Try Not to Get Worried

Me, My Dad, the Wedge, and Jesus Christ Superstar

When I sat at my first real Shabbat meal in Jerusalem, surrounded by well-meaning Jews telling me my true faith was Judaism, one of my first objections was, “But you don’t understand, my favorite musical is Jesus Christ Superstar.”

“Oh,” said the hostess. “I liked that too when I was a girl. It’s alright.” She meant my liking the play wasn’t important.

But she didn’t understand. I really liked Jesus Christ Superstar, loved it, actually (and still do, perplexed Jew or not).

I’ve seen the musical performed at least four-and-a-half times¹ and am inordinately proud of having seen the original Broadway cast featuring Ben Vereen as Judas. As a child, I listened to “The Brown Album,”² countless times in my basement, alternately identifying as Judas pleading with Jesus to be reasonable, Jesus pleading with God to take away the cup of suffering, and even Mary pleading with Jesus to relax. There’s a lot of pleading in Jesus Christ Superstar.

I daresay the musical formed as much or more of my concept of Jesus as any Sunday school lesson or any of the four Gospels and that the only close competitor to it in my life was the 1977 Zeffirelli made-for-TV drama, Jesus of Nazareth.³

I’ve always admired how Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s production humanizes Jesus. There are no miracles in the play. Jesus is less a prophet than a charismatic leader tortured by the seeming failure of his mission, betrayed by his “right-hand man,” misunderstood by his not-so-bright disciples, and unable, because of his higher calling, to return the love of the woman who yearns for him. He is sometimes sad, sometimes angry, often impatient, occasionally self-pitying, but ultimately ready to sacrifice himself in the name of God.

As a one-time believer who did, ultimately, accept Judaism as my true faith, I still admire that man.

But what surprised me last week was the rediscovery that my father shared my love for the musical.

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Last week was my dad’s twentieth yahrzeit (anniversary of death according to the Jewish calendar).⁴ Because of that and in preparation for a planned guest blog on him, I went back to an audiotape of interviews I made with him after he retired in the 1990s.

I’ve listened to this tape before, but every time I revisit it, I rediscover something new. This time, I rediscovered my father’s love for Superstar.

He was explaining to me a phenomenon that plagued him his entire life. He called it “The Wedge.”

The Wedge, he said, was an event that “jumps in and ruins something.” By way of example, he told me about what happened to him that afternoon. He had been talking with his cousin George and old friend Ferenzc, both of whom he knew from before the War in Hungary. There must have been some difficult content or associations in those conversations because he told me that afterward, he needed some “nice music therapy," and

my God, I was so lucky. I put the TV on, and it was Jesus Christ Superstar, and I like the music of Jesus Christ Superstar very much. . .

While listening to it, he was interrupted twice by phone calls—one for my mother and one for me—small examples of The Wedge—but, nonetheless, he went back to the musical, and so greatly did it relax him that he was able to find and massage a troubling sore muscle that had been eluding him.

It’s puzzling that Superstar relaxed him so much. I daresay it’s perplexing. From start to finish, conflict and tension drive the show. In fact, one of the most famous songs in the show is one in which the character Mary ineffectively urges Jesus to relax.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Jesus Christ Superstar (and, my frum friends, I mean you), the musical tells the story of the last days in the life of Jesus leading up to his crucifixion. Over the course of two hours, we see Jesus deal with disciples who misunderstand his mission, a reformed prostitute who is in love with him, powerful priests who fear he will inspire an uprising, and Roman politicians seeking to protect their cushy jobs from whatever threat he seems to pose. Throughout all this his disciple Judas, who is kind of a co-star, agonizes about his choice to betray Jesus. The story ends with Jesus’s crucifixion sans resurrection⁵ so that the ultimate status of Jesus as “Christ” is left unanswered. Hence the lyrics of the show’s title song sung by Judas after he hangs himself:

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,
Who are you? What have you sacrificed?
Jesus Christ Superstar,
Do you think you're what they say you are?

The music is amazing, and the lyrics are as inspired as the King James Bible. But it’s hardly relaxing. Indeed, I’ve often praised the soundtrack to friends as featuring the best screams in all rock and roll (and apparently, I’m not alone in noticing that).

So it’s curious to me that, after wearying discussions with two of his oldest friends with whom he shared tragic histories, that my father found this once-controversial⁶ play so soothing as to literally relax his muscles.

But my father was a curious man.

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My father, the proud papa, circa 1964. Your author is the kid looking up at Mom.

Born in 1921, née Lazlo Breslauer, my dad was two years old when his father changed the family name to Balazs, a Magyar name, in an attempt to assimilate. It didn’t help. In the last months of the war, both my father’s father and brother were killed by the Hungarian Arrow Cross, i.e. Hungarian Nazis, and my dad only managed to escape through the grace of his blue eyes and quick wit in passing himself off as the non-Jewish family maid’s son.

He was a man who told me he couldn’t focus enough to finish a book unless he was forced to but who somehow managed not only to teach himself English but also to get himself through medical school in Canada and eventually go on to practice anesthesia at the world-renowned New York Hospital.⁷

He was a man who converted to Christianity to save his children from the threat of a second Holocaust but who could never let go of the Jewish identity he kept hidden from friends, co-workers, and even his sons.⁸ He was a man who claimed not to believe in God but who always said, “thanks God,” when you asked him how he was.

He was a charmer, a storyteller, but also a man with a temper. And when he was mad, he frequently took the Lord’s name in vain, either calling on God to damn something or yelling out the full name of his presumed son.

He was a man who once pitched a fit because my brother played a John Lennon song on Christmas morning instead of something more traditional, a man who lived through the 1960s but couldn’t tell you who Mick Jagger was, a man who, when he wanted to relax, when he wanted to escape painful memories, was made joyful by a musical about an angry young Jew who gets nailed to a cross. . . .

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What did my father see in the musical? Was it just the tunes?

Maybe it was in, fact, that song about relaxing, the one in which Mary Magdalene, the woman I once thought of as Jesus’s girlfriend, exhorts him, “Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to/ Problems that upset you.”

Judas, of course, interrupts the song with complaints about Mary spreading “fine ointment/Brand new and expensive” that “Should have been saved for the poor.” But my father, I suppose, would have recognized Judas’s intrusion as The Wedge, the inevitable interruption that ruins everything. Perhaps that’s how he saw the crucifixion. It made sense, perhaps, to my father that, in the end, the beautiful mission goes awry.

I know he much preferred the first act of the play to the second. I know that because in the late 1970s, I went with him and my mother to see a revival of the musical at the Long Acre Theater in Times Square. My mom got the times wrong, and we found ourselves locked out of the first act. My father refused to go into the show late, asserting that all the best music was in the first act, and my mother and I sat out the second half on our own.⁹

Despite my father’s claim, however, the second half of Superstar does have some great music, notably “The Last Supper” and “King Herod’s Song,” but I guess you could say Act 2 is all Wedge. Jesus gets betrayed, arrested, taunted, denied, judged, and executed. Unless you believe in the Resurrection, it’s kind of depressing.

And I don’t think my father did believe in the resurrection. My mother once told me he said Judaism was hard enough to believe. With Jesus, my father said, you just add more stuff to stretch credibility.

And yet, for all that, there was something in the Andew-Llloyd Weber version of the story that must have touched my father, something that struck him so deeply he felt it in his flesh, something maybe about a Jew who sometimes lost his temper, who sometimes found it hard to love, who sometimes failed and sometimes succeeded, who did his best, nonetheless, to be a good man in trying times.

1. Keep reading to understand the fraction.

2. This is the original album that preceded even the Broadway show and features the outrageously great vocals of Ian Gillian as JC and Murray Head as Judas.

3. I could not be dissuaded, for example, by my Catholic best friend that Jesus did not have a girlfriend because of my understanding of Mary Magdalene as informed by Yvonne Elliman.

4. He passed away in the morning on the 26 of Adar. Interestingly, this year is a Jewish leap year, so there are two Adar’s, and by Chabad custom, I will observe his yahrzeit twice. The second time will be April 4. And, in between, there will also be the English anniversary of his death, March 19. So the way I see it, I’ll be spending a month or so thinking about my dad, and expect to post a few times about it.

5. The last time I saw Superstar performed it was in Chattanooga, TN and starred an aging Ted Neeley (star of the film version). In that performance, Jesus actually floated off the Cross and across the stage, but I thought that was a poorly conceived betrayal of the play’s original spirit.

6. Not only did some Christians find the play sacrilegious, Jews accused it of antisemitism. I remember seeing the Jewish protestors outside the theater. They argued that the play blamed Jews for the death of Jesus. I suppose it does in a way, but I don’t think anyone ever walks away from that play thinking the message is “hate the Jews” because, of course, almost everyone in the play, from Mary to Judas to Jesus, is a Jew.

7. Now called Weill Cornell Medical Center.

8. “Why does Dad always ask about the last names of my friends,” I once asked my mother. This was sometime after my father told me about our Jewish identity. “Because,” she said, “he wants to know if they’re Jewish.”

9. A scene I sought to immortalize in my short story “Omicron Ceti III,” title story of my collection.