The Zeitgeist

Christian Bale (left) as Moses and Joel Edgerton as the Pharaoah Ramses the Great in Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Ridley Scott’s Exodus:

Splitting the Sea for a Whole New Generation

Ridley Scott is no Cecil B. DeMille. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. What it means is that Scott’s new epic Exodus: Gods and Kings is as much a product of our high-tech new-millennium era as The Ten Commandments was of the Eisenhower gray-flannel suit period.

Scott has crafted a big picture – and not just because of the excellent 3-D effects (this film really ought to be seen in 3-D) – but because it tackles one of history’s most dramatic events with the scope, breadth and grandeur it calls for. To the viewer it seems as though no expense was spared in recreating ancient Egypt, right down to every pyramid, sword, sandal and piece of body armor. The verisimilitude is so exact that in this respect, DeMille’s sets seem cheap by comparison and DeMille spent a fortune.

Scott (and DeMille) tells us the story of Moses from the Bible’s Book of Exodus, from his early years as a prince of Egypt through the giving of the Ten Commandments. Scott takes great dramatic liberties with the biblical narrative. For Bible literati, Scott’s deviations and interpretations from the actual text can be maddeningly frustrating. Like DeMille, Scott relegates Moses’ brother Aaron to a peripheral role. Aaron just can’t get any respect in these cinematic versions of the Exodus story. Scott does away with a lot of the face-to-face confrontations between Moses and Ramses during the plagues period and he dispenses entirely with the pillar of cloud and fire that was one of the analog special effects masterpieces of the DeMille film and that is a critical part of the written story.

Moses’ first encounter with God is depicted agnostically, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not. Moses gets hit in the head by a big rock and awakens to what his wife tells him later was a hallucination from a probable concussion. The Almighty is depicted throughout the film as a cherubic messenger in the form of a little boy with a thick English accent that only Moses can see – this is another major divergence from the written account.

Initially, Moses returns to Egypt from Midian intent on mounting a guerilla-style insurrection against Pharaoh. While this notion of partisans battling the fascists is very romantic and will probably play well in certain Israeli precincts, this never happened. God (in the form of the little British boy) has to convince Moses to let him do the heavy lifting in the form of the Ten Plagues.

The Plagues are where Scott’s movie shines brightest. His crocodiles, frogs, boils, hail; locusts, darkness and smiting the Nile with blood are all exceptionally well imagined and executed. The final plague of the killing of the Egyptian first born is probably the only one that falls short, with DeMille’s green fog representing the Angel of Death having greater dramatic and visual impact.  Given that Scott had today’s computer generated graphics and effects at his disposal only enhances my admiration for DeMille’s hand-made plagues and effects that were often crafted out of whole cloth or painted in frame by frame.

The apex of the movie (as it should be) is the splitting of the Red Sea. Here, Scott is true to the biblical account of a strong wind gradually blowing the water aside and his depiction of the crashing down of the sea on the Egyptian soldiers and their chariots is masterful.

Christian Bale is probably the best celluloid Moses since Charlton Heston. He’s dashing. He’s manly. He’s smart. He’s heroic. He can also remind you of Batman (one of his prior screen roles) in that he’s got the same somber moralistic tone in both parts. Bale has been playing a bunch of Jews lately. As New York Jewish con man Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle he gives a tour de force performance of a despicable Jew whereas in Exodus he shows us the diametric, idealized opposite.

Scott reaches back to his 2000 masterpiece Gladiator for the casting and presentation of the Pharaoh Ramses the Great played by Joel Edgerton in what can only be described as full Joaquin Phoenix mode. Nothing Yul Brenner-ish about him. Edgerton’s Pharaoh could easily be mistaken for Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus, right down to the dynamic between him, his father Seti I and Moses (in the same way as it was between Commodus, Marcus Aurelius and Russell Crowe’s Maximus). No one who unworthily inherits the crown can be expected to be noble and he will get his comeuppance. Our hero will have his revenge either in this world or the next.

The great thespian surprise of the film is John Turturro as Pharaoh Seti I – this role is a significant departure from Turturro’s typical performances and shows that Turturro actually has great range and ability beyond the quirky roles of Barton Fink or as Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski. Turturro plays a very believable Pharaoh and helps ground the first part of the film.

What Exodus lacks is the plethora of character actors who populated DeMille’s film – people like Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, John Carradine, and Anne Baxter as the leering, venal and narcissistic Neferteri. Scott’s bringing in of Ben Kingsley (dull) and Sigourney Weaver (playing a stiff WASP matron in Egypt) isn’t enough to give Exodus a dash of wit. At nearly two and a half hours, Exodus needs some humor and light moments and seems to run longer than the actually much lengthier Ten Commandments.

Is Exodus worth seeing? Absolutely. A great film for our time? You bet. Something that we’ll be watching every year as a ritual some 50 or more years from now like the DeMille film? Probably not. Will it hold up as well as Gladiator? Maybe not. But it’s worth the price of admission just for the plagues and the Red Sea in 3-D.

The Zeitgeist

The 747 in My Sukkah;

Captain Sully at My Shabbat Table

(Note: This article appeared during the first week of November 2014 in The 5 Towns Jewish Times and deals with some very hyper-local NIMBY issues in my neighborhood)

When the rabbis who wrote the Talmud set forth all the intricate rules for the construction of a Sukkah, including how its roof is to be partially open to the sky, they knew about rain, wind and cold, but no had idea about jumbo jets screeching overhead.

If it’s raining, extremely windy or bitterly cold, we are in fact enjoined from eating in the Sukkah because we’d be uncomfortable. But what about deafening noise pollution? Would this detract from the performance of the mitzvah of Sukkah or provide a legitimate excuse for relocating indoors? If you can’t hear yourself (or anyone else) talk, if the heavy noise would cause headaches, make you irritable or even rattle your bones wouldn’t this be on a par with being rained on?

As fantastical as these questions may sound, over the past six weeks in many parts of the Five Towns, this has not been hypothetical or theoretical. Sections of our area have been bombarded with an aural blitzkrieg that at certain times of the day and evening make our neighborhood seem like it’s situated atop the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Since Rosh Hashanah the southern and western ends of the Five Towns have been under unremitting and unrelenting air “attack” at some of the most inconvenient hours. Planes have routinely been careening across our nighttime sky from 10:30pm to 12:30am. Naturally, these are the hours when most people are trying to go to sleep. This is seven days a week. The planes have been coming over about every 90 seconds or so without pause. If you went to the Woodmere Town Dock at the end of Woodmere Blvd, you’d have seen dozens of planes all lined up in their descent to JFK just a few hundred feet apart from one another. No end of people coming to New York.

The planes resume their auditory assault at about 5:45am running past 8:30. This is also every day. Who needs an alarm clock or 1010 WINS when you can know exactly when the midnight flight from Tel Aviv crosses over your house? It could be argued that the FAA is concerned that we make it to the 6:30 minyan or that the kids all catch their buses, but the time we arise in the morning ought to be our choice, one shouldn’t be jolted out of bed by the sound of jet engines while in a semi-somnolent state.

On the weekends, having a Shabbat shalom can be difficult to say the least because the planes have been coming over uninterruptedly day and night.  Saturday and Sunday afternoons have been a nonstop jet scream fest. Because on Saturdays most of us have no electronic media options to masque the noise, we have planes as our Shabbat companions. Again, I’m sure the FAA, in its own way is urging us to sing plenty of zmirot at the Shabbat lunch table to improve our ruchniut and drown out the cacophony. Plenty of food and alcoholic drink will be necessary for that Shabbat nap if your consciousness is to contend with the planes screeching overhead as well.

Because this time of year we’re not using air conditioning, there are fewer noise buffers. If you want to open your window, the noise gets louder and louder yet. Interestingly, it’s actually less noisy while in the plane or at the airport as the planes and terminals are girded with heavy noise insulation. Not so most of our homes.

The planes come in across Hewlett Bay, fly over the southern streets of Woodsburgh and then continue on over parts of Woodmere, Lawrence and Cedarhurst. Why the planes can’t fly over Reynolds Channel (or the Atlantic Ocean) and then make a right turn to the runway after bypassing the Five Towns, I have no idea. At La Guardia the planes take some sharp turns to make the runways, why can’t they at JFK?

Our villages don’t allow construction work or gardeners before 7;00am or after dark or on Sundays in most of our neighborhoods, why then is JFK permitted to send planes over about every 90 seconds late at night and before dawn day in and day out? This materially detracts from our quality of life.

We just had elections a few days ago A lot of our local elected officials were running for reelection. There were a slew of candidates looking to fill vacant seats in Congress, the Assembly and elsewhere. Yet air noise was not high on the agenda of folks on the ballot. It seems as though from candidates to residents, everyone has become resigned to the notion of living with intense levels of noise pollution, kind of like the way a lot of our ancestors in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries made their peace with pogroms by the Cossacks. Why all the candidates weren’t championing this key quality of life issue is mystifying. Why we weren’t pushing them (and our sitting officeholders) about it is ridiculous.

Equanimity in the face of a major diminution of our quality of life is no virtue. (Apologies to Barry Goldwater). One of the few elected officials not on the ballot last week has been just about the only one who has taken these complaints seriously and has actually tried to do something about it. I’m referring to Senior Town Councilman Tony Santino.  When alerted by yours truly to the deafening situation he got on the phone with the FAA and sent strong letters out to our US Senators and Congresswoman. Unfortunately, it’s resolved anything yet. According to one of Santino’s staff people: “It's a constant finger pointing game between the FAA -- who controls flight patterns and approach and landing routes (a federal matter under their jurisdiction)  and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who administers the number of aircraft slotted to takeoff and land from gates at JFK (LGA and other area airports as well).”

“In addition to Councilman Santino's continued work to pressure the FAA to alter their flight, departure and arrival patterns ensuring all communities surrounding the vicinity of the airport share the burden of the noise -- and as someone who was there[in the Five Towns] all weekend myself less than a mile and a half from your home, I can concur that this has happened -- it was plane after plane landing as I was at Rock Hall with friends and on Central Avenue yesterday. It's really ridiculous. I believe that when multiple governmental complaints are lodged, the FAA and Port Authority seem to take the concerns more seriously.”

Which brings me back to getting our officeholders and candidates on the horn to the PA and FAA on our behalf. Having our representatives stand up for Five Towns residents to the airport managers would be a direct, tangible benefit that would improve our daily lives.

Last week it was announced that after something like a ten year wait, the Feds finally approved the expenditure of millions of dollars to install noise meters in our area to gauge the decibel levels overhead which means they’ll let the planes continue their patterns so they can compile data for a tome-like study replete with myriad suggestions to mitigate the noise. It’s high probable that implementing those eventual suggestions will take as many years as it did to get the noise meters installed in the first place. The planes fly quickly overhead as the wheels of government grind ever so slowly.

Most of us pay a fortune in taxes to live the suburban dream here and we shouldn’t be victimized by our own government (in the form of the FAA and the Port Authority) by living under bone-crushing noise pollution. Noise pollution is just as bad as air pollution or toxic chemicals. We’d be appalled by the specter of either of the aforementioned forms of toxicity if they were directly upon us and so we should also be angry about crazy, uninterrupted deafening sound levels.

If you’re as upset about the air noise as I am and would like to be proactive, you can call the FAA’s manager at JFK. His name is Jerry Spampanato and his office number is 212-435-3640 and his mobile number is 718-244-4111 (found on the FAA noise complaint web page). You can also email the FAA’s Noise Ombudsman at

9-AWA-NoiseOmbudsman@faa.gov.

In Fiddler on the Roof someone asks the rabbi if there is a blessing for the Czar, and to paraphrase the rabbi’s answer, “may G-d bless and keep the planes far away from us,” so we can enjoy some of the peace and quiet most of us moved out of the City for in the first place.

The Zeitgeist

ISIS or ISIL head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He's no Romeo.

ISIS vs. ISIL. What’s in a Name?

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the Bard of Stratford posited and Juliet articulated “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Juliet, vexed by the danger of a relationship with Romeo by virtue of his family heritage but nevertheless in love with the boy is making the point that who someone is matters more than what that person is called.

On a far less romantic note, way more dangerous than Capulets or Montagues (or Sharks or Jets in the New York iteration) is the Middle Eastern terrorist group alternately known as ISIS or ISIL, against which President Obama has declared war upon.

Thirteen years ago when former President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror, we had no such confusion as to the moniker of our foe, we knew them as al-Qaeda. Today, depending on who you’re listening to, we could be up against two different enemies who are actually one and the same. No, our adversary doesn’t have a split personality disorder – they know quite clearly who they are and what they stand for. We are the ones sowing the confusion.

If you listen to the President, or to John Kerry or to Chuck Hagel or to various members of the defense establishment, we are committed to “degrade and destroy” a group named “ISIL,” which stands for the “Islamic State In the Levant.” However, when watching the news, seeing some members of congress, hearing pundits and talking heads, reading news sites and such we are told that we’re fighting a nefarious organization named “ISIS,” which is short for the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”

Within any given newscast, we can see Administration spokespeople wax on about ISIL while the anchors, analysts and correspondents keep saying ISIS, sometimes directly to one another within the same conversation. How are we to agree on a long term strategy to eradicate this evil if we can’t agree on what to call them? A rose by any other name, indeed

I believe we should all agree on “ISIS” and push the Administration to change their tune. Here’s why:

● “ISIS” is easy to pronounce, like “Hamas.” It just sounds better. ISIS is a nemesis. “ISIL” always comes across as awkward; it causes the tongue to make an unnatural pause before saying the next word. ISIS makes for better looking headlines, with the final “S” more graphically attractive than looking at an “L.” If we’re to spend a lot of time over the next few years talking about this group, we should make it as pleasant a linguistic experience as possible.

● “ISIS” sounds like the name of some ominous and dastardly group, like “Kaos” from Get Smart. Would Agents 86 and 99 have made any headway against “Kaol?”  All evil and violent NGOs have cool names.

● “ISIL” on the other hand sounds like the last four letters of some cholesterol, diabetic or cardiac pharmaceutical – the kind that gets advertised all day on CNN, Fox and MSNBC. Is it ennobling to be up against a pill, even if most of these medications warn you of the danger of heart attack, stroke or death?

● The “L” in “ISIL” is for the “Levant,” an old-world word that stands for the Middle East, particularly for the area between the Mediterranean and Iran. Most Americans wouldn’t know where the Levant was if it fell on them – also – why give this group regional status? Isn’t it the President’s objective to bomb them back into some corner or Syria anyway?

There’s a scary-looking black-clad guy named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who is the head of ISIS (or ISIL). Perhaps when our team of Navy Seals eventually gets to his lair in Syria, just before we pull the trigger, we can ask him which English-language acronym he prefers? After all, a Caliph should be able to write his own epitaph. Maybe we could send a message to his YouTube account asking him to clarify this debate for us before his next televised beheading?

My bet is al-Baghdadi will go for ISIS as he and his group seem to be very image conscious and media savvy. But in all seriousness, the American people will soon be clamoring for an end to the ISIS-ISIL ping-pong, especially if we’re being asking to support another trillion-dollar war effort. Juliet may not have cared much about names and labels but the American people deserve an adversary whose name is easy to pronounce and as we know from the play, ultimately the names did matter, which is why I’m “pro-ISIS” and “anti-ISIL.”