{"id":33961,"date":"2019-12-20T03:33:16","date_gmt":"2019-12-20T11:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=33961"},"modified":"2019-12-18T13:03:54","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T21:03:54","slug":"livings-jewish-aspects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/12\/20\/livings-jewish-aspects\/","title":{"rendered":"Living\u2019s Jewish aspects"},"content":{"rendered":"

A still from the Netflix show Living With Yourself, co-starring Paul Rudd.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As the secular New Year approaches, many people make resolutions, in an effort to become a better person. What if there were a shortcut? What if, for a tidy sum, you could be transformed, virtually overnight, into the person you\u2019ve dreamed of being?<\/p>\n

This the conundrum posed by the Netflix show Living With Yourself<\/em>, an eight-part series released in late October, starring Paul Rudd and Aisling Bea, who play spouses Miles and Kate Elliot. Rudd is also one of the executive producers.<\/p>\n

The premise is this: Miles, a shlub discontent with and disconnected from his wife, and suffering career ennui, discovers a \u201cspa\u201d that offers a treatment to improve his charm and confidence. For a small fortune, they promise, a \u201cnew you.\u201d And so, a shlemiel enters and a gentleman exits. Just one problem: [spoiler] it\u2019s actually a cloning lab and, unbeknownst to Miles and Clone Miles, the two men exist and, later, each must contend with the other in his life.<\/p>\n

Rudd\u2019s 25 years of movie experience includes Ant Man<\/em>, Anchorman<\/em>, Knocked Up<\/em>, 40-Year-Old Virgin<\/em> and Clueless<\/em>. On television, he played Mike Hannigan in Friends<\/em> and appeared in Reno 911<\/em>, among other things.<\/p>\n

The New Jersey-born actor hasn\u2019t been shy in publicly discussing his Jewish identity. He kibitzed a bit about his Jewishness in an interview segment of Between Two Ferns<\/em>. In an episode of Finding Your Roots<\/em>, he found out that his grandfather, Davis Rudnitsky, fought the Nazis, only to return home to England to face antisemitism. In 2017, Rudd played his first (overtly) Jewish character, Moe Berg, in the biopic The Catcher Was a Spy<\/em>, about a baseball player who joins the Second World War effort as an undercover agent.<\/p>\n

In Living With Yourself<\/em>, there is one explicit Jewish moment, when a Holocaust survivor tells Miles an off-colour anecdote about the Shoah, involving pork. But there are also hidden Jewish themes. For example, envious of a colleague\u2019s extraordinary success in the office, Miles is spurred by the prospect that his technological makeover could help him outperform this coworker. Though Judaism has no problem with someone being motivated to accomplish because of another\u2019s success, the Torah warns against jealousy. The ninth commandment is one obvious caution against such sentiment: \u201cThou shalt not covet.\u201d Another is Joseph\u2019s brothers (Genesis 36), who, enraged with jealousy, sell Joseph into slavery. In a sense, Miles and Clone Miles are like brothers, and they develop petty and spiteful jealousies, wanting the best of both worlds, but not able to have it.<\/p>\n

If only Miles initially had derived fulfilment and was grateful for what he had, he wouldn\u2019t be in this much trouble. Ethics of Our Fathers<\/em> (Pirkei Avot<\/em>) (4:1) advises just that: \u201cWho has wealth? The one who is pleased with his lot.\u201d The meaning isn\u2019t limited to \u201cwealth\u201d of materials, of course, but the wealth of blessings that are bestowed upon us, including, for most of us, our loved ones, our safety, our employment and access to the necessities of life.<\/p>\n

Notably, though, Miles versus Clone Miles is illustrative of the yetzer hara<\/em> (good inclination) and the yetzer hatov<\/em> (bad inclination) at battle with each other. Interestingly, neither character is completely good nor bad, but a combination, reflecting the real, complicated, human condition, where we have both inclinations competing inside us.<\/p>\n

Often, we are able to convince ourselves of the nobility of our decisions \u2013 that is, find a good reason for our perhaps less-than-good action; explain away the importance of a choice\u2019s potential harm. Paradoxically, the yetzer hatov has a sneaky side. To explain this, author and radio host Dennis Prager often cites the late Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, former head of the Conservative rabbinate. He once told Prager that he had his yetzer hara under control, but his yetzer hatov \u201calways got him into trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rarely do ordinary people wake up each morning and strive to make another human miserable. Still, we must wrestle with our \u201cother\u201d selves, overcome our justifications and egos, to make principled choices. Every day is a lesson in living with ourselves.<\/p>\n

Dave Gordon<\/strong> is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 100 publications around the world.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A still from the Netflix show Living With Yourself, co-starring Paul Rudd. As the secular New Year approaches, many people make resolutions, in an effort to become a better person. What if there were a shortcut? What if, for a tidy sum, you could be transformed, virtually overnight, into the person you\u2019ve dreamed of being? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33962,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[5780,218,9564,7645,9563,7066,2172],"class_list":["post-33961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-culture","tag-judaism","tag-living-with-yourself","tag-netflix","tag-paul-rudd","tag-television","tag-torah"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}