He has played most every role in the movies, but in real life, he looks to the Bible for cues

Los Angeles

KIRK DOUGLAS INSISTS THAT the stroke that paralyzed his cheek muscles, forcing him to struggle to get out his words, has had at least one benefit: Now, the octogenarian actor has to think twice before speaking. If only, he complains, the journalists in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East who ostensibly report on his doings could follow suit. Almost every story written about him these days, he told The Jerusalem Report, gets it wrong. Grossly wrong.

"Are these people journalists?" he rails. "For Chrissake, why don't they just pick up a phone and ask me what's going on?"

Douglas is not that hard to find. He lives in an unprepossessing ranch-style house in Beverly Hills, a few blocks south of Sunset Boulevard. Pulling up to the curb, I double-check the address to make sure this is the right place: Surely Kirk Douglas can do better than this.

I am partially reassured by the weather-worn mezuzah at the entrance to his house, and more so when a Hispanic woman emerges from a side gate to give me the once-over, asking me to wait a moment while she opens the front door.

After I'm admitted, Douglas makes his entrance, shaking my hand with a firm, warm grip, and ushering me into the living room. Even knowing about the physical travails he's suffered in recent years, I was still unprepared for the shock of meeting him. Douglas looks so old!

"Say it ain't so, Spartacus," I almost blurt out. But as he begins to hold forth, it becomes clear that in some senses, it ain't. Douglas's mind is clear, and his thoughts tumble forth with logic and deliberation. In fact, the presence of a reporter is almost superfluous - he's been interviewed enough times about his return to Judaism to know the routine. And of course, now he has an agenda: setting the mangled record straight, something he proceeds to do before I can ask my first question. After five minutes or so, though, realizing I may still want to go through the motions of an interview, he slaps my thigh and says, "You know, contrary to most opinions, I am actually capable of shutting up - so please feel free to have me do so."

"Certainly not," I reply. "You're touching all the bases - please do continue."

No, says Douglas, 83, he is not, nor does he plan to become, an Orthodox or even an observant Jew. And no, he is not, as he has been described, a disciple of the Los Angeles branch of the Jewish outreach organization Aish HaTorah Jerusalem.

Yes, he studies with several Orthodox rabbis, including Aish's West Coast education director, Rabbi Nachum Braverman. And yes, he has participated in at least one Aish HaTorah fundraiser. He also hosted a Bible Codes seminar at Universal City last year, and attended a dinner in November at which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented Douglas with the organization's King David award.

But Douglas sees Aish as a study resource, not as the driver for a total life style makeover, and certainly not as the fundamentalist cult some critics have branded it. Douglas also studies with other Orthodox rabbis, most notably Canadian-born David Aaron, of Jerusalem's Isralight Institute. Aaron flies in periodically, holding study sessions with Douglas (occasionally sons Michael and Joel attend as well) that can last up to five hours at a stretch.

"This is not about politics or denominations," he says. "I have no interest in Israeli politics. I don't care if someone has tzitzit down to the floor, or if they are Reform or atheist. I am not Likud and I am not Labor. I am a Jew, and all Jews are my brothers. I am merely trying, by studying Torah and using my money to help people, to become a better person."

Douglas says he has not, as reported, bought up properties in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel or the West Bank, either for personal reasons or to support or establish settlements or seminaries. Moreover, he has never met, and has no known association with, Miami-based bingo tycoon Irving Moskowitz, who has made a number of provocative land purchases. And he most assuredly does not see himself, in contrast to a recent report in the official Palestinian daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida, as "a racist American actor" known for his anti-Arab and anti-Muslim positions.

"All I have done," Douglas told The Report, "is build some playgrounds. I built one in the Ezra neighborhood of Tel Aviv, in honor of Yitzhak Rabin. I built another in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, next to Herod's Gate, so that the Palestinian children there would have a beautiful place to play. I would like to build the next one in Jaffa, where Arabs and Jews can play together. If this makes me a racist, then I suppose I'm a racist.

"I believe that the Palestinians are there to stay. No one is going to throw them out. My only hope is that Jews and Palestinians will learn to live together. In some small way, maybe these playgrounds will help."

But Douglas has also pledged $ 2 million to Aish HaTorah for the establishment of a multimedia theater near the Western Wall.

"When a visitor comes to the Kotel," he says, "it's an emotional experience. But then there's nothing… except maybe for that wonderful trip through the (Western Wall) tunnels. I want to build a theater there where Jews and gentiles can experience a multimedia history of the area, something like an IMAX theater, maybe with Steven Spielberg's help. But none of this involves purchasing the land. It belongs to the city."

THE DETAILS OF THE FORMER Issur Danielovitch, later Isidore Demsky's, renewed interest in his own Jewish heritage are now widely known, thanks largely to the recent publication of a second autobiographical tome, "Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning" (Simon & Schuster).

The sequel to his 1988 "The Ragman's Son," Douglas's new memoir is by a man who can no longer be bothered not to tell it as he sees it. And what he sees, he sees with an eye entirely unclouded by pain, infirmity, delusion or despair.

In 1991, returning to Los Angeles from Ventura County northwest of the city, the helicopter Douglas flew in hit a small plane and crashed. The plane's two occupants, an experienced 46-year-old flying instructor and an 18-year-old high school senior, died. But Douglas did not die, although his painfully compressed spine, and the stroke that, five years later, debilitated half his body, often left him wishing that he had.

"I felt terrible, terrible guilt," he said. "I was in my 70s. I had made some 80 films, I had four kids. I had done something with my life. But this kid who died would never even get to attend his senior prom. Why was I alive?"

It would have been too easy, Douglas acknowledges, to succumb to the notion that he had deliberately been spared to fulfill some divine purpose. What possible purpose could be achieved, by the same token, through the death of an 18-year-old boy?

No one, Douglas believes, can discern God's purposes - not in this world, and who can even pretend to know about the next? His survival, and his attendant afflictions, may have been preordained. But it would be up to Douglas to discover, or imbue them with, any human meaning.

"C.S. Lewis said that pain is God's megaphone to wake up a deaf world. I was selfish. I was always doing two, three, four pictures a year. I was acting, producing, directing, never thinking of other things. I had to be hit on the head. Boom! Boom! Now, I'm beginning to get the message.

"I really am very lucky. No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse. So what if I have a speech impediment? Moses had one, and he did all right. I don't expect to do as well as Moses. But I am functioning. You can sit and ask me questions, and I can answer you, and you understand what I am saying. So what's the problem? "I just want to give my money away, to do worthwhile things that will help other people."

Douglas says he turned to the Torah for inspiration after staring forelornly at a series of Chagall paintings depicting the Patriarchs. Michael had asked him about the family ancestors. They were Russian peasants from the Jewish Pale, Douglas recounted, food for Cossacks. But that wasn't where the drama was. The drama, he realized with Chagall's help, lay in the Bible.

"These were my ancestors," he told his son. "We have an amazing lineage we can be proud of. I am touched by the drama of being a Jew," Douglas declared, "by the Torah and by how God gives you a second chance."

LIKE MANY OTHER JEWS WHO hail from Hollywood, Douglas feels a tad beholden to the Orthodox Jews now reaching out to them from organizations like Chabad, Aish HaTorah and even the controversial Kabbalah Center. The Orthodox remind some of their immigrant great-grandparents, and of a quaint world long gone.

Douglas believes that Orthodox Jews preserved Judaism while secular Jews like himself sampled the fleshpots of Western culture. "If we didn't have those black-hatted Jews throughout the ages," he intones, "Judaism might have died out. They kept it alive. But my aim is not necessarily to be a religious Jew. That's why I like Aish. They are not political. They don't exclude those of us who are less observant. They believe in religious tolerance. Sure they'd like everyone to put on tefillin every day. But they won't tell anyone to do it. It wouldn't help if they did."

Of course, that religious tolerance doesn't extend to accepting the changes that Reform Judaism has made in the rules that determine how Jewish identity is passed down. And superstar son Michael, not halakhically Jewish, recently told an Israeli TV interviewer that he was watching with concern attempts in Israel to tighten up conversion procedures.

Kirk's two marriages have been to non-Jews. Michael and Joel come from his first wife, Diana, and Eric and Peter are from his marriage to Anne, which has lasted 43 years. All four have developed an interest in Judaism, and no one is more surprised than Kirk. Most strikingly, a script called "A Song for David," about a businessman who returns to his Jewish roots, to the distress of his son, has served as a vehicle of reconciliation between him and Michael. Michael gave his father the property as a gift, and the two are working to develop it as a film, in which Kirk hopes to make a comeback.

I ask Douglas if he doesn't feel any contradiction supporting organizations such as Aish HaTorah that might not be willing to recognize his children as Jewish unless they converted.

"Michael has asked that question," replies Douglas, "and so far, he hasn't heard any answers, not even from those Jewish organizations that routinely hit him up for money. It's a problem. But it's not, to my mind, an insurmountable problem."

During his lifetime, Kirk Douglas received three Academy Award nominations and after his stroke, a lifetime achievement Oscar. He won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best actor, for "Lust for Life" (1956), a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Jefferson Award for Public Service, the American Cinema Award, Germany's Golden Kamera Award and the French Legion of Honor. How, I ask, did his dinner with Bibi Netanyahu compare with the glitter-filled events that accompanied these honors?

"I've always said that any dinner that ends early is a success," he says, assuring me that he left with a good personal gut feeling for Israel's embattled prime minister. "If they try to keep me past the '10 O' Clock News,' I tell them I'm sorry, but they're waiting for me at the disco."