
she converted. And why, on the whole, he's pleased. And why he's not
recommending that other non-Jews convert. Judaism teaches that
non-Jews can find God too, in our own ways, so why, if you weren't
born into an ethnic tradition and aren't trying to marry into it,
would you want to adopt it?
Fair
disclosure: out of love and respect for a wonderful older lady, my
own mother officially moved onto the Jewish side of the Messianic
Jewish and whole-Bible Christian fellowship in St. Petersburg,
Florida, while she lived there. My mother, at sixty, made bas
mitzvah. My mother owns a
menorah. (Though not a mezuzah—both objects are discussed in
Climbing the Mountain.)
My mother has a rabbi. Yes, this is the same mother who warned me
when I was a little girl that people who thought we looked Jewish did
not mean it as a compliment, even if I thought it was one because so
many Jewish actresses were so pretty. My mother is now a sort of
honorary Messianic Jew, despite the fact that all that's known about our ancestors' religious practice is that all of them claimed to be Christians and some were even celebrity Christians. I, too, enjoyed long-term working
relationships with wonderful Jewish clients, and out of love and
respect for them I explain when people ask that a whole-Bible
Christian is a completely different thing from a Jew—mainly in the
sense of having a different set of ancestors and dysfunctional genes.
So I grok the ambivalence here.
There's
more about the quirkiness and stubbornness for which Jews (and other
unassimilated, unrepentant minority groups) are justly famed, further
along in Climbing the Mountain,
when Douglas discussed the stroke he had after the helicopter crash.
“One of the worst things about being a victim of a stroke is that
people feel sorry for you. They want to do things for you. And since
you also feel very sorry for yourself, you are more than willing to
accept their gifts of kindness...Beware...Such well-meaning people
are encouraging you to become an invalid. Next thing you know,
they'll be feeding you and diapering you.” Douglas considered
having Michael Douglas accept his Academy Award for him, but Michael
Douglas did the right thing: “Go up there even if you have to
crawl.” Kirk Douglas did not have to crawl.
Kirk Douglas's death has been reported twice but, at last report, those reports turned out to be wrong. He's ninety-seven, he's had some more medical problems, but he's still alive and apparently in his right mind. Awesome. I was planning to schedule this book review for next week but think I'll rush it out now, out of respect for a tough old writer. If anybody out there wants to buy Climbing the Mountain as a Fair Trade Book, we'll sell it as one. $5 per book, $5 per package (I doubt that more than two copies would fit into one package), to the address at the very bottom of this page (I just figured out how to put the contact information at the bottom of every single page of this web site, isn't it cool?); this makes the total price of the book $10, of which 10%, $1, will be sent to a charity of the author's choice.
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