Sam Katz’s ‘The Storm: 1765-1790’

Coincidentally, this Passover/Easter season we Philadelphians were also exhorted by the municipal-finance-consultant-turned-mayoral candidate-turned-documentary-film-producer Sam Katz to retell the story of the American Revolution, lest we forget that we were once oppressed peons of the British crown (and slave-owning peons, to boot). In The Storm: 1765-1790, Part 4 of Katz’s multipart series, Philadelphia: The Great Experiment, the God-like catalysts are neither Moses nor Jesus but homegrown miracle workers like James Logan (“the great intellectual of the colonies”) and of course Benjamin Franklin (who “saw that you could make a dirty, miserable city into a better place”).

You already knew that, of course. But the exercise remains worthwhile if only because, with each retelling, you might notice something that you’d overlooked before. Thanks to computer technology, Katz’s half-hour segments (he has completed nine, not necessarily in chronological order) can place live actors in 3-D recreations and painted moving backdrops so you actually feel yourself on the cobblestones of High Street (now Market)— smelling the horses, dodging the sewage dumped from front doorsteps (no modern plumbing in those days), and jostling with the increasingly angry and violent mobs in a decidedly uncivil and unsanitary community.

Violent and unsanitary

This scenario provides a useful alternative to the conventional wisdom that believed that the American Revolution was driven by the Founding Fathers, those elegant visionaries in three-cornered hats. “The Storm” suggests, contrarily but originally, that the Revolution was actually driven from below: by the anger of some 10,000 tradesmen, merchants, servants, women and, yes, black slaves, all of them crowded together within a few chaotic blocks, the likes of which even a farsighted city planner like William Penn hadn’t anticipated. By contrast, the men of the cultural elite (including Franklin, not to mention slave owners like James Logan) were relatively comfortable with the status quo; they aspired not for independence from the Brits but merely to be “just as English as anyone living in the British Isles.”

As I’ve suggested before, Katz’s episodes seem most valuable — and on surest ground — when they’re dealing with the distant past, as opposed to, say, the ’90s, when Katz was running for mayor. (Click here.) By reinventing himself as a historical impresario, Katz has demonstrated that running for public office isn’t the only way a citizen can serve his or her community.

Jewish slavery

Now, about that Exodus from Egypt —

At our family seder this past weekend, I discerned something that had somehow escaped my notice in my previous 70 years of seders. According to Genesis (12:2), God commanded Abraham to leave Mesopotamia and go to the land of Canaan (what we now call Israel), where he would become the founder of “a great nation.” But in fact Abraham fathered only Isaac; Isaac sired Esau and Jacob; and Jacob had 12 sons, of whom the brightest, Joseph, was sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers. Once there, Joseph rose to become prime minister to Pharaoh, the Egyptian king. And when a famine broke out in Canaan, Joseph invited his father and all his family to join him there. Jacob went down to Egypt with just a few people, but before long “the few became a nation, great, mighty and numerous” (Deuteronomy 26:5) — so numerous that a new king “who knew not Joseph” enslaved them, lest they overthrow him. And so these Israelites remained enslaved for 400 years, until Moses led them to freedom.

In other words, Abraham’s so-called Israelite tribe actually lived in Israel only for three generations, no longer than my German Rottenberg ancestors sojourned in Hungary during the 19th century before moving on to America. Those Israelites didn’t become a great and numerous community until they arrived in Egypt. Yet they persisted in thinking of themselves as Israelites, just as we Rottenbergs call ourselves Hungarians when there’s little reason for us to do so.

Rearview mirror

According to Genesis (15:13), God had warned Abraham, “Know that your descendants will be strangers in a land not their own. There they will be enslaved and oppressed for 400 years.” But God had also promised Abraham that his descendants would later go free, saying, “The very nation they will serve [that is, Egypt], will I bring to judgment, and they [the Israelites] will go forth with great wealth.” Thus, according to my Haggadah, “The Israelites were to learn what it means to be slaves; thus they were to be made ready for the sacred role they were destined to play as defenders of justice and freedom.” During those four centuries of slavery in Egypt, “the Israelites kept faith with God, remembering God’s promise to their ancestors. They held fast to their ways, keeping ever faithful to the covenant. And God kept faith with Israel.”

Talk about history observed through a rearview mirror! If you’re a Jew in the 21st century, 400 years of character-building slavery may strike you as downright beneficial. But if you were a Hebrew slave in Egypt, being told that you and your descendants were doomed to bondage for the next 400 years — how grateful would you feel to know that a big payoff awaits your kind, far down the road? What, do you suppose, were the Hebrew slaves really thinking during those 400 years of captivity? For that matter, what was Jesus thinking and doing throughout all those long days when he wasn’t delivering sermons or performing miracles but had to concern himself with the more tedious private business of making a living?

These thoughts occurred to me at a seder that took place just 48 hours after I viewed the premiere screening of The Storm. Which leads me to this thought: When Sam Katz is done with Philadelphia: The Great Experiment, I may have another project or two for him.