Wrestling With David Mamet

By MORDECAI FINLEY

If you didn’t know Mamet was a genius, you wouldn’t notice him much in shul. Those who do know that he is a genius, an icon, get over it quickly.

He is a shul-mensch. Comes every Shabbos that he is in town, which, since he lives here in California, is just about every Shabbos. He and his wife Rebecca sit in the same area: back left when facing the bimah. He asks an occasional question during Torah study, with a smile on his face that I have yet to fully interpret. Maybe he is just having a good time.

His questions are usually a little quirky. They seem to ask for a peshat (simple, factual) answer, but mid-way in my response I notice a horizon in the question that I didn’t initially see, so I slow down and then start to smile. I think, “A good kasha [question],” and respond to the deeper aspect. Mamet smiles that I got it.

He comes up with his kids on the bimah for the hakafah like the other dads. He has a beatific look on his face when his wife Rebecca chants Torah, like everyone else in the room when Rebecca reads Torah, only more so.

Mamet is extremely gracious and polite. Gives me a firm handshake, a little bow—“Gut Shabbos, rabbi”—when I come around during the hakafah. Out in the courtyard for kiddush after shul, he smiles, shakes hands, kids around, jostles—loves hanging with his fellow Yidden and spiritual seekers.

By coincidence, Mamet and I both study Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, submission wrestling. (He didn’t know that when he joined the shul). In the courtyard after services, we show each other moves we have learned that week, and sometimes an interested congregant who overhears the discussion might just be used for demonstration. A few Purims ago our good judgment was sufficiently lowered so that we spontaneously sparred a bit (when we do physically fight each other, it’s usually in private). People got a kick out of it. Now he and I just do Hamentaschen-Latke debates.

Mamet is tough. He his very strong and quick and has a good fighter’s mind. Talented Jiu-Jitsu fighter. My guess is that he could take 99 percent of guys his age and 80 percent of guys half his age. He loves the sport, and fighting in general. He tells me that he can’t up give this writing thing, because he has to support his Jiu-Jitsu habit.

His deepest passion, other than his family, is Yiddishkeit. Or maybe those are two faces of the same passion. He is a good man with good, liberal values, but when he talks about Israel, the Jewish people, authentic Jewish spirituality (the kind of stuff that breaks your heart and rebuilds it through God’s presence and with God’s guidance), he gets the same look on his face as when he fights, just more so. Intense focus. Everything is at stake in that moment.

I don’t know how he got that way. I heard of Mamet before I met him, of course, but the first time I really took note of him was in the summer of 2001. I was in Israel studying. (This was at the height of the second intifada.) One day the Israeli press starts to cover David Mamet’s trip to Israel. The papers were resplendent with the image of his bearded, square jaw, his baseball cap. I wondered, “What is David Mamet doing in Israel?” And then I realized he was there to show support during the intifada. The Reform Movement had cancelled its required year in Israel for incoming rabbinical and Cantorial students. Jews were staying away in droves. My plane was filled with evangelical Christians from Texas who came because Israel needed them. That’s when Mamet came to Israel.

I met him a few months later. A friend in Boston recommended our shul when Mamet said he was moving to Los Angeles. He and Rebecca came once and stayed.

Mamet ruminates. He reads voraciously and we talk: on the phone, over lunch. He has been reading Ludwig Lewisohn, for example. I knew the name (“Old fogey,” I thought, when Mamet asked me what I knew about LL). He sent me some books and I meet a Jew writing in the 1920s who gets it—with precision, poetic brilliance, passion, pain, impatience. Like Mamet.

When we talk in private conversation, he bursts out with a heart full of thoughts and feelings about what to do and what must be done. He is one of those too few non-Orthodox Jews who has seen into the palace: Torah channeling the divine mind, traditions as vessels for divine light, the people Israel together anchoring and being transformed by that light. He looks around at other parts of his life and sees people who are not superficial; they are deep and searching and questing, but their connection with Judaism is so painfully shallow. And some are smug that their connection to the transformative dimension is so shallow. They are so sure they don’t need it. He and I commiserate, plan, and hope.

If you want an aperture into Mamet’s soul as a Jew, don’t just read The Wicked Son. Read his Faustus. Mamet wrote Faustus after he had been at our shul for about two years. He studied the spirituality of the High Holy Days with me and had been coming to shul devotedly for a long time. He told me that the mix of Mussar and Chassidus that I teach has changed his life and made him a better man. (That’s what it does for me too, by the way.) But he never really got into details with me, nor did I ask.

He invited the shul to a reading of Faustus. Very soon I was on the edge of my seat, often unconsciously holding my breath because I was afraid if I breathed I might miss one word.

Faustus is the false, self-deluding penitent. The Magus asks question and makes comments—subtle, lacerating comments. In The Wicked Son, the spiritual voice of the Magus becomes the lacerating, barely disguised rage of a Chasidic Mussar teacher who knows that his student is just so full of shit but does not have to be. Okay, in both books Mamet is talking to himself. He is helping all of us talk to ourselves. Read the play and the book at your risk of being exposed to yourself.

Mamet can’t stand complacent bull-shitters and Jews who content themselves with being superficial Jews. He would like to kick their asses as a way of bringing their souls to consciousness, but he wrote The Wicked Son instead.