Judaism is nothing if not about tradition. Sandi DuBowski’s engrossing new documentary, “Sabbath Queen,” about Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, explores the many tensions around what it means to be a rabbi pushing against the constraints of patriarchal Jewish Orthodoxy in a rapidly changing and complex century.
The film, playing at the M.V. Film Center on Sept. 3, opens with Lau-Lavie preparing two men for their wedding. He tells us, “I broke the law. My choice and my actions represent betrayal. I imagine myself looking in my grandfather’s eyes. All the other rabbis who consider what I’m doing to be a breach, while I’m sitting on their shoulders … I’m also resisting their hold.”
DuBowski doesn’t reveal what law Lau-Lavie broke until the end of “Sabbath Queen,” when he flashes back to the same wedding.
Soon we meet Lau-Lavie’s older brother, Orthodox Rabbi Benny Lau, who weaves in and out of the story, and reveals a complex emotional relationship as the siblings negotiate their diverse political and ideological beliefs in an underlying love and respect. DuBowski says, “That’s so rare these days in this toxic climate, where people have lost the ability to talk to each other, and somehow, these two brothers find a way. For me, that’s a model of how we can be in love and disagreement.”
Lau-Lavie and his brother are their family’s 38th generation of rabbis, stretching back some 1,000 years to the 11th century. Lau says of Lau-Lavie, “You say to him, Be a decent man. Be yourself! The moment I say that the path to protect Judaism runs through orthodoxy, we’re in two different places … Where’s the boundary? Playing a game with Judaism seems very dangerous to me.”
Lau-Lavie says of this internal conflict, not just with his brother, but with the Orthodox community at large, “One day I am going to die and stand before the Throne of Glory, and there is this one option where God is going to look at me and say, ‘Why didn’t you follow all the rules that all the rabbis told you?’ or is going to look at me and say, ‘Wow, why didn’t you follow your heart?’”
Raised in a closed Orthodox Jewish community in Israel, Lau-Lavie’s uncle and cousin served as Chief Rabbi of Israel. Lau-Labie reflects, “I’ve been isolated from the Orthodox world where I grew up. I’m totally ‘an other.’” Later in the film, he explains. “That religion I grew up on — the patriarchal Orthodoxy, my father’s legacy in its intact form, I left it for a reason. I stand behind my ethical and aesthetic and philosophical and poetic, feminist, humane rejection of that strand of Judaism.”
The film follows Lau-Lavie’s quest over 21 years to creatively and radically reinvent Judaism and ritual, and to challenge patriarchy and supremacy. His journey began in 1993 in Israel, when there was a newspaper story about the hypocrisy of the religious establishment that outed him as gay. “It was a very difficult, painful, and surprising thing, because then he had to deal with it publicly,” DuBowski explains.
Coming to New York City in 1997, Lau-Lavie found a home with a politically subversive drag group called the Radical Faeries, which he describes as “a combination of people who are queer and connected to the spiritual shamanic reclaiming of being. Worshiping everything under the sun and laughing at it. When I discovered the Radical Faeries, I discovered how to be who I am. To be very queer, very spiritual.”
He says of his drag persona, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, “She emerged out of my head like Athena. She is a Hungarian matchmaker, kabbalist, and truthsayer. It became clear she is not me. This is something between channeling and performance. It’s something about the feminine and the divine … One of the ways to tap the sacred inside of us is through the Joker.”
The mix of artistic ritual and sacred is carried on in Lab/Shul, a God-optional experimental Jewish community. Lau-Lavie founded this nondenominational congregation in New York City in 2012 as an experimental pop-up synagogue, when he was a rabbinical student.
The scenes of the diverse Lab/Shul community are profoundly moving. They include powerful interfaith marriages, which Lau-Lavie believes open up the possibility of not “losing the Jew,” as the Orthodox community puts forth, but creating the opportunity to bring the partner to Judaism.
Ethical challenges arise, as Lau-Lavie gets deeper into his studies to become a rabbi within the Conservative tradition. He wants this because it will give him a platform of legitimacy. Yet it sets up a dilemma, because it disallows interfaith marriage. We see, hear, and feel the impact of the resulting internal struggle within Lau-Lavie and the Lab/Shul community, which leaves us anxious to see where he ultimately will stand.
The film takes us to the present day, as Lau-Levie advocates for peace, a ceasefire, and an end to the occupation in Israel/Palestine. “We are learning to keep our sense of Jewish, but open it up to create peace and coexistence … all over the world,” he says, leaving us with the question, “How do we reimagine our sacred traditions to achieve peace?”
DuBowski’s choice of title is subtly complex. In Judaism, the Sabbath is a feminine concept, depicted as a queen. “I think ‘Sabbath Queen’ captures some essence about the kind of spirituality of this film,” DuBowski says. “The playfulness and gender expansiveness. I think there is something redemptive about the title. And I feel that Amichai always does his work with a wink.”
He concludes about this powerful and thoughtful documentary, “I want audience members to be nonbinary, and think about that as a space where we are not in these polarized ends, but sitting in what Amichai would call the ‘messy middle,’ and we’re dialoguing with everybody.”
“Sabbath Queen” plays on Sept. 3. For tickets and information, visit mvfilmsociety.com/2024/07/mviff-sabbath-queen.
