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Rabbi, Have I Got a Girl for You!
Herb Freed
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Summary
Alternately hilarious and heart-rending, "Rabbi Have I Got a Girl for You!" follows the earnest, if occasionally misguided, exploits of young Rabbi Ben Zelig as he valiantly tries to balance the sometimes tragic and often bewildering demands of his calling.
Real, surreal and super real, each of the six stories takes a unique stylistic twist. One of the most riveting episodes centers on the Rabbi's desperate search to recapture his lost faith. His Walpurgisnacht quest leads him into phantasmargorical situations where he encounters outrageous Fellini-esque characters who lead him on a bizarre adventure that starts in the ivory tower of The Rabbinical Academy, winds its way through Harlem strip clubs and ends in the Garden of Eden.
Whether the events in these stories actually happened or not, they are undeniably true.
Reviews
Reading Herb Freed's six short stories about Rabbi Ben Zelig, I laughed and cried from page to page. Once you start reading, you don't stop. Freed is a gifted story-teller with a vivid imagination and a wonderful power of narrative. He captures your attention and then seizes your heart and doesn't let go. He invents people you'd want to know, beginning with the rabbi himself. In these stories, you meet the daughter of a great theologian of Judaism who dances in a go-go bar, an actress dying of cancer who converts to Judaism and on her deathbed marries the rabbi, a rabbi's first funeral and what can go wrong (more or less, everything). Someone shakes a finger at the young rabbinical student and warns, "If you become a Rabbi, you will delay the coming of the Messiah for another thousand years." The stakes in these stories mount up.
Each one of the stories takes up a classic theme of the Torah and translates it into a credible story, populated by real people. Ezekiel, Job and Joshua all come on stage. Freed is a film director and writer and producer, as well as a rabbi, and he makes his characters live. The rabbi's mother chooses his wife in a reprise of Ruth and Naomi, and the rabbi preaches, "The book of Ruth is a powerful testament to love and loyalty; to friendship and devotion to one another. It's about two amazing women and how they turned each other's grief into triumph." Through the allegory of a biblical narrative I was asking my mother for forgiveness and thanking Soji for opening my heart. Freed has already shown how that has happened, then he spells it out - in a manner of Midrash - or film. But what else would you expect from the only member of the Director's Guild of America and the Writers Guild, west, who is also a member of the Rabbinical Assembly of America (Conservative).
Some writers use Judaism for color or texture. Freed doesn't do that, he sets out to imagine what "Judaism" would be like if the truths could be translated into the relationships of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, the living and the dying, the healthy and the sick. And that is his starting point, an act of imagination that transforms biblical narratives into enchanting events of here and now. Freed's book is an act of religion. It is not about Judaism, but it is a book of Judaism: it is a sefer.
Jerusalem Post
**** “…a delicious book, absurd and exuberant, wise and uproarious… You must read it.”
Robert Kovacik, KNBC
“Herb Freed's "Rabbi, Have I Got A Girl For You" is a delightful mosaic of warm wit, rich spice and sardonic social commentary.”
Richard Z. Chesnoff, columnist, NY Daily News, author, "The Arrogance of the French"
“Herb Freed captures the reader’s emotions in telling stories at once funny and moving, satirical and serious, about universal problems: life and death, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers and everywhere, lovers lovers, lovers. The Bible’s Ruth, Ezekiel, Job, the Kabbalah’s picture of death and eternal life – these eternal verities take shape in what happens to contemporary Americans as the master story-teller tells their stories…Freed does for Judaism what the great Andrew Greeley does for Catholicism. He shows how religion is story, before it is anything else, after it is everything else.” (Extracted from review in The Connecticut Jewish ledger.)
Jacob Neusner, Professor of Theology, Bard College
“…combines the whimsical enchantment of Amelie with the boisterous, boundless joy of Mad Rabbi Jacob."
Michael Heuser, Producer, Hurly-Burly, starring Sean Penn, Meg Ryan
“...a remarkable book crammed with wit and wisdom it cries out to be read.”
Rabbi Barry Friedman, Emeritus, B’Nai Abraham, Livingston , N.J.
“… a magnificent collection of stories…an uplifting book. It touches the Jewish heart in everyone, – even those of us who aren’t.”
Glynn Turman, Actor/Director, (Cooley High/ A Different World/ The Wire)
“Hip Hip Hooray and L’Chaim! Herb Freed’s witty, touching and enchanting book is full of laughter, love and LIFE!”
Jackie Joseph, The Tolucan Times
“ Superb…funny and tragic, but what is most remarkable about each story is its depth.”
Gil Cates, Producer, ACADEMY AWARDS
“…a glorious achievement…powerful and moving.”
Professor Shalom Paul, Chairman, Bible Dept., Hebrew University
“If you like a good laugh, a good cry And a good read…have I got a book For you!”
Howard Albrecht, comedy writer, Editor: Gags Gang
About the Author
An active member of the Director's Guild, the Writers Guide, west and the Rabbinical Assembly of America, Herb Freed is the quintessential Hollywood hyphenate.
Soon after he was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Freed became spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Lake Mahopac, New York. At the same time, he produced and directed three shows at the Maidman Playhouse in New York City. Dore Schary, a member of the Seminary's Board of Trustees as well as head of production at MGM, became Freed's mentor when he resigned his pulpit to become a movie director. "Don't think of yourself as defrocked," Schary counseled, "merely unsuited."
Freed directed and produced fifteen feature films, including top grossers like Tomboy and Graduation Day, movies seen regularly on TV: Subterfuge, Beyond Evil, and Paradise Lost and award winners like Haunts, starring Mai Britt. His credits include seventy TV shows and over two hundred TV commercials, including award winners for Pepsi-Cola, Revlon, Clairol, U.S. Steel and many others. All this is detailed on IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base). He is married to Marion Segal, an accomplished film editor and writer, with whom he collaborated on his last five films. Freed is currently working on Valor, a film inspired by one of the most heroic events of World War II.
