The Beholder’s Eye by Doug Brook
The Sound of Jewsic At this time of year, the hills have just finished being alive with the sound of shofar music. As the echo fades, the traditional season for viewing “The Sound of Music” approaches, because what’s more festive and appropriate for the Thanksgiving and Christmas season than a family being chased from Austria by pre-World War II Nazis? Aside from being a lovely story about family, “The Sound of Music” has almost several Jewish aspects to it. You just have to really want to see them. So, let this column be your eyeglasses, and take a look at the heretofore or five unobserved Jewish aspects of this classic musical. The seemingly most obvious Jewish tie-in actually isn’t. Despite his name, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II was not Jewish. His grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein, was, but Numero II was raised Episcopalian. An equally obvious, and more actual, Jewish tie-in is the story of a family fleeing the Nazis just before the start of World When you know the War II, while others remain behind thinking they can just place to look, you can ride out the storm and that find something Jewish in this too shall pass. most any book But there are numerous, more subtle Jewish subtleties scattered throughout the play. The most legitimate, yet most subtle subtlety, comes during the wedding sequence. After singing “How do you solve a problem like Maria,” the nuns all sing the Confitemini Domino. Both of you who studied Latin and Hebrew and also go to services might observe that this is also the first line of Psalm 118, known to Jews as the ubiquitous “Hodu” in the festival “Hallel” and elsewhere. Back at the very beginning — a very good place to start — before Maria is sent from the abbey to be the von Trapp governess, her fate is discussed by a trio of nuns — a Catholic Beit Din. Upon arrival, Maria tries to ingratiate herself to the children by teaching them to sing. She uses the song “Do-Re-Mi,” whose words at first are as comprehensible to the von Trapp brood as a weekday minyan is to most children (and adults). That night, during a thunderstorm (or later, in the film), the kids and Maria sing a famous, playful song, “The Lonely Goatherd,” whose title easily describes more characters in Genesis than you can shake a gragger at. When Maria flees to the abbey after Brigitta (in the film, Elsa) enlightens her about the Captain and being in love, the Mother Abbess sings to her to climb every mountain — a seemingly insurmountable task, since even Moses was commanded to climb just one mountain. (As an homage to Moses climbing Sinai a second time for the second set of tablets, “Climb Every Mountain” is reprised at the end.) Not all of the Jewish tie-ins are associated with songs or plot points. Some involve the actors and even the real-life basis of the play. The ubiquitous film features Christopher Plummer (if not his singing voice) as Captain von Trapp. However, the original Broadway production five years earlier starred Theodore Bikel, who later logged thousands of performances as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
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October 2012
Southern Jewish Life