Amazon Prime Takes on the Story of David – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Years ago, Bob Dylan spoke of the Bible as both the most underrated and overrated book in the world. His words seemed clear enough to me. Though I can’t speak for what it meant to him, I will share my thought: it all depends on whether you can see past the mountains of clichés.

A cliché, we must remember, started as a fresh insight. People then latched onto it and treated that insight as if it were an algorithm so that the insight could be iterated and so be of great use.

Good thought. A cliché can serve as a valuable place-marker. But it isn’t the insight itself. And if we forget that, and pretend that that it is, the insight gets lost and the connection discredited.

I’ve spent years studying Hebrew Scripture and many volumes of the books that record the traditions that surround its story. I’ve learned how to be precise and to let the words discipline my thought rather than impose my prejudice on the texts and stories. I want to put in as much effort as it takes to hear a message I wouldn’t otherwise be able to hear. I also want to fight against the air being filled with false messages. I dig in my heels against mistakes and argue as needed to clarify and set the record straight and keep the channels open for hearing the real story.

But if there is no interest in the Book, all those kinds of efforts mean very little. The first duty is to tell whatever we have of the story. That’s the start.

Over the millennia, the stories of the Book were told and retold among the Jewish people. The Bible was after all a story about our own family, and every time one tells family stories, a new angle is likely to emerge.

Beginning in Roman times, these stories began to be set down and emerged in a genre of writing known as Midrash Aggada. It is filled with backstories: details of Abraham’s childhood that are absent from Scripture; how Pharaoh’s daughter’s arm miraculously extended to reach into the Nile and pick up the little basket that carried the baby Moses; the story of how all of the people’s souls flew from their bodies when they heard God address them directly at Sinai and how God used the dew that will revive the dead on the future to bring them back to life then; and many, many more stories.

There were rabbis who had no use for this; their objections were preserved. But the defenders of Midrash Aggada did their job well. One rabbi quoted Jeremiah, “Is not My word like a hammer shattering apart a rock?” and added: “with sparks flying in all directions.”

The image is apt to the task. The Bible is so deeply embedded in our culture in the West that it is encrusted with cliches. We must be able to break through that stony covering, just as we must break through the stone of our hearts to reach a heart of flesh.

Amazon’s new series, House of David, takes a storyteller’s liberties in picking up the tale of the life of King David, set out in the Books of Samuel and Chronicles and augmented by the writings attributed to David in Psalms. Sometimes the risk taken pays off and sometimes it doesn’t. Trained in rabbinic literature, I have a great tolerance for narrative liberties, but become extremely uncomfortable with liberties taken with law. The law is everyone’s business in Jewish tradition, as it must be for people who wish to be free of human masters. And so, it is up to everyone to clarify law and keep it clear and its wisdom and heart in touch with our own minds and hearts, so that it may ever be alive and inspire our love — for each other and for the law and its Giver. There is room for criticism.

But what needs criticism is decidedly secondary to the great good of a fresh rendition of a story whose power is easily overshadowed by centuries of cliché. The cast in general has found heart and drama in the story. That’s there in the best of the West — think of Shakespeare’s histories — history is itself never seen better than as a great drama. And the stony cover of cliché is spectacularly exploded here in the performance of veteran actor Stephen Lang as the prophet Samuel.

Samuel in his old age — which is where House of David meets him — is, at first glance, not a likeable guy. He may have a white beard and long hair, but he is no Santa Claus. He is the most powerful man in Israel, the man who put the crown on the head of the nation’s first king, Saul. And in Episode 1, Samuel charges Saul and Israel to fight Amalek and destroy them completely, leaving no one alive and destroying all their wealth.

Even back then, that seemed a bit much. The Book of First Samuel tells how Saul allowed the army to violate the command of God, allowing them to keep some of the plunder and, notably, to keep alive Agog, the Amalekite king. Samuel is choked with wrath over this. He delvers God’s message to King Saul that God is taking the kingdom away from him and his line, and then Samuel slays Agog.

It’s the perfect cliché of the violent Old Testament God and his sycophantic prophets, eager to justify merciless cruelty and bloodletting in the loftiest theological terms.

But that’s not what it is in the hands of the HOD writers and Lang. The Samuel they create is human, passionate, wry, and devoted to God whom he knows directly enough to love and fear in a most humble and moving way.

“God is funny,” Samuel says a few times, amazed himself at how unexpected His will is and how it connects the most unusual things together in ways that seem obvious but only in retrospect.

A good choice of language. One doesn’t usually hear God described as funny, as if He were a joke. Samuel makes it clear himself that that kind of funny is not what was meant. “God will not be mocked!” Samuel exclaims, and we know instantly — neither does He mock.

Rather, what is meant is the sense of what comedy can achieve — to cut right through the fabric of rationalizations and excuses that screen us from our own reality, and to bring us to surrender to that better vision, with relief and even joy.

To see that behind the prophet is itself funny in the same sense. The caricature of the prophet as a screaming, bloody fanatic stands revealed as a stony covering, something that has kept us apart from the real story in the Bible. Samuel is a most intensely human person. He allows himself the hurt and the exultation of being open to that which is greater than him, the full reality behind everything in the world and in himself. He is open to love, of God, of his people, of God’s world. He is no addict of violence. He is instead the bearer of the hard message, the kind only someone who loves can bear, because anyone else could not take the pain.

It was Saul who in the end sought ease in a power that was never his alone, for a king’s glory belongs to all the people. He wanted their love and so tried to give them the spoils of power. He failed his duty to guide them towards the responsibility to the larger task that is the people’s destiny. That duty alone elevates love from a mere consumption of pleasure to the most powerful force of beneficent change. That’s a leader’s job.

Samuel does not shrink from his duty. And so unlike Saul, he does not go mad but suffers both the fears and the joys through which his devotion leads him.

And that leads to places unimaginable, both fearsome and wondrous. That kind of funny.

Showing and Telling the Story

In a line attributed to various big names in show biz, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” A video, a play, or a story has to succeed on its terms; otherwise, go write a tract or preach a sermon. As my high school English teachers used to say to us constantly: “Don’t tell about it — show it!”

The Bible’s stories are often just told about, and there is good in that. But they need to be shown as well, and to be told, not just told about.

In many places, House of David does just that — it tells the story. You will be riveted to the vision, eyes open, as when Samuel anoints David and both are rocked by the power to which they have knowingly opened themselves and which has changed not only their lives, but ours as well.

There is good storytelling here, the kind that opens us up to the story of which our own lives are a vital part.

And part of that story is that we can now read the Book better, and break through a little more of the old stony crust of cliché to the Book’s living heart.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

Moses Argued With God

We’re Not Invading Russia. So Make a Deal.