tfw an angel touches you
Recently, I saw some news about Dennis Prager having covid and it reminded me, as that dirtbag always does, of his long collaboration and friendship with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. For some rite of passage in my young Jewish life (my guess is graduating fifth grade in Hebrew School? maybe), our Rabbi gave us each a copy of Telushkin's The Book of Jewish Values, and my copy meant a lot to me. Its structure was basically, do a different mitzvah every day and here's 365 of them to try. I'm sure I never finished the book but I did refer to it occasionally in my young Jewish life and I appreciated having a Hefty Jewish Book on my own bookcase. I suspect other Jews can relate to the business-cards-in-American-Psycho type of envy a bookcase full of Hefty Jewish Books can inspire. I was once busted at a friend's house taking a picture of their bookcase just because it had a lot of impressive Hefty Jewish Books on it.
Anyway, it kind of sucks to know that Joseph Telushkin, who had some impact on my moral development, has written books with Dennis Prager and even contributed videos to PragerU. Like, in the end, fuck that guy. This line of thinking brought me to a discovery that if I ever knew, I'd forgotten: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin has three writing credits (all with frequent co-writer Allen Estrin, who created PragerU) on Touched by An Angel, a show I'd never watched. So I decided to watch his episodes.
For those who, like me, are largely unfamiliar with the series, it was right-wing Christian propaganda where a small handful of angels solve human problems in different places, all filmed in the greater Salt Lake area. It's a show structure that's increasingly rare in television, which I think is unfortunate - like the original Incredible Hulk TV series, the small recurring cast shows up in different places around the country to solve new problems with new characters (Heat Vision and Jack was a parody of this model, and the late Supernatural might be the most successful recent example of this model). In the series's final episode, according to Wikipedia, a guy is wrongly convicted of exploding a boiler and killing children, and then it turns out the prosecutor is Satan and the wrongly convicted guy is Jesus.
Two out of Telushkin's three episodes are about Jews, which is no surprise, I suppose. I don't know how many episodes of the series are Jew-focused but I wouldn't guess many. His first, Bar Mitzvah, is about a Jewish family where a Bar Mitzvah boy's grandfather is an atheist bodybuilder played by Kirk Douglas. The boy is torn between his religious parents, who are excited for him to have a Bar Mitzvah, and Kirk Douglas, who makes fun of Jewish stuff every chance he gets. As the angels reveal, Kirk Douglas lost faith in the power of prayer and therefore stopped being Jewish. When his son (the Bar Mitzvah boy's father) goes to the hospital with a brain tumor, he convinces Kirk Douglas to pray, which Kirk Douglas does, and then the guy dies anyway. At the Bar Mitzvah, the boy says he is too upset to do a ceremony, but Kirk Douglas announces that he'll have a Bar Mitzvah because the angels convinced him to be Jewish again. Though it concerns things like Bar Mitzvahs and includes the detail that it can be traditional for an 83-year-old to have a second Bar Mitzvah, this content is still very much of a kind with the series's overall theme: being Jewish, on this show where canonically Jesus is God, is all about faith in the supernatural.
Telushkin's second episode is a story-by credit. This episode, A Death in the Family, is about a racist cop (played by racist actor racist Scott Baio) who shoots and kills a Black child. Ultimately, Racist Scott Baio learns that he has Unconscious Bias to work through. But also, a Black preacher, played by Isaiah Washington, learns that organizing protests is actually bad, because he's putting a target on police. Indeed, someone throws a brick through Racist Scott Baio's window, evidence that Isaiah Washington has turned up the heat too high. In the end, the angels convince Isaiah Washington to cancel a protest march and instead invite Racist Scott Baio up to the pulpit to explain that his daughter was hit by a car driven by a Black driver, and he'll try to do better in the future. Perhaps the most notable thing about the episode is how little has changed in twenty years as far as television's mealy-mouthed attempts to address police racism.
Telushkin's final episode, Chutzpah, is absolutely unhinged. At this point in the show, Valerie Bertinelli has joined the cast as a young angel who doesn't know anything (?) so she meets some skinheads and becomes antisemitic. Meanwhile, a sofer is loosely estranged from his daughter (estranged in the Jewish sense, meaning they eat together almost every single day), who's a cartoonist at the local paper. When the paper decides that her cartoons aren't edgy enough, she starts making them super antisemitic, as a way of striking out against her father. Her antisemitic comics become SUPER popular in town and everyone loves them except for the main angel, played by Roma Downey, who explains to this Jew that the comics are antisemitic (prophetically anticipating Meghan McCain's defense of the Jewish people against the antisemite Eli Valley). One sample of the comics is just an illustration of a pretty classic antisemitic joke:
Jew A: I'm so sorry to hear that your store burned down!
Jew B: Shhh! That's tonight!
Anyway, the angels learn that the reason this cartoonist is so angry at her father (and Judaism) is that as a kid she wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a sofer, but he discouraged it because he believed only men should write Torahs. Also Valerie Bertinelli learns Hebrew and visits a Holocaust museum to learn that antisemitism is bad.
In the end, the same skinheads from the beginning get explicitly inspired by the cartoons (at no point does anyone suggest that it's irresponsible of the paper to publish antisemitic comics) and break into the synagogue to trash the Torah and also assault the sofer. The angels appear and sort of clear everything up (You're mad at him for x, he's mad about y, you're going to jail, etc), and in the end the sofer, whose hand was broken by the skinheads, lets his daughter sort of help him finish a Torah. The angels translate the Shehecheyanu for each other and the audience, and everything is resolved.
In this episode, as in Bar Mitzvah, there is no real indication that Jewish ritual is meaningful or holy (the angels do not even wear yarmulkes in synagogue) or that Jewish faith has a relationship to the divine (the angels speak English but have to learn Hebrew???), or that - most crucially - people who feel differently about ritual and tradition can still be Jewish or have positive relationships with their Judaism. If these episodes weren't literally written by a literal Rabbi I would have assumed that the writers had only a superficial comprehension of Jewish life.
Of course, as is usually the case with freelance television scripts, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin didn't have final say on what ended up on screen. His name could be on an episode where barely any of his words or story appeared. This is arguably the most embarrassing part of it all - for whatever effort Telushkin put into explaining Judaism in these scripts (Bar Mitzvahs, sofers, some prayer), the end result is the same as something any right-wing Christian could have produced - Jews experience antisemitism, the Holocaust happened, their religion is subordinate to Christianity.
I will probably not watch any more episodes of Touched By An Angel - this show truly sucks so bad - but it was very strange to take a trip into the world of this long-running show, where angels are real, and strong, and my friends.
Did any of you ever watch the show? I'd love to hear from you if so!
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