Ki Tissa 2010

It is Oscar weekend, it came early this year, and we have an overtly Jewish film in the running.  You may or may not have seen A Serious Man—it had two brief stands at the Westdale, and now it’s out on DVD.  It’s written, produced, and directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, set in their suburban Minnesota youth, right around 1967, when they were roughly the same age as the movie’s bar mitzvah boy.  If you haven’t seen the film, I won’t spoil key parts for you, though you might be wondering how is the movie so Jewish that it merits a drash, and if you have seen it, you know that the question is in what way isn’t the movie Jewish. 

            A summary:  Larry Gopnick is a physics professor living with his wife and two kids in a Minnesota housing development.  Over the course of the movie, his wife decides to leave him for a gasbag widower, his schlimazel brother moves in with his bad health and bad habits, his teenage daughter is only concerned with her appearance, his son tries to memorize his Bar Mitzvah portion while stoned, his bid for tenure is questioned, and a student tries to manipulate and bribe his way out of a failing grade.  Gopnick, the protagonist, has always tried to do his best, and is baffled by what to do in the face of such bad fortune.  He follows his friends urging to go visit the rabbi.

            At their big suburban shul there are three rabbis that Gopnick calls on in turn.  He is first bounced down the chain of command to the junior rabbi, a young, unmarried man who is enthusiastic but without a clue about the problems Gopnick faces.  He offers a thinly veiled quotes from Heschel on changing perspective to see Hashem everywhere, even in the mundane.  The senior rabbi seems utterly narcissistic and unconcerned with God, truth, or humanity; though he looks and, on the surface, sounds like he should.  The third rabbi, the wizened old sage who spends his days in study, offers no wisdom.  The shul tries to teach Hebrew to uninterested kids who find more meaning in psychedelic pop songs and drugs than they do in Hebrew verb conjugation.  Judaism comes off as a self-serving sham, irrelevant to the lives of Jews caught up in a changing culture.  Worse, it’s less than relevant.  It offers promise of shelter from the storm, a rock to lean on in hard times, and a fount of wisdom of the ages, but when you really need it, there’s nothing there.  Everyone assumes God, Hashem is the name they use, is present and active in the world, no one seems to notice that this God is either absent or malevolent.  Your fate does not depend on your goodness.  Or, as the Talmud puts it, the heretic thinks, there is no judgment, there is no Judge.

            And yet.  In reality, none of the characters in the movie, secular or religious, really seem to know how to live well.  They’re all narcissists, or else they live in fear.  The protagonist is even a physicist, teaching the Uncertainty Principle and other keys for unlocking the secrets of the universe, and he has no clue what they really mean for his life.  Gopnick cries out to his rabbi, and to his lawyer, “what does Hashem want from me?  What is he trying to tell me?” and neither has an answer beyond urging him to calm down and just live life.  If Judaism is bankrupt, so is the secular culture. God is either absent or malevolent.  It’s a depressing picture.

            If there is a Jewish take on all of this, we can say it’s “Yasher koach.”.  Good job for being honest.  If there is a rabbi who is useless, yasher koach for being honest about it.  We give glory to God by serving the truth, not by making idols out of our traditions.  Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, all Jewish leaders spent much of the 10^th and 20^th centuries presiding over communities that voluntarily shrank.   Gopnick suffers without cause, does not know what to do, and asks where God is.  No answer is offered—that’s understandable; but no solace, identification, sympathy, or empathy is offered.   That’s the real sin of the rabbis of the movie.  We are not asked to know God’s Mind or God’s purposes.  We are asked to treat each other humanely and to help each other find purpose.

            So let me try my hand at it.  In A Serious Man, the protagonist Gopnick is afraid to act.  He questions “Why?” and freezes.  Others act, but always in a selfish way.  What wisdom does the tradition offer?  A hint of it we just read:  Moses is not afraid of God or man.  He does not spend too much time asking why, he does not act out of selfishness.  When given the tablets from God, Moses starts down the mountain only to find the Israelites worshipping the calf, and, according to the midrash, breaking all ten of the commandments.  He has spent enough time alone in the desert, and in the heat of his confrontation with Egypt, to know that the calf celebration is out of bounds.  He breaks the tablets on the spot.  He breaks the most important thing anyone has ever received: the writing of God.  He breaks them before anyone can see them.  He breaks them, even though they are the culmination of his life’s work and suffering.  He breaks them because he is angry, and he breaks them because he thinks they should be broken.  He tells the people what they have done wrong, even though they don’t want to hear it, then he tells God what God should do, even though God disagrees with him.  Moses is a man of thought and a man of action.  He does not dwell overlong on the question of why these things happen.  He is more concerned with what one should do once it has happened.  Think and act.  Gopnick in the movie only thinks.  Others act, but without thought.  The example of Moshe calls for both.

            I do not know if A Serious Man will the Best Picture Academy Award tomorrow night, I see too few movies to even hazard a guess.  I can say that it asks a question that will continue to be asked long after the Oscar parties are over: What does God want from me?  There will always be those who effectively brush off the question, as in the film.  And there will be others, who know that the question has no easy answers, but that we must study and act, be unafraid of breaking the tablets when need be, and unafraid of picking up the pieces and carrying them with us on our journey, as Moshe did.  We can’t expect an answer when we seek the meaning of life, or the meaning of suffering.  What we can expect is sincere caring from each other.