Summary: Rabbi/comedian, Jackie Mason, concludes the series by giving his blunt views on Jewish persecution, miracles, the ten commandments and humor.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:…A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; – Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4 (KJV)
A Trip to See Jackie Mason
As seen in Part 1 of the series, during the process of making his first film on the Exodus, Tim Mahoney was looking for different perspectives to comment on the Biblical account. To learn more from a Jewish perspective he traveled to New York to interview comedian, Jacki Mason. Mason had followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather in becoming an ordained rabbi, but soon turned to comedy as a career. He spent a lifetime as an award-winning entertainer before passing away in 2021.
In the course of their discussion, Mahoney gained an appreciation for the fact that evidence supporting the truth of the Bible comes not only from history and science, it comes from philosophy and morality as well.
The interview would take place at Mason’s New York City apartment just a few blocks from Central Park. When they met, Mason gave Tim a bit of his own interview. Planting his feet firmly, he looked sternly up at Tim. “Okay what is this all about anyway? Why are you making a film about the Exodus? What kind of thing is this? What are you – a part of a religious cult or something?
It was clear this would be a typical interview. After Tim shared a bit of his background, Jackie kindly invited him to set up his gear in the living room. The greatest challenge for filming was that the room was full of mirrors and windows that reflected the camera and lights at every angle. A fuller account of the story behind this interview and the entire investigation is told in our eBook, Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus – A Filmmaker’s Journey.
Now, let’s hear more from Jackie Mason.
Why God Allows Hardships for the Jewish People
JACKIE MASON: People have asked for many generations why God puts the Jews in positions where their survival should become so precarious that they would be trapped right in front of the Red Sea with all the power and the might of the Egyptian army confronting them and trapping them. Why would they reach that predicament? Why couldn’t he make it easier for them to survive and why should he put them through such travail and such torment that they should feel that their lives are endangered and that they are about to be destroyed.
There have been many different interpretations, and I define it in accordance with certain rabbis who say that you never appreciate life unless there is a fear of death. And you never appreciate the power of somebody saving you and the significance of the fact that he saved you unless you feel that you have faced your last final moment and you thought it was over. When somebody saves you from drowning, he is your friend for life. But if you were never about to drown you might never have appreciated how much he loved you and cared for you and how much he would have done for you. It’s only when you come to that test that that kind of devotion survives. That kind of remembrance lasts a lifetime and lasts for generations.
Jews will never forget and will never ever allow themselves to believe that God is not their ultimate friend and their ultimate protector from all the travails of the universe. That nobody will be able to destroy the Jews because whenever it reached that point – this was not the only time – there were many times that the Jews were about to be destroyed, but no matter when it happens, it’s amazing how at the last moment God is there to save them. That teaches us to believe in him because we would never know how much we should believe in him unless he was able to perform such miracles for us. That teaches us the lesson of this friendship, this partnership, of this love and devotion that God has for the Jewish people.
The Challenge of the Miraculous Sea Crossing
If I didn’t believe that miracles actually happened, I wouldn’t believe in God at all. Why do we believe in a God and an almighty power? Because we don’t think everything in the world is practical or identifiable in human terms that we can explain with the finite intelligence that we have. There are worlds of things happening that we can’t define or explain and only through time or generations do we begin to understand certain things that we never thought were possible before.
If somebody told you you could have a clicker [remote control] in your house and turn on a television set – if you didn’t see it happen, you would say it’s impossible. Now, for simple things like this that you say are impossible, then of course you would say that it’s inconceivable that the waters could be parted by some kind of an almighty power. There are so many things that happened that you can’t explain, but you believe them because you saw them. Now, if we existed at that time and we saw them, we would believe them. Since we live here now and it happened thousands of years ago, we can’t imagine that it’s possible. But you can see it with your television set, you can see it with a clicker that opens the door to a car. You can see that you’re sitting in your house talking on a telephone, talking to somebody in Egypt. Now if you didn’t see it or experience it, you would never believe it – you would say that somebody made it up. And you would just say the man is insane for believing it, because this could never happen.
Now, it’s the same kind of moronic thinking that doesn’t believe in the power of God. Because we can’t imagine it and we can’t experience it and we can’t define it or explain it – we don’t believe it. That’s stupid. It’s just as stupid as saying that if somebody told you you could have a telephone and talk to Egypt, you would call them insane too. You wouldn’t believe it. You know why you wouldn’t believe it? Because while you think that the person who believes it has something wrong with him, the truth of the matter is that there is something wrong with you. Because you don’t have enough imagination to realize that everything can’t be explained on the basis of your intelligence. That your intelligence is so limited that you are stupid compared to the possibilities of what could happen in this universe.
The Ten Commandments
When Moses got the ten commandments directly from God, I would say that is the greatest single definition of the identification of men and civilization. Civilization today would not be what it is if not for the ten commandments. Because before the words of the ten commandments became the defining law of the universe, became the defining law for human behavior, it became the way to interpret whether people are civilized or not. Because those who don’t believe in the ten commandments, or who violate the ten commandments, even to this day, are not considered civilized.
The difference between a human being and an animal is the difference of those who don’t and do believe in the ten commandments. Because that explains to us what life between human beings is all about. Unless humanity has those kinds of considerations and concerns to bring in these kinds of laws, these patterns of behavior that were laid out by the ten commandments, humanity in general would not only not be civilized but they wouldn’t even survive because we have been destroying each other to such and extent there would be no humanity at all today. That’s the ultimate definition of civilization and that’s what they call a civilized human being today. All because of the ten commandments.
Nobody has created an idea that they should identify a human being as a consoling, thoughtful, helpful person in terms of other human beings – that he shouldn’t violate them, that he shouldn’t have contempt or hate for them, that he shouldn’t want to destroy them. Because people until that time were destroying each other. And they were destroying each other because they never saw themselves as human beings and the power that they had within themselves for the good as much as the bad.
They only saw one way to survive, which was to kill. They saw only one point in humanity, that we are all basically here to survive regardless of the other person’s survival. That he could always be sacrificed to save yourself. That nobody cared about the death and destruction of his fellow human being. That whole concept was redefined and rearranged and reorganized by the ten commandments and the Torah which all of a sudden defined human beings as caring, loving people, sharing the world and not fighting each other for pieces of the world. Not destroying each other to survive but to help each other to survive together and it’s created a whole new order to the universe and that’s what we call civilization today.
Attempts to Destroy the Jews and their Message
There are definitely people, countries and people in places all over this universe who don’t want the story of the Exodus to be told. They would like it to be buried and forgotten because of everything that it represents. It is something that they can’t tolerate. They can’t tolerate the idea of Judaism as a people and they can’t tolerate their survival as a people. They feel the Jews are a threat to them one way or another, because Jews have become the conscience of the world and they threaten the conscience of the people who don’t believe that they owe anybody else in the universe any right to survive in the same terms that they do. They believe in the ultimate power of themselves, not in the ultimate power of God. They believe in their rights as the only thing that counts and the rights of others as meaningless.
They are threatened by the thought that the tiniest of nations and the smallest in number have the same rights on this earth as the most powerful and the most in number – that military and physical power means nothing compared to humanitarian considerations and the survival of people, and that people are all the same and have the right to survive, regardless of who they are or where they are – which robs them of the right to destroy other human beings and to do it with impunity and that it destroys the right of their conscience to allow it, because it disturbs their conscience from allowing it to happen.
Their own conscience confronts them with their sins and their crimes and the real reasons for doing it, and the real criminality involved with it, and it makes them realize how inhuman and how horrible their own behavior is. And it makes them realize that that’s not the normal human being’s behavior, that’s the behavior of an animal. And when it makes a human being feel like an animal he can’t face it, he can’t deal with it, because what the ten commandments and the precepts and the concepts of the Bible and the Torah say to the Jews as a people – it says the same thing to everybody.
Before you read it or heard [the Bible] you could justify all the viciousness of your behavior, all the misdeeds, all the hate, all the violence, because you convince yourself you have a right to it. This robs you of the feeling that you have any such right. This makes you face the fact that you are basically a criminal. And people can’t face the thought that they’re a criminal, so they try to destroy the messenger who reminds you that you are a worthless human being for behaving the way you do, and that God’s wrath will be driven into you and that you will suffer for it. You are going to find out that you can’t survive this way.
And they feared those words, they feared those thoughts, they feared those admonitions because it’s a whole way of life that they can’t tolerate, because it destroys everything that they live for. What they live for is the power, to be the only power and the right to destroy everybody else, and everybody else has to pay for their right to do whatever they please. And all of the sudden they find out that if they do, they will be destroyed because God’s wrath will see to it, and that’s what it reminds them of. That’s why the Jews have survived through all these generations because the Jews believe in the power of God and the goodness of God and the fairness of God and the survival of all people, not just the Jews.
But they will destroy everybody who represents anything like the Jews. You can’t kill everybody and get away with it, is what God tells you. And they don’t want to hear it and they can’t face it and the Jews symbolize it. So, you have to destroy the Jews so that their conscience shouldn’t have to face it,
On Humor
After I became a rabbi I realized that I was much more interested in jokes. And jokes to me create happiness. And it won’t help me exactly fulfill all of my father’s mission, but at least I’ll fulfill part of his mission. Because when Jews suffer all over the world and have been persecuted, they need a laugh to survive. It’s hard to live with just misery.
That’s why jokes were told in the midst of the Holocaust. When the Jews were going to their very deaths under the persecution of the Nazis, there is still material that has survived to this day, literature of comedy, because they needed some escape, to the very last moment from the misery they were facing and laughter was the only way they could maintain their equilibrium and their mental health.
Conclusion
We will explore the bizarre, severe, and persistent persecution of the Jewish people in our upcoming film, The Israel Dilemma II. Does Jewish history provide a pattern of evidence that matches a set of specific prophecies found in the Bible? Might those prophecies even point to events in our time and to the end times? As always, keep on 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 preparing to be filmed at his home in New York City. (© 2006 Thinking Man Films)
