Stephen Macht trained professionally at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, is a graduate of Dartmouth College, holds a Ph.D. in Dramatic Literature from Indiana University and, during his teaching days, was a tenured Associate Professor. Stephen has been called “one of the best educated working actors in American today.”  He has played leading men in plays and dozens of television movies and feature films including “Raid on Entebbe,” “Graveyard Shift,” and “The Immigrants” to name just a few.  On television, he has starred as Sharon Gless’ love interest in “Cagney and Lacey” and has had recurring roles on “Boston Public,” “Jack and Jill,” and “Boomtown.” In 2007, Soap Opera Digest nominated Stephen as “Villain of the Year” for his work as the dastardly “Trevor Lansing” on “General Hospital.”  On stage, he played all the young leads at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario in its 1975 season and went on to  star opposite Charlton Heston in both “A Man for All Seasons” and ”Caine Mutiny Court Martial.”  Most recently, he starred opposite Sharon Gless in “A Round Heeled Woman.” While undertaking his studies at AJRCA, Stephen has served as the Chaplaincy/Rabbinic Intern for Rabbi Jerry Cutler of Creative Arts Temple in Los Angeles, a position he has held for the past three years. In that capacity, he has served the congregation by officiating at lifecycle events, commenting on the weekly Parshiot and, most recently, instituting the “Creative Arts Jewish Play Reading Series,” in which he directed Paddy Chayefsky's “A Holiday Song.” Opera Theater Ink called the reading “a resounding success.” Reflecting his deep commitment to philanthropy, Stephen works with such organizations as The Parkinson’s Resource Organization, The Jewish National Fund, the Center For Jewish Culture and Creativity, serves as Celebrity Spokesman for the Israeli Consulate and as a performer/director in Jewish theatre projects in Los Angeles for the past twenty five years.  Stephen and his wife, Suzanne, have four children as well as eight grandchildren and counting. 

 

Stephen received his M.A.  in Jewish Studies this past June and graduated as a Chaplain from the Academy for Jewish Religion, L.A.  His goals as a chaplain are:  “By integrating my theological and pastoral training and my career as an actor, producer and director, I hope to transmit my passion for Jewish values via the arts to the Jewish community in multiple ways as speaker, scholar, teacher, artist and chaplain.”

 

I had been aware of Mr. Macht's work since his days on Cagney and Lacey. When I discovered his Jewish commitment and his desire to be a chaplain, I knew that he would be a subject of great interest for this project.  I asked him first about his early religious life.

 

SM: My father was a secular Jew from the South who married an orthodox girl from the North.   She ran away to New York and Columbia University from her small town life in Mystic, Connecticut and from her Jewish isolation in a sleepy, Christian village in which her extended family were  the only Jews. She married my father in New York and he died at 44 when  I was 9 years old.   

 

My mother returned home to Mystic with my brother and me.  My grandfather davened every morning, and quite frankly, his Hebraic mumbling scared the shit out of me! But I was also fascinated because he seemed to transcend his worldly existence and transport himself into another state of being, somewhere else other than his small dining room. My grandfather was a kindly man who never proselytized but seemed to be at one with everything when he prayed and in his daily behavior toward other people, until his dementia ravaged him and he confessed to me he was ready to ‘go anytime.’  As he lay dying in an old age home, I read him the  Mourner's Kaddish. I didn’t understand the prayer, but as I read the Hebrew, Grampa seemed to squeeze my fingers as we held hands.

 

DW: What does Judaism mean to you?

 

SM: To be a Jew means learning how to become a mensch. Through study at the Academy for the Jewish Religion here in Los Angeles and with the nurturing of my compassionate, loving wife, Suzanne, I am discovering what being a mensch is.  I remember looking at my father’s head in that coffin, and I said, "I will never die! I will never be like you!" As I've grown older and studied the works of Maimonides and Aristotle, I realized at that moment I was fulfilling their insights and unintentionally, without knowledge, I had become my own worst enemy;  I became the threat to my own well-being.

 

It's written into our liturgy, you know.  In our daily prayers, especially in the Amidah, it's all there--discovery of our mistakes of judgment, reversal and repentance are built into a way of living a healthy, Jewish system of ethics. With the aid of this ritual--and I don't care if you worship the moon or the great white whale, as long as it helps you lead a holier life—some form of doing mitzvoth creates a system of good deeds.  These actions, in turn, become metaphors for holy garments that every individual can weave.  We make spiritual clothing composed of ‘golden chain- mail links.’ That's the kind of mensch I want to be as a father, a husband and a grandfather.

 

(I had mentioned to Mr. Macht, who had guest starred in a three part episode of STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and had been considered for the role of Jean Luc Picard in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, that I am a HUGE Trek fan, and he told me the following)

 

SM: I met with Gene Roddenberry (the creator of Star Trek) through DC Fontana (a writer who worked on the original series and the first season of Next Generation). She had shown Gene my  television and feature work on video tape.  Roddenberry smiled at me, "You're the next Starfleet captain. I want you to do this role." I shied away from it.  At that point in my life, I was not ready and available to become the Commander. When I met Gene, I was still a rebel who thought “Count no man happy till he is dead!” was my operating principle.  I didn't understand that Star Trek was a series of pithy morality plays in which man gets to undergo a journey to the farthest reaches of the universe to discover himself and a system of values enabling him to live of life of well-being .

 

DW: Can you tell me about some of your roles that were influenced by your Judaism?

 

SM: At the Stratford Canadian Shakespeare Festival, I played John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible.  I played him as an American Jew among goyim.  I became a man who was a stranger from himself, that is the best part of himself,  his love and integrity.  Ultimately when his dishonesty becomes the cause and threat to his own wife’s life, Proctor learns to tell the truth,  make vidui, as it were, in order to teach his children to “Stand (for justice, truth and love) upright in the wind.”  He sacrifices his life for those values.

 

Two memorable events took place.  I was recruited by Universal Talent Scouts and offered a contract to go to Hollywood.  Just as important, after one matinee performance,  a man with a bowler hat stopped me in the street, took his coat off, and rolled up his sleeve.   He showed me his tattoo from Auschwitz.   He said, "You played Proctor as a Jew!  In my Polish town, the goyim sold Jews for ‘two golden’ candlesticks?!” (a reference in the play to the fascist hypocrisy of the Salem Christians).  I started to weep and thought, "You got it; you understood!"  That Jewish spirit of integrity was what catapulted me.

 

Over the years, I slowly learned that La'asoke B'divrei Torah ("To immerse one's self in the study of Torah") is something I had to do every day.

 

DW: You said you came to this later in life.  How has your family reacted?

 

SM: My children see that I'm never more myself than when I'm attending to my grandchildren’s needs. I live in the present, in a manner I never could do before.  In the past, I was a father but an anti-hero fighting my own demons.  Thank God, I married a woman whose healthy instincts were always toward and into life. To me, she is a living example of the Shechina (God's presence).

 

Many years ago, I played “Yoni Netanyahu” in the movie, "Raid On Entebbe." When that movie was released, my young family and I were in Israel and I met Yakov Aloni,  a commander in the IDF and a leader in the Jewish Agency. At Yoni’s grave in the military cemetery on Mount Herzel, Aloni asked me what the raid was about. I answered, "Saving Israelis at Entebbe."

 

"No," he told me. "That's not what it was about. Up until that raid, every Jew in the world had two rights—the right of return to Israel or aliyah, and the right to an education provided by the State of Israel.  When the Palestinian commandos separated Jew from Christian, not simply Israelis from Christians, The State of Israel launched that raid because we created a third right: the State of Israel reserves the right to protect Jews anywhere in the world."

 

For the next two weeks, Aloni ‘walked the bible’ with me and my family.  He helped me discover the living significance of many places that are mentioned in the Tanach.  It was then that I started to discover that my life had  to become more  about doing good things for Jews.

 

I try to allow those themes--how can I do good things for Jews? How can I be true to myself as a Jew and as a human being?  How can that kind of  consciousness take me back to the beginning of this discussion? How do I become a mensch?