SAL LITVAK
HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR, FOUNDER OF THE ACCIDENTAL TALMUDIST
Salvador Litvak was born in Santiago, Chile and moved to New York at age five. He attended Harvard, NYU Law, and UCLA Film. His latest movie is Guns & Moses, an action thriller about a beloved small-town rabbi who becomes an unlikely gunfighter after his community is violently attacked, starring Mark Feuerstein, Neal McDonough, Alona Tal, Christopher Lloyd and Dermot Mulroney.
Sal's first film was the Passover comedy and cult hit, When Do We Eat? starring Max Greenfield, Ben Feldman, Shiri Appleby, Lesley Ann Warren, Michael Lerner and Jack Klugman in his final role.
Sal directed Saving Lincoln, based on the true story of Abraham Lincoln and his closest friend & bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. This epic indie features a new visual style called CineCollage, which places the actors within actual Civil War photographs. The film's Gettysburg Address scene has been incorporated into Houghton Mifflin's standard American history textbook, used by students across the country.
Sal wrote all these films with his wife, Nina, and produced them under the banner of his production company, “Pictures From The Fringe.”
Sal & Nina share Jewish wisdom, humor and history with over a million followers at “Accidental Talmudist.” He teaches a daily Talmud class to a diverse audience of thousands of people around the world. The project arose from Sal's faith journey to becoming an Orthodox Jew.
His first book, Let My People Laugh: The Greatest Jewish Jokes Of All Time!, published by Skyhorse, is an Amazon bestseller.
The Language of Events
SAL LITVAK
I was a teenage science-fiction fanatic. My heroes were Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke. They rarely talked about God. At the time, Hebrew School was a three-day-a-week chore that I mostly dreaded, and my teachers there didn’t talk much about God either. Nor did my parents, friends, or public-school teachers. And yet, I somehow formed a relationship with the Almighty.
He (an admittedly clumsy pronoun for a Being beyond gender) is the strong, silent type. He hasn’t spoken to me in words, but He speaks to all of us constantly in the language of events. I started paying attention at a young age because it seemed absurd to me that the universe and all its trillions of stars could have burst into existence out of nothing. The Big Bang had to have been willed. It had to have a Creator.
And if that Creator placed thinking creatures in the creation, it stood to reason that He would be interested in having a relationship with them – with us. So I started talking to Him. Decades later I learned that I had stumbled onto an important Jewish practice. You can do it too. Simply talk to God as you would to a close friend. Not in your thoughts, but with your lips. It’s liberating and rewarding. I suggest trying it in private. People can be pretty judgmental about such things – their loss.
When you talk to God, a few things happen. Since there’s no point in lying – He knows what’s what – you hear a dead honest version of yourself. More honest than the voice inside your head, which often self-deceives. And since God answers in His own way and in His own good time, you grow in patience. Eventually you even begin to grow in wisdom.
In Psalm 90, Moses addresses this process. He was luckier than most. God spoke to him in words. Moses understood that he was privileged, so he left us some guideposts for fashioning our own relationships with God. The Torah is the big one, but Psalm 90 is pretty special too. In it, Moses scripted an average person’s one-sided conversation with God, including the line, “Teach us to number our days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom.”
When you speak with the eternal One, you soon realize how short life is, even if you’re blessed to reach 120 like Moses. I don’t know about you, but my tendency is to waste a lot of time, time I’ll regret having wasted when I’m lying on my deathbed. Now, no one likes talking about their deathbed. Talking to our Creator, however, accomplishes the same task without being so grim. In fact, it’s joyful. Highly recommended.