Torah Goes Hollywood. Moses time-jumps to a black-and-white American town.

An Exodus, and an entry.

Hi! We here at Torah Goes Hollywood figure it’s a new year, and the start of a new Torah book. So what better way to mark those events than with the start of a new newsletter?

Below, please find the first official Substack installment of Torah Goes Hollywood, a foray into all things Bible and entertainment. It’s our belief here at TGH that holy texts can illuminate one other — characters and storylines in our greatest (and even not-so-greatest) entertainment can throw a light on the Torah, and vice versa. Connections abound. Let's dig into ‘em.

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The book of Exodus, which we've just begun reading, starts with some big historical context before getting down to the people we really came here to see. In filmmaking terms it’s an establishing shot before the close-up. In pharmaceutical-advertising terms it's the warning of uncontrollable face rashes and a desire to yell ‘Jellybeans’ in public before a revelation of the cure.

The children of Israel, we’re told, are multiplying — like, creatures-at-the-start-of-Genesis multiplying. Seeing how numerous the Jews in his kingdom are growing, Pharaoh first panics, then tries oppressing them with manual labor, then tries infanticide (foiled by the handmaidens Shifra and Puah), then another form of infanticide.

We get an entire chapter of this before we reach the main attraction: Moses. You know the Moses story without looking. Born in secrecy, placed on the river by his mother and sister, discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in the monarchy. As a young man he visits the fields and realizes painedly what’s happening to his fellow Jews, even defending one of them against an Egyptian attacker. After killing the man Moses flees to Midian, meets Tzipporah and her sisters at a well, chases away their harassers, marries Tzipporah and becomes a shepherd for his dad-in-law Re’uel.

These tales move with a kind of telescoping quality, from the backdrop of history to the particulars of story — from the machinations of an empire to the individuations of a man forced to flee it.

But read a little closer and you’ll see something else is happening. Something very specific that, remarkably, is repeated over and over in every narrative piece of these 2+ chapters.

Someone is in trouble. And someone else is coming in to save them.

First come the children that Pharaoh ordered strangled in the cradle, saved by the two handmaiden. Then Moses, one of those children, is saved by his mother-sister-Pharaoh’s-daughter combo. Soon after, Moses does the saving, bailing out his Hebrew brother from the hands of an Egyptian. And then Moses saves the daughters of Re’uel at the well.

If you’re keeping score, that’s 42 verses and 4 rescues. Douglas Adams himself, the foremost expert on the power of 42, would be impressed.

Each of these mini-rescues contains its own linguistic fingerprint. “Va’t’chayena = “and they enlivened,” the text says of the handmaiden; “Va’tekacheha” = “and she took,” for the daughter of Pharaoh; “Va’yach” = “and he hit,” for Moses striking the Egyptian; and “Va’yoshian” = “and he redeemed them,” for Moses and the sisters at the well. We start with that most elemental of verbs, “te’chayena,” life, and move all the way to its most enlightened mode, “yoshia,” redemption.

What’s notable is how one leads directly to another. Had the handmaiden not saved the children, then Pharaoh’s daughter/Moses’ family couldn’t save Moses. Had Pharaoh’s daughter/Moses’ family not saved Moses, he could not have saved the Hebrew. Had he not saved the Hebrew, he would not have fled to Midian and saved the daughters of Re’uel.

All this saving is sharply picked up on by the Ramban, Nachmanides. He observes the clause that Moses’ mother saw her new baby “was good.” A seemingly superfluous addition since, well, doesn’t every mother think their child is good? Especially, you know, Jewish mothers? (I’ve heard.) The ‘good’ suggests something extra, a kind of savior aura, Ramban says. In other words, Moses’ mother intuited where all this saving would lead.

The idea of a redemption progression (pyramid?) rings all sorts of bells to another text on our minds this time of year. As Clarence tells George Bailey near the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” life is a similar momentum-build of redemptive consequences, at least if we’re smart enough to put such vibes out there.

As Clarence walks around Pottersville/ Bedford Falls laying out the domino sequence that George’s life kicked off, he details the chain reaction. “Every man on that transport died,” Clarence says, referring to a WWII convoy that was rescued by George’s brother Harry. “Harry wasn't there to save them — because you weren't there to save Harry” [from a boyhood sledding accident]. Sounds a lot like Exodus: had the daughter of Pharaoh not saved Moses, he couldn’t have saved the Hebrew, or Tzipporah and her sisters.

Neat parallel, ya? Ah, but the savin’ isn’t done. All of Moses’ saving leads to one big save: What God will ask him to do in the next chapter.

In 3: 10: “V’atah l’cha v’eshlacha’cha el paroh v’hotzih et ami b’nei Yisrael mimitzraim,” — “and now go to Pharaoh and take my people the sons of Israel out of Egypt,” God asks of Moses, hoping he’ll carry out the mission of “l’hatzilo,” of saving them. (Its own linguistic fingerprint, a kind of grand save both physical and spiritual.) This is the ultimate rescue all the other rescues enabled: the saving of a people.

So the entire rescue of the Jews from Egypt — in a way, the birth of the Jewish people — starts with one small act of heroism on the part of some humble handmaiden. (Not for nothing: the handmaiden were women, as were Moses’ mother, sister and the daughter of Pharaoh. Exodus features five heroines before a man even gets out of bed.)

The prospect of one simple person saving an entire people draws us — where else — right back to “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Because as Clarence vividly illustrates to George, the entire town of Bedford Falls is saved by one ordinary person’s actions. And not just the airy-fairy, move a pebble and cosmic things happen kind of saving. This is the real, hard tacks, cause-and-effect kind of saving.

(Btw, this is hardly the only parallel between Exodus and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” both of which of involve balls of ice raining down at a climactic moment; a man miraculously redeemed as he jumps into a body of water that should have killed him; and an 11th-hour bailout from a tyrant. But Frank Capra’s Hebrew School education is a story for another Substack.)

A question still lingers, though: Did Moses really need to be the one to save all these people? I mean, if God had promised to take out the Jews, why did there need to be a leader at all, let alone this particular leader?

Thinkers have debated this philosophical-historical question for centuries, and one Substack newsletter, cleverly named though it might be, won’t settle it. What is the effect of one person on the arc of history? What would have happened if a significant leader was never born?

The British hyphenate Stephen Fry does offer an illuminating thought in his 1990’s-era novel “Making History.” His book proposes a counterfactual world into which Hitler is never born — and which then sees an even more ruthless figure come to power. History may indeed be different without particular leadership figures, but not necessarily in the way we expect.

Besides, what’s the point of getting too caught up in butterfly effects? When it comes to questions of how our world might look if minor events had broken another way, I can defer only to one of the great philosophers of our time: Steven Wright.

The comedian once asked a profound question. He wondered how his life would have been different had he been born a day earlier.

He reached a reasonable conclusion. “It wouldn’t be different at all, except I'd have asked that question yesterday.''

Thank you for reading.