Jackie Mason on the Bible, Miracles, and Israel Part 1

Summary: Jackie Mason, rabbi turned celebrated comedian, shares his Orthodox Jewish perspective on important Biblical themes.

A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. – Proverbs 17:22 (KJV)

Interviewing Jackie Mason

The late Jackie Mason was one of a kind. Mason is known for a long career as a standup comic and for appearing in a string of movies and tv shows. He was an Emmy and Tony award winner for his writing and performing, and did a show for Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Variety Performance in 1991. He passed away in 2021 at the age of 93.

But why would Tim Mahoney interview a comedian for his first film on the Exodus? 

He got the idea from author and film critic Michael Medved. The question came up while talking to Michael about the intrinsic Jewish nature of the Exodus story. A wide variety of views would be represented in the film and Tim wanted to include some commentary of the account from a Jewish perspective, someone well known to the audience. Michael suggested Jackie Mason as a unique and intriguing candidate. When Jackie was a young man he was ordained as a rabbi, and he came from a long line of rabbis.

Good comedians use humor to raise insights about the human condition. Just as the court jester and the fool could say things to the king that would get anyone else’s head chopped off, modern comedians can honestly broach topics through a joke that no one else would touch. They get laughs but also provoke thought in the process.

Mason grew up surrounded by rabbis, including all three of his brothers. He too was ordained as a rabbi at the age of 25. In his family, doing anything else was inconceivable. The family’s mission was to produce more rabbis to maintain the lineage of this religious tradition and to teach Orthodox Judaism and its values to Jews and everyone else across the world. However, he soon became much more interested in comedy as a way to fulfill at least part of his family’s mission.

Mason left the synagogue after three years to start his career in comedy. He later cracked, “Someone in the family had to make a living.” He also joked, “I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.”

The interview took place in Jackie’s New York home in 2006, and provided a lot of provocative and sometimes surprising views about the Exodus and God’s covenant with Israel. The story of the interview was also shared in a tribute to Jackie Mason as a Thinker Update five years ago. The striking thing about Mason’s interview is that sections of it have been cut into nearly every Patterns of Evidence film that has been produced, however Jackie never made it into the finished version of any of those films. He was always one of the last cuts to be made in a final effort to reduce the run time (which was deemed to be too long), despite the good fit for his commentary.

What follows are sections of Jackie Mason’s commentary on a range of important questions surrounding the Bible and the Jewish people. They connect as well to themes in The Israel Dilemma as they do to the Exodus.

The Burning Bush 

JACKIE MASON: Moses comes across the burning bush and it alerts him to realize that he has a message from God, and the message is to go back to save your people. It’s your mission to go back to Egypt because your people are being persecuted. And he hears the message saying ‘I am.’ And, that gives him the message that God is the universal leader and the universal God of his people; that God’s Word and God’s deed and God’s rule is the almighty power that rules this whole universe. “I am” means that I am before, and now, and after, and always, of all times and in all ways and in every direction. He hovers over this universe and controls the fate of every human being on this earth. 

This is the pronouncement that as long as this earth survives, and man is on this earth, that the power of God is now, for the first time, simple and obvious and defined. This is the way and the time that God explained himself and identified himself, and this is his connection to the Jews as a people. And this defines his power over Pharaoh and defines his protection of the Jews. It also defines the fact that the Jews are the people that he has chosen to survive no matter what happens on this earth. That they will always be somehow protected and defended because God and his power will always be there as the ultimate power that will protect the future of Jews for all generations. 

The Ten Plagues

God gave ten chances because he didn’t really want to kill that many Egyptians and destroy them. He wanted to give them hints and warnings. He started with slighter punishments and went further and further with heavier and further forms of punishments. The plagues became progressively worse. They didn’t start with such horrible punishments, because he didn’t really intend to destroy the lives of the Egyptians. He was hoping while he was doing it that they would be willing to listen, and somehow they would appreciate the significance of the crimes that they are committing. 

He wanted to give them an opportunity to understand what they are doing, to contemplate what kind of consequences there would be for the kind of criminality that they are engaging in…. so, he made it worse and worse. They started to learn more and more but they still couldn’t believe it. They thought between one plague and the other that somehow this is the last plague. They couldn’t believe in the power of God to do this much damage to them and hurt them this much and create this much pain and agony and misery. They thought that his power might be limited in some way. They couldn’t imagine that God had this kind of power because they didn’t believe in him in the first place. And, they were stunned by the huge kind of punishments that were attacking them and destroying them. 

But people keep forgetting about the humanitarian nature of God, even towards the people who misbehave in the most brazen ugly ways. In the most horrible and inhuman ways. God still wanted to save them from their own criminality, from their own behavior, from their own guilt. From their own dastardly acts that they had performed before, thinking and hoping that somehow they would get the message and change. Because the idea of redemption was always in his mind and they never took the message, they never appreciated the message, they never took the hint and they never learned their lesson and they continued with the same venomous behavior as they started with until they got the message, until he did it with the death of the first-born. 

He had to go that far for it to penetrate, and for them to realize the significance of the misdeeds that they had accomplished and the horror of their behavior. It shows that the inhumanity of man towards man is so terrible, a part of the basic nature of our behavior, that unless people are punished to the point where it is impossible for them to survive – they will never get the message. 

The Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart

They say God hardened Pharaoh’s heart because Pharaoh believed in his own power and his own Godliness. He thought that he was God. He believed in himself as the almighty power. And his own almighty power was being challenged by another force that he didn’t believe existed in those terms, that could actually overcome the level of his power. It was inconceivable to him.

And to him it was a challenge that he had to overcome. It was like a fight that he had to win. It was like a fighter jumping into the ring with you and you believed that you are the best fighter in the world and somehow this guy thinks he can beat you. And you had to prove the point because nobody could ever beat you before, that it’s even possible for somebody to do it. He didn’t know such a power existed, he refused to believe it. 

This says something about the ego of humanity in general. Very often it symbolizes the fact that when there’s too much power residing in you, power spoils you. Power corrupts you. Power created the most vicious dictatorships in the world. Because the need for power builds upon its own and serves its own purpose and grows on its own terms. And the pleasure of that power grows in a human being because it fascinates a person to be that powerful. It’s the headiest power that a person could have. It becomes like a drug. And that kind of drug is the ultimate kind of drug in any human being – when they think they could be the most powerful person in the world. 

That’s why power is the ultimate corruption and that’s why dictators of the world have committed the most heinous acts against humanity, because they enjoy the pleasure of that power and that power turns into sadism. The greater the power, the greater the tendency towards sadistic pleasure. And, that’s what it did to Pharaoh. 

It became a matter of survival to him. Because when that power is threatened and shattered, it shatters the essence and the core of everything you look for and the only reason for your existence on this earth. That’s why no dictator can give up power. Nobody in a position of power can ever survive without it once he has it, because the feeling that it gives you becomes a need of its own and it lives and breathes with so much of your being that it becomes the essence of you, the whole life of you to the extent that you can’t live without it. People can never give it up. 

Passover and Covenant Protection

He found a way to protect the Jews from all the plagues that he wanted to visit upon the Egyptians. And, he found the way by making this mark on every Jewish door, so that’s where the whole idea of Passover came from. It’s symbolism, the word ‘Passover.’ Passover meant, literally, passing over the Jews and attacking only the Egyptians. And the scourge of all these plagues somehow enveloped the Egyptians while the Jews escaped it totally and that is the greatest miracle that God ever created – that symbolized for the future of the Jews that they are protected when God decides to express his power over those people and destroy those people and to eliminate them whenever the Jewish life is being threatened to the point of possible extinction. 

That’s why the Jews symbolize the fact that throughout history, no matter how many – the Babylonians were destroyed, and the Romans were destroyed, and the Greeks were destroyed, somehow, regardless of the fact that the Jews were such a miniscule kind of a population in terms of the populations of the world, the most miniscule population of any has been the Jews – and nevertheless, they have survived to such an extent that not only are the Jews in the world today, but very often the defining people of the world. 

Very, very often they are the leaders of the world, and the greatest influence of the world, for the good of the world. While other people survive to kill, plunder or murder, the Jews always survive to give help and charity in terms of humanitarian comfort to even their enemies. Nobody has done as much in terms of the contributions to humanity as the Jews have, and this is the thankfulness to the Lord for saving them from all the viciousness and the hate that they had to endure throughout the generations, and all the persecutions that have started from the Egyptians throughout history to this very day. 

The Passover meal is a celebration of the power of God to save the Jews as a people. This is why it became the holiest of all the holidays, because it celebrates our survival and the fact that we even exist on this earth as a people. Regardless of all the attacks from every source and the overwhelming power from the rest of all the universe, compared to the miniature number of Jews that there are on this earth, who have no power at all in terms of physical power; nevertheless that power that God gave them to survive became an inner power, a power within the Jews, by their connection with God’s power. 

He created a marriage between his power and the Jews as a people that you will be my protected people in eternity and that it will never end and it will be here forever. So that no matter what dies in the world, Jews have always been threatened, but they always survive. They have survived all the abnormal situations where any other people would have been destroyed. Even in our own lifetime we have seen it. Even with the war with the Middle East against all the countries of the Middle East – where you have 300 million people fighting against a million and a half Jews, in 1948 when they declared the Jewish state, it was considered impossible for the Jews to survive. Here they are, all the Arab countries, where they have all the military power accessible to him that the Jews have. It’s not like they were cut off from all the armaments of the world and the Jews were given it by some force. 

The Jews have nothing in terms of physical power compared to this. We had no armaments compared to them, we have no population compared to them. We have no way to survive compared to them. We have no help from any sources in the world compared to them. Where does it happen that a million and a half people could win a war against 300 million people? This was the power of God that saved us and it’s the only thing that we can attribute it to.

It’s another one of the great miracles that God has performed for the Jews so that his power to save the Jews was always there, no matter how big the threat, no matter how desperate our chances are. No matter how short the possibility of survival ever became, all of the sudden it became some part of a miracle that nobody can understand or explain – because they can’t understand how and why God chose the Jews to survive, no matter what tragedy they faced, no matter how desperate their predicament, no matter how real the fear, or the power of all the people that were surrounding them. There was no power in the world that could overcome it because the power of God is the ultimate power, and he used it for the Jews. 

Conclusion

Look for the conclusion of Jackie Mason’s commentary as we gain more insight to his perspective on humor, miracles, and Jewish history. Until then, keep thinking.

NOTE: Not every view expressed by those interviewed for our films and podcasts necessarily reflects the views of Patterns of Evidence. We include perspectives from various sides of debates on Biblical matters so that readers can become familiar with the different arguments involved. – Keep Thinking!

TOP PHOTO: Jackie Mason in 2006 at Gulfstream Park, Hallandale, FL. (Carl Lender, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)