Between the Temples: A comedy of contrasts in Jewish life - opinion

I wasn’t planning to watch Between the Temples, the recently released comedic portrayal of Jewish life in America. Watching the trailer was enough to convince me that I did not need to see yet one more example of the irreverent humor so characteristic of a number of films with Jewish themes. However, when a friend pointed to a statistical discrepancy on Rotten Tomatoes, an American site that reviews films and television shows, my interest moved up a notch.

The discrepancy is between the rating by professional film reviewers and those by the general audience. Professional critics rated it highly (86%) while the general audience gave it a low score (40%). In the end I did watch it, and while I felt it had a few redeeming features, my overall reaction mirrored that of the general audience.

The basic plot (spoiler alert) involves a young cantor, Ben, who has lost the ability to sing and is experiencing a crisis of faith. (Only later in the film does the audience learn that Ben’s novelist wife died a year earlier from a fall and that Ben has kept 762 of her voicemail messages, including at least one very erotic one, on his phone.)

Ben runs from the temple, still wearing his kippah and tallit, and lies down on the road in front of a large truck hoping to die. Instead, he ends up in a bar, where he has a few drinks too many, is knocked down in a fight, then rescued by an older woman (Carla, played by Carol Kane), who it turns out was his grade school music teacher.

When Carla learns that Ben is giving bat mitzvah lessons at the temple to Jewish girls, she asks for lessons too. She never had a bat mitzvah – her parents were communists. Thus begins a tender, loving relationship between an older woman and a younger man. Along the way, Ben’s mother and her partner, a woman with a Filipino background who is a convert to Judaism, as well as the temple’s rabbi, who has an eligible daughter, try to arrange suitable matches for him.

Anti Orthodox stigmas 

Did the movie have to portray a caricature of a rabbi, one who cheats when he plays golf, uses a shofar (a non-kosher one, mind you) when practicing his putting in his synagogue office, and is willing to bend the rules when it comes to ritual matters if a large donation to the temple is at stake? Was it necessary to include a scene involving a tasteless synagogue bingo event to raise funds to restore Holocaust Torah scrolls?

In the end, Carla gets her bat mitzvah, albeit an unconventional one. Rather than chanting it in the synagogue, off limits after Ben reveals his feelings for her at a Friday evening family dinner, she does it in the open air. Carla does a commendable job of chanting the first verses of the Torah portion Kedoshim (Holy Ones). I do have a nitpicky point to make, however. We learn that Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, arranged the first bat mitzvah ever for his oldest daughter in 1922, in his home, not at a synagogue. I checked, and she, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, reported (“A Recollection of the First US Bat Mitzvah,” ritualwell.org) that it took place at a synagogue, the newly formed Society for the Advancement of Judaism, New York.

The movie highlights the shallowness of Jewish life in North America. Uncommitted Jews, a large and growing number, will assimilate and gradually disappear from the Jewish community. There are many secular Jews in Israel, but they speak Hebrew, tend to marry other Jews, have Friday night dinner with family, celebrate Jewish holidays, and are willing to sacrifice their lives to fight for their people.

In fact, a feature of the movie missed by most reviewers, but not by Hannah Brown of The Jerusalem Post, is that the soundtrack includes a number of classic Israeli songs by several prominent Israeli artists, such as Arik Einstein and Matti Caspi. To me, this is the best part of the movie. The contrast between Jewish life in Israel, as opposed to that in the Diaspora, couldn’t be clearer.

The writer, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.