The Twilight Zone taught real truths about the human condition.
I always thought of The Twilight Zone as a show that so excellently captured the zeitgeist of the time in which it ran, from 1959 to 1964, but I never thought of it capturing the Jewish soul. Alan H. Luxenberg used to teach a course on the show at a religious school and found a profundity rarely seen in popular culture today.
He says:
It is a show I watched as a child but it is only now that I have begun to realize how meaningful a program it really was. The show was preoccupied with man’s place in the universe, with threats to freedom and individuality, and with man’s inhumanity to man. With such preoccupations, I figured there must be a lot of grist there for the religious school mill.
Read more here.
—Mike D’Virgilio
I caught an episode the other day, titled “In Praise of Pip” and staring Jack Klugman. Here is the episode summary:
Max Phillips learns his only son has been wounded in Vietnam. Feeling he could have been a better father, he returns three hundred dollars to an unlucky bettor and is shot by his boss’s hitman. He makes it to an amusement park. There he finds his son, a child again, and they relive past pleasures. Pip runs away, and when Max catches him, he tells his father that he is dying and disappears. Max makes an offer to God – his life for Pip’s. He dies and his son is allowed to live.
I thought about how that same story would play out today, and am certain that, instead of being an example of a father’s love for his son and the sacrifice he’d make so his son might live, it would focus on the politics surrounding the war. It was interesting the in 1963, when “In Praise of Pip” aired Vietnam took up just a few minutes in the opening scene.