(Picture: Rabbi Amichai Lau Lavie. Supply: Rialto Cinemas)
Director Sandi DuBowski makes motion pictures into social actions. His 2001 documentary Trembling Earlier than G-d illuminates the struggles and braveness of queer Orthodox Jews. When DuBowski took Trembling on the exhibition highway, he was decided to have the movie be a catalyst for non secular activism. Rabbis whose intolerance had harmed individuals featured within the movie appeared on stage to apologize for his or her spiritually-inspired cruelty and to ask Jewish queer people to share a Shabbat desk with them. The movie turned a touchstone for queer Jews who took to calling themselves “tremblers.” It helped catapult the Conservative motion, which had been wrestling mightily with queer points, to a place of higher tolerance, together with the ordination of queer rabbis. And it impressed different religion communities to do their very own repentance for non secular homophobia. A screening in Salt Lake Metropolis actually introduced Mormons out of the closet to specific their ache and their queer persistence to their co-religionists.
DuBowski is again to creating cinematic good hassle along with his 2024 documentary Sabbath Queen. This sprawling movie follows Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, the religious co-leader of New York’s God-optional Lab/Shul and his Hasidic drag queen persona, Rebbitzin Hadassah Gross. Lau-Lavie grew up in Israel, the inheritor obvious of 29 generations of Orthodox rabbis. Involuntarily outed by a journalist when he was in his 20s, Lau-Lavie has spent his religious life wrestling along with his Orthodox patriarchal legacy whereas striving to convey Judaism into the 21st Century. As he places it, “Not every thing we’ve inherited is worthy of being handed on.” However decided to separate the wheat from the chaff and to honor the Jewish queer, the female precept, and interfaith love, Lau-Lavie makes his lifework an amalgam of religious work and play. Director Sandi DuBowski chronicles Amichai’s religious journey onscreen. And as Sabbath Queen makes its means internationally at movie festivals and in theaters, DuBowski and Lau-Lavie typically accompany it and switch screenings into temples stuffed with soulful power.
The origin story of this documentary hearkens again to Trembling Earlier than G-d. DuBowski initially needed to incorporate Lau-Lavie’s queer Orthodox journey in Trembling; Lau-Lavie refused, however they turned buddies. The making of Trembling brought about DuBowski to take an Orthodox flip in his personal Jewish orientation. Nevertheless, after finishing that movie, he discovered himself changing into religiously restive with Orthodoxy and drawn to the much less conventional Jewish journey that Amichai was on. Provided that Amichai “opened [him] as much as discover Judaism another way,” he dedicated himself to let Amichai’s “life unfold earlier than the digital camera.”
With 1,800 hours of footage of that life in addition to 1,100 hours of archival footage, the movie took over 21 years to make, with six of them dedicated to modifying. The working title of the movie was “Rabbi,” and one may properly think about the tagline “that is what a 21st-century rabbi seems to be like” accompanying the promotional image of Lau-Lavie in a decent black tank high with tefillin (phylacteries) wrapped round his muscular arm. Nevertheless, the title Sabbath Queen extra aptly conveys the combination of the sacred and the campy that defines Amichai’s Judaism.
Amichai’s religious awakening and want to problem his patriarchal legacy started in earnest in his teenagers when he was a part of a mixed-gender group that went to the Kotel (often known as the Western Wall) in Jerusalem. Each the police and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) males encircled the group and forcibly eliminated them. Women “screaming and crying” as they have been dragged away from this holy website haunted him, and he couldn’t wrap his thoughts round such violence directed at “Jews who wish to pray.”
Given his early championing of gender equality as foundational to Judaism, it appears no coincidence that Amichai discovered his personal voice as a queer Jew—and a religious chief—in drag as Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross. Residing in New York within the late Nineties, he discovered a fusion of the queer and the religious within the Radical Faeries, a bunch that was, for him, stuffed with “worship and laughter.” Serving because the Grasp of Ceremony at a Radical Faeries occasion and admittedly below the affect of “one vodka too many,” the concept for a widowed Hungarian Rebbetzin who spoke with a powerful accent and was the mom of six sprung from his head “like Athena.” She embodied his conviction that “redemption will solely come via transgression.” Relatively than being a voice of antagonism, she was in favor of every thing, was a star of Purim (a carnivalesque Jewish vacation), and preached that the “greatest commandment is to dwell fortunately.” Representing the divine female in addition to the disruption of the masculine/female binary, the Rebbetzin allowed him to provide voice to the “profound mystical educating” that was inside him and of which he was beforehand unaware. He in the end got here to know her as “the masks” he wore to find himself.
As soon as Amichai allowed himself to discover his religious choices immediately and unmasked, he retired the Rebbetzin Hadassah as his queer religious alter ego. Nevertheless, worshiping the female facet of the divine turned central to the Lab/Shul expertise within the type of welcoming the Sabbath Queen into that religious area each week (this ritual follows the kabbalistic custom of imagining the Sabbath as a bride or a Queen). For Shira Kline, the co-founder of Lab/Shul and the queer daughter of a rabbi, bringing the Sabbath Queen into the Lab/Shul home served as an antidote to the Judaism of her youth. In that custom, males learn and led, and girls watched. Relatively than worshipping God as a masculine choose and king, Lab/Shul and the Sabbath Queen ritual join her with “spirit and thriller, the female voice.”
DuBowski contains a number of takes of the raucous, joyous ritual within the movie that bears its title. And screenings of the movie typically embody a Sabbath Queen service in order that audiences are usually not merely watching Amichai and his Jewish co-conspirators at religious work, however embodying and performing that work themselves. On this means, DuBowski hopes that Sabbath Queen, like Trembling Earlier than G-d, could be a movie that turns into a catalyst for change, a film that turns right into a motion for a extra joyful and inclusive Judaism.
To additional emphasize and characterize the centrality and necessity of female religious power, DuBowski crosscuts the Sabbath Queen ritual at Lab/Shul with an animated model of Rebbetzin Hadassah strolling into the Lifeless Sea to launch the Shekhinah (the female facet of God within the Jewish custom) from her burial floor. Brilliantly, this onscreen anti-realist religious work is given the imprimatur of famous Israeli professor and feminist activist Alice Shalvi, who died in 2023. Shalvi says within the movie that, traditionally, the Shekhinah was perceived as a risk to patriarchy and thus needed to be sidelined. By incorporating an animated type of Rebbetzin Hadassah into the movie, DuBowski conveys the playfulness that attends Amichai’s and Lab/Shul’s severe commitments to a queer and feminist Judaism.
Amichai was properly into his work because the co-leader of Lab/Shul when he determined to pursue a rabbinical diploma on the Conservative Motion’s Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). DuBowski conveys the irony of this new route by twice together with footage of Napthali Lau-Lavie, Amichai’s father, saying that he couldn’t think about his son ever changing into a rabbi. Whereas his father couldn’t see his wayward son taking his place within the household enterprise, Amichai’s Lab/ Shul congregants have been additionally flummoxed by his want to formally change into a part of the rabbinate. He undertook this path as a result of he believed that to “make actual change,” it’s a must to “get contained in the system.” Unable to situate himself inside Orthodoxy, he additionally couldn’t pursue a extra liberal rabbinical route since he felt that “would shut the doorways of dialogue with extra right-wing non secular Jews,” together with members of his circle of relatives. His time at JTS was exhausting; whereas the establishment was dedicated to normative Jewish observe, Lau-Lavie was dedicated to transgressive Judaism. Footage of Rabbi Daniel Nevins, then dean of JTS, studying that Lau-Lavie leads a God-optional congregation underscores that JTS and Amichai regularly examined and challenged each other. Regardless of these challenges, Amichai accomplished his diploma and was ordained as a Conservative rabbi.
However intermarriage brought about Amichai and Conservative Judaism to half methods. The Conservative motion doesn’t enable its rabbis to officiate at interfaith weddings. Amichai knew this when he enrolled at JTS, and the scene when he explains this to his perplexed and dissatisfied Lab/Shul congregation is poignant. Nevertheless, after being ordained, he felt the necessity to serve a queer couple who needed a Jewish-Buddhist wedding ceremony. Footage from this occasion opens the movie; later, we return to it, with a fuller understanding of this pivotal second within the lifetime of this couple, within the Lab/Shul neighborhood, and in Lau-Lavie’s rabbinical profession. Having damaged Jewish legislation, he resigns from the Rabbinical Meeting of the Conservative Motion, although he retains the title of rabbi. DuBowski cleverly cross-cuts the rabbinical backlash to this occasion and the primary dance of those newly married “Joys,” those that perceive themselves as each Jew and Goy.
The attitude of Rabbi Benny Lau, Amichai’s brother and a preferred and outstanding Israeli rabbi, is threaded all through the movie. Unsurprisingly, he’s a cautionary voice about Amichai’s religious methods and waywardness. For Benny, “enjoying a recreation with Judaism,” is stuffed with hazard and creates a disaster of boundaries, whereas for Amichai, the transgression of boundaries is a religious alternative and even a necessity. At one level, Benny urges care as a result of “individuals be taught from you.” But, regardless of his commitments to Orthodox traditions that Amichai upends, he turns into Amichai’s scholar. He celebrates Amichai’s ordination as a rabbi within the Conservative motion, acknowledges that “the closet is loss of life,” and finally ends up doing his personal feminist work by bringing a girl as a religious chief into his personal conventional neighborhood. Such incremental however nonetheless transformational modifications to Benny’s personal religious orientation verify Amichai’s function as a cross-denominational changemaker. However Benny’s shifts concurrently level to the ability and the opportunity of non secular wrestling matches that usually occur in even essentially the most staunchly tradition-bound communities. Like Trembling Earlier than G-d, Sabbath Queen explores fault strains throughout Jewish worlds and the ache visited on those that are Jewishly othered. But, each movies exhibit that throwing out the infant with the bathwater is as untenable and counterproductive as settling for the established order.
Amichai’s religious orientation is one which resists the binary of observant and secular Jew, that transgresses the boundary between masculinity and femininity, that challenges those that would legislate love and separate Jew from Gentile in intimate relationships. Given this penchant for binary busting, Amichai unsurprisingly refuses to simply accept the opposition between Palestinian and Israeli. In the course of the 2014 Gaza warfare, he attended a pro-Israel occasion sporting an indication that learn “Stand with Israel, Mourn with Gaza, Stop the Fireplace, Seize Our Peace.” When he’s aggressively informed that he’s within the flawed place and that he’s a mamzer (illegitimate), he refuses such a abstract dismissal, telling his verbal attacker that his father was a Holocaust survivor, that he served within the IDF, and that he’s a Hebrew speaker.
His response to October 7 closes the movie. After Hamas’s modern pogrom, he went to Jerusalem, “maintain[ing] the ache of my Israeli household” whereas not justifying the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza. Insisting on a “bilateral ceasefire, a hostage deal, and a path towards everlasting peace,” he insists that the necessity to “reimagine our sacred traditions to realize peace” is the “problem of our lifetime.”
Whereas Amichai is stuffed with religious chutzpah, he’s concurrently spiritually humble. Admitting to doubts concerning the path he’s on, he says “I believe I’m doing the appropriate factor, typically I’m unsure, solely time will inform.” Recognizing that his selections would possibly foster continuity or “disrupt [it] too radically,” he refuses dogmatism as he continues to serve his congregation. Amichai does what Jews maybe do finest: he wrestles.
Helene Meyers is Professor Emerita of English at Southwestern College. Her most up-to-date e-book is Film-Made Jews: An American Custom.
(Picture: Rabbi Amichai Lau Lavie. Supply: Rialto Cinemas)
Director Sandi DuBowski makes motion pictures into social actions. His 2001 documentary Trembling Earlier than G-d illuminates the struggles and braveness of queer Orthodox Jews. When DuBowski took Trembling on the exhibition highway, he was decided to have the movie be a catalyst for non secular activism. Rabbis whose intolerance had harmed individuals featured within the movie appeared on stage to apologize for his or her spiritually-inspired cruelty and to ask Jewish queer people to share a Shabbat desk with them. The movie turned a touchstone for queer Jews who took to calling themselves “tremblers.” It helped catapult the Conservative motion, which had been wrestling mightily with queer points, to a place of higher tolerance, together with the ordination of queer rabbis. And it impressed different religion communities to do their very own repentance for non secular homophobia. A screening in Salt Lake Metropolis actually introduced Mormons out of the closet to specific their ache and their queer persistence to their co-religionists.
DuBowski is again to creating cinematic good hassle along with his 2024 documentary Sabbath Queen. This sprawling movie follows Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, the religious co-leader of New York’s God-optional Lab/Shul and his Hasidic drag queen persona, Rebbitzin Hadassah Gross. Lau-Lavie grew up in Israel, the inheritor obvious of 29 generations of Orthodox rabbis. Involuntarily outed by a journalist when he was in his 20s, Lau-Lavie has spent his religious life wrestling along with his Orthodox patriarchal legacy whereas striving to convey Judaism into the 21st Century. As he places it, “Not every thing we’ve inherited is worthy of being handed on.” However decided to separate the wheat from the chaff and to honor the Jewish queer, the female precept, and interfaith love, Lau-Lavie makes his lifework an amalgam of religious work and play. Director Sandi DuBowski chronicles Amichai’s religious journey onscreen. And as Sabbath Queen makes its means internationally at movie festivals and in theaters, DuBowski and Lau-Lavie typically accompany it and switch screenings into temples stuffed with soulful power.
The origin story of this documentary hearkens again to Trembling Earlier than G-d. DuBowski initially needed to incorporate Lau-Lavie’s queer Orthodox journey in Trembling; Lau-Lavie refused, however they turned buddies. The making of Trembling brought about DuBowski to take an Orthodox flip in his personal Jewish orientation. Nevertheless, after finishing that movie, he discovered himself changing into religiously restive with Orthodoxy and drawn to the much less conventional Jewish journey that Amichai was on. Provided that Amichai “opened [him] as much as discover Judaism another way,” he dedicated himself to let Amichai’s “life unfold earlier than the digital camera.”
With 1,800 hours of footage of that life in addition to 1,100 hours of archival footage, the movie took over 21 years to make, with six of them dedicated to modifying. The working title of the movie was “Rabbi,” and one may properly think about the tagline “that is what a 21st-century rabbi seems to be like” accompanying the promotional image of Lau-Lavie in a decent black tank high with tefillin (phylacteries) wrapped round his muscular arm. Nevertheless, the title Sabbath Queen extra aptly conveys the combination of the sacred and the campy that defines Amichai’s Judaism.
Amichai’s religious awakening and want to problem his patriarchal legacy started in earnest in his teenagers when he was a part of a mixed-gender group that went to the Kotel (often known as the Western Wall) in Jerusalem. Each the police and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) males encircled the group and forcibly eliminated them. Women “screaming and crying” as they have been dragged away from this holy website haunted him, and he couldn’t wrap his thoughts round such violence directed at “Jews who wish to pray.”
Given his early championing of gender equality as foundational to Judaism, it appears no coincidence that Amichai discovered his personal voice as a queer Jew—and a religious chief—in drag as Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross. Residing in New York within the late Nineties, he discovered a fusion of the queer and the religious within the Radical Faeries, a bunch that was, for him, stuffed with “worship and laughter.” Serving because the Grasp of Ceremony at a Radical Faeries occasion and admittedly below the affect of “one vodka too many,” the concept for a widowed Hungarian Rebbetzin who spoke with a powerful accent and was the mom of six sprung from his head “like Athena.” She embodied his conviction that “redemption will solely come via transgression.” Relatively than being a voice of antagonism, she was in favor of every thing, was a star of Purim (a carnivalesque Jewish vacation), and preached that the “greatest commandment is to dwell fortunately.” Representing the divine female in addition to the disruption of the masculine/female binary, the Rebbetzin allowed him to provide voice to the “profound mystical educating” that was inside him and of which he was beforehand unaware. He in the end got here to know her as “the masks” he wore to find himself.
As soon as Amichai allowed himself to discover his religious choices immediately and unmasked, he retired the Rebbetzin Hadassah as his queer religious alter ego. Nevertheless, worshiping the female facet of the divine turned central to the Lab/Shul expertise within the type of welcoming the Sabbath Queen into that religious area each week (this ritual follows the kabbalistic custom of imagining the Sabbath as a bride or a Queen). For Shira Kline, the co-founder of Lab/Shul and the queer daughter of a rabbi, bringing the Sabbath Queen into the Lab/Shul home served as an antidote to the Judaism of her youth. In that custom, males learn and led, and girls watched. Relatively than worshipping God as a masculine choose and king, Lab/Shul and the Sabbath Queen ritual join her with “spirit and thriller, the female voice.”
DuBowski contains a number of takes of the raucous, joyous ritual within the movie that bears its title. And screenings of the movie typically embody a Sabbath Queen service in order that audiences are usually not merely watching Amichai and his Jewish co-conspirators at religious work, however embodying and performing that work themselves. On this means, DuBowski hopes that Sabbath Queen, like Trembling Earlier than G-d, could be a movie that turns into a catalyst for change, a film that turns right into a motion for a extra joyful and inclusive Judaism.
To additional emphasize and characterize the centrality and necessity of female religious power, DuBowski crosscuts the Sabbath Queen ritual at Lab/Shul with an animated model of Rebbetzin Hadassah strolling into the Lifeless Sea to launch the Shekhinah (the female facet of God within the Jewish custom) from her burial floor. Brilliantly, this onscreen anti-realist religious work is given the imprimatur of famous Israeli professor and feminist activist Alice Shalvi, who died in 2023. Shalvi says within the movie that, traditionally, the Shekhinah was perceived as a risk to patriarchy and thus needed to be sidelined. By incorporating an animated type of Rebbetzin Hadassah into the movie, DuBowski conveys the playfulness that attends Amichai’s and Lab/Shul’s severe commitments to a queer and feminist Judaism.
Amichai was properly into his work because the co-leader of Lab/Shul when he determined to pursue a rabbinical diploma on the Conservative Motion’s Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). DuBowski conveys the irony of this new route by twice together with footage of Napthali Lau-Lavie, Amichai’s father, saying that he couldn’t think about his son ever changing into a rabbi. Whereas his father couldn’t see his wayward son taking his place within the household enterprise, Amichai’s Lab/ Shul congregants have been additionally flummoxed by his want to formally change into a part of the rabbinate. He undertook this path as a result of he believed that to “make actual change,” it’s a must to “get contained in the system.” Unable to situate himself inside Orthodoxy, he additionally couldn’t pursue a extra liberal rabbinical route since he felt that “would shut the doorways of dialogue with extra right-wing non secular Jews,” together with members of his circle of relatives. His time at JTS was exhausting; whereas the establishment was dedicated to normative Jewish observe, Lau-Lavie was dedicated to transgressive Judaism. Footage of Rabbi Daniel Nevins, then dean of JTS, studying that Lau-Lavie leads a God-optional congregation underscores that JTS and Amichai regularly examined and challenged each other. Regardless of these challenges, Amichai accomplished his diploma and was ordained as a Conservative rabbi.
However intermarriage brought about Amichai and Conservative Judaism to half methods. The Conservative motion doesn’t enable its rabbis to officiate at interfaith weddings. Amichai knew this when he enrolled at JTS, and the scene when he explains this to his perplexed and dissatisfied Lab/Shul congregation is poignant. Nevertheless, after being ordained, he felt the necessity to serve a queer couple who needed a Jewish-Buddhist wedding ceremony. Footage from this occasion opens the movie; later, we return to it, with a fuller understanding of this pivotal second within the lifetime of this couple, within the Lab/Shul neighborhood, and in Lau-Lavie’s rabbinical profession. Having damaged Jewish legislation, he resigns from the Rabbinical Meeting of the Conservative Motion, although he retains the title of rabbi. DuBowski cleverly cross-cuts the rabbinical backlash to this occasion and the primary dance of those newly married “Joys,” those that perceive themselves as each Jew and Goy.
The attitude of Rabbi Benny Lau, Amichai’s brother and a preferred and outstanding Israeli rabbi, is threaded all through the movie. Unsurprisingly, he’s a cautionary voice about Amichai’s religious methods and waywardness. For Benny, “enjoying a recreation with Judaism,” is stuffed with hazard and creates a disaster of boundaries, whereas for Amichai, the transgression of boundaries is a religious alternative and even a necessity. At one level, Benny urges care as a result of “individuals be taught from you.” But, regardless of his commitments to Orthodox traditions that Amichai upends, he turns into Amichai’s scholar. He celebrates Amichai’s ordination as a rabbi within the Conservative motion, acknowledges that “the closet is loss of life,” and finally ends up doing his personal feminist work by bringing a girl as a religious chief into his personal conventional neighborhood. Such incremental however nonetheless transformational modifications to Benny’s personal religious orientation verify Amichai’s function as a cross-denominational changemaker. However Benny’s shifts concurrently level to the ability and the opportunity of non secular wrestling matches that usually occur in even essentially the most staunchly tradition-bound communities. Like Trembling Earlier than G-d, Sabbath Queen explores fault strains throughout Jewish worlds and the ache visited on those that are Jewishly othered. But, each movies exhibit that throwing out the infant with the bathwater is as untenable and counterproductive as settling for the established order.
Amichai’s religious orientation is one which resists the binary of observant and secular Jew, that transgresses the boundary between masculinity and femininity, that challenges those that would legislate love and separate Jew from Gentile in intimate relationships. Given this penchant for binary busting, Amichai unsurprisingly refuses to simply accept the opposition between Palestinian and Israeli. In the course of the 2014 Gaza warfare, he attended a pro-Israel occasion sporting an indication that learn “Stand with Israel, Mourn with Gaza, Stop the Fireplace, Seize Our Peace.” When he’s aggressively informed that he’s within the flawed place and that he’s a mamzer (illegitimate), he refuses such a abstract dismissal, telling his verbal attacker that his father was a Holocaust survivor, that he served within the IDF, and that he’s a Hebrew speaker.
His response to October 7 closes the movie. After Hamas’s modern pogrom, he went to Jerusalem, “maintain[ing] the ache of my Israeli household” whereas not justifying the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza. Insisting on a “bilateral ceasefire, a hostage deal, and a path towards everlasting peace,” he insists that the necessity to “reimagine our sacred traditions to realize peace” is the “problem of our lifetime.”
Whereas Amichai is stuffed with religious chutzpah, he’s concurrently spiritually humble. Admitting to doubts concerning the path he’s on, he says “I believe I’m doing the appropriate factor, typically I’m unsure, solely time will inform.” Recognizing that his selections would possibly foster continuity or “disrupt [it] too radically,” he refuses dogmatism as he continues to serve his congregation. Amichai does what Jews maybe do finest: he wrestles.
Helene Meyers is Professor Emerita of English at Southwestern College. Her most up-to-date e-book is Film-Made Jews: An American Custom.
