Joshua: The Movie

A while ago, I helped produce this series of movie adaptations of the Torah with G-dcast. Our plan at the time was to hit the Prophets and Writings and just not stop. "No sleep till Malachi" was the actual phrase used, I believe. It's taken a little while, but today G-dcast launched the next book. Here's the three-part series "Joshua," which I wrote, which Sarah Lefton directed, Richard O'Connor animated, and Matt Ryd wrote the theme song to.


 ...originally I was trying to convince them to let me play shofar for it, too, but that didn't really happen.

 This is Part II:
 
And Part III:
 
Next up is Judges, but don't ask about that yet -- apparently it's a lot faster to write words than it is to draw a few thousand animated icons. Who knew?

Lag Time

It's almost Lag B'Omer, which is making me hella nostalgic for the Stern Grove Chabad party in Yoko a Go-Go. Well, part of it, anyway. And for the holiday, the good people at the Forward have printed my poem "Bar Yochai (Ai Yai Yai)" in honor of the festive season:

for those who gathered there at sunset there
were promises of a sin-free life at stake
I didn’t want that
I just wanted to say hi

apparently everyone had the same idea
fighting to get closer to the kever
I wanted to tell them
I’m only here for the rabbi 

<< read the rest >>

And because good things always come in threes (famous people dying, wise men...uh, whut?) I should also tell you that the new G-dcast Shavuos video is up and atom:

The Sukkot Song

Just when you thought Yom Kippur was over (I mean, it is) we get started on Sukkot:



Ecclesiastes/The Sukkos Song by Hadara Levin-Areddy, animation by Jeanne Stern, and the holiday brought to you by G*d. Everything else, that's just G-dcast.

Yom Kippur with G-dcast

After the onslaught of Rosh Hashanah videos, seems like the least that G-dcast could do would be to make something that full-on fist-pump rocks us out to the Day of Repentance.

And that's not all! Sukkos is coming next week. The holiday, and also the video.

G-dcast's Rosh Hashanah Music Video!

Prodezra, the hip-hop sensation out of Savannah, GA and Mayanot Yeshiva and into our ears, stars in G-dcast's new Rosh Hashanah video -- dropping rhymes, mixing beats, and playing his own shofar backup. Prodezra and I wrote the song. And then we made it into a music video.



And don't forget to come back the second Rosh Hashanah goes out -- we've got Yom Kippur on deck, with the cowriter of the new Sleepless in Seattle musical, Josh Nelson.

Passover with the Four Sons

If you haven't noticed, since G-dcast started, we've been playing around with the way we tell stories. For Chanukah, we did a sweeping story of the Maccabees. For Passover, we decided to zero in a little bit...and tell you a nice little family story. About arguing. Of course.

The Jewish Authors' Oscars

Last night the Jewish Book Council hosted their annual National Jewish Book Awards, and they were kind enough to invite me. I wasn't a famous author or a famous book-buyer, but they let me in anyway.

At first my (a) shyness and (b) authory anti-social tendencies and (c) not knowing anybody-ness got the best of me. There was a (parenthetically: really fascinating) exhibit about Thomas Mann and German publishing, and the reception was mostly being held in one room ("mostly" meaning that the drinks table was in there, and therefore, so were all the guests) but spilled over into a second room that was ideal retreating space. I gave it an honorable go, checking out people's name tags to see if I recognized anyone. The first I spied was the illustrator of a book that I kind of slammed last year. Then I saw Alicia Susskin Ostriker, whose book of poetry >The Book of Seventy I'd read last week, but what would I say? I always appreciate when people tell me that, but then there's the deadening lack of conversation that's like, where do we go from here?

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin whizzed by. I worked with him last year on a G-dcast episode, but he was moving too fast to interrupt, although I made a mad dash of it. So I retreated to the exhibit, where I made small talk with two gentlemen who spoke about Thomas Mann like they went to grade school with him, that familiar. After spending about five minutes (that's long, in the context of a conversation, anyway) trying to explain what my book was about, and failing, I threw the question back at him: "So what do you do?" "Oh," he replied offhandedly, "I'm an acquisitions editor." He smirked. And my stomach hit the ground.

I'd kind of composed myself by the time dinner began. I saw Rabbi Telushkin again, and actually spoke to him. Randomly, he asked me where I lived. "Crown Heights," I told him, to which he raised an eyebrow -- he's working on a book about Lubavitch. He started to grill me about my Chabad connections (I'm not, my wife is, her family is about as Lubavitch as the town of Lubavitch), and, the way that these things go, he used to live with my grandparents-in-law and wrote a book in their house.

The M.C. for the evening came on mic and called for everyone to take their seats. Rabbi Telushkin, who was in the middle of a sentence -- he speaks in these long, fluid paragraphs, each like a train with a hundred cars -- ignored him. Then the M.C. said something about a "welcoming word from Rabbi Joseph Telushkin" and I broke him off, don't you have to go? He shrugged and did something with his hands. Carolyn Hessel, who's the director of the Jewish Book Council and maybe the most important person ever to hold a book in her hands, gave a much-too-polite word. The rabbi grinned at me. I scattered.

Remember how I thought I wouldn't know what to say to someone whose book I read? I slid into an empty seat at the table. There was one person I knew, a sometimes-editor of mine, and one person I knew but didn't realise I knew, since we had one of those email-only correspondences (a writing/editing one, not a sketchy Internet one) -- and then there was the person whose seat I slid next to, who was Dalia Sofer. Who might have written one of the best books I've ever read. Who is probably as close to a rock star as the literary world can offer. Who was introduced to me, and whom, upon meeting, I shrunk about 25 or 30 percent and told, in as natural and un-awkward a voice as I could muster (it was still incredibly awkward and incredibly unnatural) that, geez, The Septembers of Shiraz was pretty technically proficient. Or something. Graciously, she talked to me until I'd un-awkward-ized. And it was simply really cool, in the middle of a room where I was surrounded by people with amazing ideas, to have a straight-up conversation about writing that was pretense-free and unencumbered by all our fancy clothes (my invitation said "casual," I dressed casual-but-formalish, and I was still underdressed) and the weight of all the potential in the room.

I could tell you more about the food, or the people, or the books. I wish I could tell you more about the awards ceremony -- the speeches people made, and how incredible it was to take an arbitrary topic, like landlords in mid-20th century Chicago, and listen as an author gripped the microphone and talked about how it was her father's passion and she never understood what it was all about until she researched this 400-page book about it. For someone like me, to whom reading anything but novels (stories, action, making up stuff) is hard, if not impossible, the night was nearly revolutionary.

Holy Hot Pants

Yes, I have several Mormon friends, and yes, they do make fun of each other for wearing what the more playful adherents of their religion have dubbed holy underpants.

The link between ritual undergarments and religious purity didn't start with Joseph Smith. In this week's Torah portion, Tetzaveh, there's an extensive description of exactly what clothes -- material, color, and otherwise -- the High Priest should wear:

Exodus 28:2 And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, for splendour and for beauty. 3 And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise-hearted, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, that they make Aaron's garments to sanctify him, that he may minister unto Me in the priest's office. 4 And these are the garments which they shall make: a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and a tunic of chequer work, a mitre, and a girdle; and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto Me in the priest's office. 5 And they shall take the gold, and the blue, and the purple, and the scarlet, and the fine linen.

The Torah goes even further, and actually discusses what type of undergarments the High Priest should wear. Earlier this week, when I was reading the daily Torah portion, my mind was blown, and -- as per norma -- I ran to my wife, who grew up Hasidic. As per norma, she laughed at me. What kind of a Jew am I, not knowing about holy underpants?

(28:42) You shall also make for them linen pants to cover their nakedness; they shall extend from the hips to the thighs. They shall be worn by Aaron and his sons when the enter the Tent of Meeting or when they approach the altar to officiate in the sanctuary, so that they do not incur punishment and die. It shall be a law for all time for him and for his offspring to come.

"What kind of pants start at your hips and go to your thighs?" I said. "That sounds like hot pants."

"They're underwear," said my wife, totally calmly, as if this sort of confusion happens to us on a daily basis -- which, by a much looser definition, it might. We don't always talk about holy underwear, but we did have a conversation the other day about why our kid frequently wears underpants on her head.

I did some digging and checked around with the commentators. They all seemed to be in agreement: this was, indeed, the Tabernacle's modernized version of a fig leaf. Rashi notes that Moses is commanded by G*d to suit up Aaron and his sons in their ritual uniforms, which includes this; a bunch of other commentators say that, because of the placement of the verse in the flow of the Torah (this particular item of clothing is listed last, after the commandment is given), Moses was not required to dress them in these particular lederhoisen. Ohr HaTorah, another Torah commentator, adds, "Were not Aaron and his sons perfectly capable of putting on their own underwear?" It's as near verbatim as the translation lets me get.

So, there you go. Jews and hot pants -- we did it first.

And, while my G-dcast co-producers and I didn't peek beneath the holy vestments, we outlined basically everything else from the parsha in this week's episode. Just in case, you know, you ever get appointed High Priest and the invitation didn't include a dress code.

Chanukah: The Untold Story

Proudly presenting the return to G-dcast.

Noah Was a Survivor

Of all the gigs I've ever had, this had to be the most extreme. And I wasn't even there.

To celebrate reading the story of Noah in the Torah, Amsterdam Jewish Salon had a cruise. And they showed the Noah G-dcast, which I {humbly} narrated.





You might think it's heretical to take a leisurely cruise in order to honor the sole survivor of a catastrophic event that, well, annihilated the rest of the world. I might disagree with you. I grew not far from the ocean. My parents carried on the ancient Jewish tradition of taking us to Atlantic City for weekends during the summer. When I lived on my own, I moved to San Francisco, and stopped at the ocean every week before Shabbos.

I love watching the ocean. And I'm scared to death of it. It's the most tangible part of God that we can get close to: it's bigger than any human eye can fathom, shapeless, and deadly. I think I've read somewhere that humans have explored less than 10% of the total mass of the ocean. If there's undeniable proof of the Flood, or any other mysteries of creation/the Big Bang/early Earth history, it's probably lurking somewhere down deep, protected by some fearsome sea creatures bigger than dinosaurs.

Or maybe there's nothing...and that just makes the mystery that much more mysterious.

Either way, the ocean is huge. It's big and it's bad. There's a reason that nearly every sea shanty ends in tragedy, the same as every life ends in death. Noah's not just the story of some dude and his boat. It's the story of the sole survivor of a global tragedy, and -- although my G-dcast implies that he wasn't the best person in the world -- tragedies transform people. The same way Holocaust survivors and military veterans have some unspoken piece of wisdom that the rest of us will never be able to understand, that's what Noah has. And that, much as God and the depths of the ocean itself, is un-understandable.

From Last to First

So...Simchas Torah. Lately, it's become famous for being the #2 Jewish drinking holiday, but my past few Simchas Torahs have all been pretty clean events -- festive and debaucherous in that wholesome way where we jump around with the Torah and sweat up our thrift-store suits until we've soo earned every penny of that $15 dry-cleaning visit.

And it's not just me, I don't think. People have been raving about G-dcast in a way that makes me blush like they're saying how good I look, and it's all positive and gung-ho in a way that appeals to 5-year-olds. And David's post about the new Moses movie probably will owe more to 300 than Charlton Heston...but making an action movie about the Torah is as close as Hollywood will probably ever come to a studying-books-can-be-cool movie as we'll get.

This year, I went to San Francisco. I'd somehow managed to convince my ex-boss, David Levithan (who wrote the awesome Boy Meets Boy, as well as the so-indie-its-jeans-hurt Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), to narrate for us. So we did V'Zot Habracha with a bang.

Then, of course -- because some good things don't have to come to an end -- we did our real conclusion episode, and did Bereshit again. (There was a whole huge concert, and Elana Jagoda performed her alterna-folk-dancey children's anthems, and Julie Seltzer talked about being a soferet, but mostly talked about her project baking a different challah for every parsha in the Torah, and we all just generally rocked out.)

And then the lights dimmed, and we rewound the Torah, and showed our final episode.



Anyway, some good things do come to an end -- and this was the end of the line for G-dcast. Or, at least, G-dcast as it exists now. We've got some wild stuff in the pipeline, and some even wilder stuff that might happen, but we're leaving you to jump into the Good Book on your own. (And it's definitely not the end of my involvement with Torah -- I'll probably have a new blog about how I got caught in a typhoon next week for Parshat Noah -- but for now, this is G-dcast signing out.

Crossposted on Jewschool

G-d, Kids, and Movies

First of all: the important things in life.


It's pretty quiet here, for a change. Working furiously on the new book, now that the movie script is in, approved (mostly), and everyone seems more-or-less happy with it, or if they're not, they're not being unhappy in my direction. Which is a relief. Secretly, by the beginning I was thinking that 120 pages was nothing and that I could spit it out in a heartbeat, but by the fifth complete revision, as I was adding up each 120-page draft in my head -- that's something like 600 pages. Definitely longer than any novel I've ever written. Way longer than anything I've written in three freakin' months!

For a good portion of preproduction, they tried to keep their top casting choices secret from me. They didn't want the people getting in the way of my voices for them, the producer said. Before the last draft, I sneaked a look at the audition tapes, and I could see why. Suddenly, I wasn't writing for my main character, I was writing for this snarky, beautiful, a-little-too-candid young woman who was going to become my main character.

But: There's a new novel in the pots. I don't know what's going to happen, but it tastes great so far.

And, finally, there's a new G-dcast in the house! These are the final few episodes, and I feel like we've upped our ante with them. First up this week: Dahlia Lithwick, who edits for Slate and NPR and Newsweek. And you have to come back on Wednesday to see Mayim Bialik's take on Vayelech. Oops. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say that.

G-dcast: Babies and Hippies

Okay, I was uneasy about this one. Because you guys know me as the big tough punk of G-dcast, and this is SO SWEET AND HIPPY. But it's pretty damn praiseworthy, and Chanan makes it so beautiful that it's kind of inevitable how good this is. If I do say so myself. And it's possibly one of the most abstract G-dcasts we've done, for a just-as-abstract parsha, which led to some interesting discussions about animation, and about the Torah. And now that you're watching it, hopefully, it will lead to some more.

G-dcast: Spooky Moses

It's hard to top a beatbox harmonica Shema, but the first 3 seconds of Ekev really do it. Just the post-bris expression is what my 10-year-old cousin likes to anthropomorphize as an "OMG moment."

G-dcast: The Shema, Beatbox version

Husband-and-wife team Rachel Harvrelock and Yuri Lane did this week's G-dcast. I really think it might be the best one yet. Do I say that a lot? Well, I mean it. Evidence: this does mark the first appearance of a capella gospel beatboxing in a G-dcast. And Old Man Moses is making me a little jumpy, after being used to Dynamic Puffy-Beard Moses, but I think I like him. He reminds me of Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. And that swelling of the beatbox just as Rachel fades from her own words into the words of the Torah...man, I get chills.

G-dcast: 40 Years in 4 Minutes

Just back from LA, and expecting that I will get a full night of sleep one of these days. The G-dcast fiesta was totally awesome. I spoke about G-dcast and the process and the amazing people we work with, and everyone kept clapping when I showed videos, which was weird, since I wasn't sure whether to bow or thank them, or just to tell them that I'll pass it on the next time I see Marcus Freed or Malki Rose or Stereo Sinai.

But the participants were great, and we had some amazing talks -- about my being Orthodox, about what we all thought of the Torah, and about why we were here in the first place. And this is what I didn't show anyone -- Shawn Landres's great G-dcast that takes us right into the Book of Devarim, the last of our 5 rounds of Torah this year.

G-dcast: Hesta Prynn & Pinchas

The Daughters of Tzelophechad have the hardest-to-pronounce surname in the entire Torah. That isn't the reason that we asked rapper Hesta Prynn to talk about them in this week's G-dcast -- it's because the story of the Daughters is one of the most intense feminist-or-is-it? stories in the Torah, and we wanted to know her take on it.

The real reason that we asked Hesta is kind of twofold: one, I read an article by ethnomusicologist Mordechai Shinefield about how 2/3 of the hip-hop trio Northern State is Jewish -- a trio which my daughter was really into at the time. (She was six months old then. Now she's 16 months, and is more into They Might Be Giants, but still needs to get her hip-hop fix now and then.) They're also no strangers to my own CD player. So I wrote them up, said pretty please, and Ms. Hesta was incredibly receptive.

And so, without further ado, the Daughters themselves:

10 Things I Hate about Commandments

I'm a big proponent of making the Torah relevant for modern society and everyday life. Maybe it's my whole Orthodox Jew trip of believing that Torah was given to us as a gift. Maybe it's because I'm a writer, and I want to believe that the stories we tell have life beyond when we tell them, and that they can pertain to different people in different circumstances -- and that the Torah, as the greatest story of all, can apply to anyone, anywhere.

But I don't think I have any excuse for loving this video as much as I do. Except, possibly, that I have dreamt all my life of someone turning my book into the next Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

OK, so the addition of Samuel L. Jackson "as Principal Firebush" at the end is a bit of a stretch, and doesn't at all fit with the tight-as-anything leitmotif that the rest of the video established. But who doesn't love themselves some Samuel L.? He didn't even totally suck playing a one-eyed black Nazi in The Spirit.

(One more note: yes, it is creepy that the narrator says "we'll see who can get the girl" just as Basya -- otherwise known as Moses's freakin' ADOPTIVE MOTHER -- comes onscreen.)

G-dcast: Flaming Carnivorous Snakes

Yes, this stuff is in the Torah. The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible: I'm not even talking about midrash or Mishna or anything. There it is, in regular black and white -- the raised black ink and veined white parchment of the Torah, that is. I feel like a bit of a Torah ignoramus admitting this, but I never realized that this story existed in the Torah until the amazing Malki Rose brought it to our attention.

At first she came to us with a script that tried to cram in everything that happens in Chukat -- Aaron and Miriam dying, Moses striking the rock, the Red Heifer, as well as a bunch of the Israelites' military victories over Sichon and Og and Arad. All in under three minutes, of course. Sarah and I pulled her aside and had a talking to. The talking to basically went like this: If we try to animate half this stuff, our animators' hands are going to be falling off.

So, I asked, which is your favorite part? Which part speaks to you the most?

"Oh, that's easy," she replied. (If you couldn't tell, her voice has this great Australian brogue.) "The flaming snakes."

Sarah's and my jaws hit the ground in synchronization.

The flaming snakes?

Yep -- the flaming snakes. Go see for yourself.

Torah for the People

I just wrote this to the uber-mentionable Yonah Lavery, creator of Talmud Comics (who, btw, just inked a deal with the also-awesome Ben Yehuda Press). We were discussing our love of Torah and our mutual wavery position in the Torah world:

i used to have a terrible phobia of haredim. i think i still do, and yet i seem to have become one of them. albeit an obama-votin', peta-flag-wavin' haredi. i think g-dcast really encapsulates what i am: people learning torah is good. people living torah is good. and people being creative with torah is good....until they get to be either fascists or hippies. then they just give me a headache with their hating and/or vibing.

i'm not sure if i stand by that since i'm half asleep, but it might just be my mission statement.