Rick Sacks is a crazy guy who doesn't exactly think he's Judas -- but something like that. Can't remember. Noam has been selling him for some time now. Worth getting for some Naked something or other!
Naturally I said: “book him.”
Well we shot Rick yesterday, and he was better than I imagined.
Simcha came in the morning, one ear glued to his cell phone, talking to someone – anyone – about the Tomb. He asked what we were doing. I told him: Rick Sacks, and explained approximately what I’ve explained here. Simcha looked as though he might spit.
Well fifteen minutes into our interview with Rick, which we conducted as publicly as possible on Ben Yehuda street in the City Centre, Simcha leaned over to me and whispered: “this guy’s great”.
I can’t exactly take credit for this choice, after all he’s Noam’s friend, and having spent a little time with Noam in the summer I guessed that someone he recommended would have a good chance of being at least interesting.
But Rick was more than interesting. He was bordering on nuts.
And I use the word 'bordering' loosely.
Rick is from L.A., although he’s lived all over the world (“A Jew should wander”, he told me), and he believes passionately that Judas is the most maligned Jew, the most maligned person in the history of the world. If only we would embrace him as the Messiah (and he believes the Gospels tell us that we should) the world’s problems would be solved. Or, to put it another way, Christianity would be erased off the face of the earth and all the rest of the peace loving religions (like Islam and Judaism, to choose but two) would be able to fulfill their pacific destinies.
Simcha, being nuts in his own way but no slouch when it comes to recognizing television gold suggested that we should introduce Rick to a few American Evangelical pilgrims.
So we loaded Rick into the van and took him to the old city. Because you know that if you want a subtle, quiet, nuanced discussion of religion, the Old City is your place.
It went awfully well.
The crowds lined up to argue with, berate, and shout at the founder of the movement of the Righteous Double Cross. He gave as good as he got, and then some.
In the end Rick was thrilled at the attention, Simcha was happy that he hardly had to do anything except let Rick loose on the unsuspecting tourists, and I’m happy that when I get back to the cutting room I’m going to be able to use each and every one of those drunken teenage Australian pilgrims. Cause they all signed releases.
We ended the day at the American Colony Hotel, a real institution in East Jerusalem, the place where movie stars, and foreign correspondents on an expense account stay. If your sympathies push you toward the Arab side of town, your bank account allows, and your taste runs to colonial excess, this is your joint.
We came here to interview Professor James Charlesworth from Princeton.
The hotel was built in the nineteeth century, the home of Pasha Rabbah Daoud Amin Effendi el Husseini who built a wing for each of his four wives. And it’s exactly what you are imagining.
After our interview ended, and the sun set, I sat in a wing back chair in the bar of the hotel, sandwiched between the huge wine cellar and the fireplace, behind me a view of the impossibly blue swimming pool. I watched more than listened to Simcha expound the umpteenth iteration of the Tomb theory and thought back over the last few days.
The American couple: “He coulda got right down off that cross anytime he wanted, called the whole thing off…” The pilgrims singing tepid folk songs at the stations of the cross. The Arab teenager shouting “allahu Akbar” at the top of his lungs in the crowds of the Damascus Gate, just to see the tourists flinch. And the Hasid peeing voluminously on the door to the garden of a Catholic Church, paying special attention to the brass handle, a men’s washroom not ten meters away.
And it dawned on me: Rick Sacks may be nuts, but in Jerusalem he fits right in.
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