Kosher Movies

When I was 12 years old, I had what I would call an “outer-body experience.” I thought I was in the presence of God. It happened in Mountaindale, New York, in heart of the Catskill Mountains where I was a camper at a religious boys’ camp. We were singing and dancing on Friday night on the holy Sabbath, and suddenly my whole body was tingling. I felt spiritually touched, as if I had gotten an A+ on a final and hit a home run at the same time. It was an exquisite moment.

I also recall that as a very little child, my mother, of blessed memory, encouraged me to say the following prayer when I went to bed: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” My mother planted in me a sense of the spiritual life, a sense that God was involved with me. I remember that my earliest conception of God was that of an old man who lived on the top floor of my friend Victor Delgrasso’s house. He had an ancient face and a black moustache; and from my child’s perspective, he possessed a kind of divine mystery.

I share these very early childhood memories because they resurfaced as I watched Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, a one-of-a-kind movie that seriously attempts to give the viewer a notion of what life after death is like, and how love and forgiveness can enable us to cope with the inevitable inconsistencies and adversities that are part of existence.

Tree of Life takes place in the 1950s and recounts the story of a loving Texas family whose faith is tested in the crucible of life experience. The parents, played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, experience the tragic death of two children, the father’s loss of his job, and the growing-up tensions between father and son that threaten to destroy their inherent love for one another. Life, which begins with hope and innocence, brings inconsistencies, loss, suffering, and death to the forefront, echoing the Book of Job which is quoted at several points in the film.

The story is told through the eyes of the 11-year-old son Jack and through the eyes of the adult Jack, a successful architect who seeks to discover meaning in a contemporary world where wealth is the measure of the man, not his spiritual sensitivity. The film is filled with images of doorways and ladders, as if to suggest that we need to enter another world to comprehend the one in which we are living.

The climax of the movie takes us through one of those doorways. As we cross the threshold, we glimpse the afterlife, an ethereal place where we are all reconciled with one another and where forgiveness is the operative emotion. Freed from the constraints of the real world, we can make peace with parents with whom we have had deep disagreements and create eternal bonds of love with people in our lives, both past and present, all of which makes our present life more bearable, meaningful, and spiritually satisfying. The Ethics of the Fathers tells us that one moment in the afterlife is more blissful than all of life in this world, suggesting that it is only from the aspect of eternity that we can truly transcend present adversities and appreciate the everyday miracles of life.

The Tree of Life, suffused with poetic images of beauty from all facets of creation, affirms that within one’s family are nurtured the seeds of love that allow us to endure and come to terms with the mysteries and tragedies of life.

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In Israel, one of my jobs is teaching literature in an Israeli high school. A recent assignment was reading The Crucible, the celebrated Arthur Miller play which later was made into a movie whose screenplay was also written by Miller.

When one of my students asked why we are still reading this play, I responded that although it deals with the Salem witch trials of the 1690s and originally was written as an allegory of Senator Joe McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities which took place in the 1950s, the play is still relevant today.

In a burst of creative energy, I googled  “movies about the McCarthy hearings” and discovered three dealing with the topic: the 1991 film Guilty by Suspicion, the 2005 film Goodnight and Good Luck and the 2007 documentary Trumbo. I then downloaded the trailers for all three films onto my iPad and showed them to my students before we read the play. I then asked them what is the common thread between those films. The answer: they all address the issue of being true to oneself, about being a person of integrity even at great personal cost. That is a topic of significance today as much as it was over fifty years ago when The Crucible first appeared.

The movie begins with a scene of teenage girls running in the forest at night conjuring love potions to encourage the affections of young men in Salem. Their dancing is witnessed by the local preacher who sees their wild behavior as witchcraft, the work of the devil. This eventually leads to a myriad of false innuendos and false accusations made in court about upright citizens, which unravel the bonds of community.

A central figure is Abigail Williams. She has had an affair with John Proctor, and wants to get rid of Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, who stands in her way. In fact, she rejoices when Elizabeth, along with many others, is singled out as a witch condemned to death for trafficking with the devil. With her gone, John will be free to marry her. Absorbed in her own selfish needs, she threatens her peers not to contradict her perjury and they oblige.

Numbers of innocent people are sentenced to death on the testimony of this group of girls who have fabricated stories of devil worshipping among the righteous pillars of the town. To stop the hangings, John Proctor is compelled to admit his own moral mistake and he, too, is condemned to death.

In a powerful, poetic scene on a windy day by the sea, he has a frank conversation with his wife in which they finally communicate in an open and honest way with one another and confess their shortcomings as husband and wife. It is an emotional tableau of reconciliation that touches the heart and mind. In the end, Proctor values life and agrees to confess to Judge Danforth, the presiding judge in the witch trials.

But there is a problem. Danforth wants Proctor’s signed confession to be posted on the church door for the entire community to see. That will blacken Proctor’s name forever. In an impassioned speech, he cries out: “How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name!”

The Ethics of the Fathers tell us that our most important possession is not our wealth or our knowledge but rather our good name. More important than the priesthood or kingship is our reputation. John Proctor understands this well. He wonders aloud: “I have three children—how can I teach them to walk like men in the world?” If his name is besmirched, then how will his children regard him? Leaving them his farm or his wealth is meaningless if he cannot leave them his good name. A good reputation is a legacy that transcends the generations.

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