‘Sabbath Queen’: From radical drag artist to rabbi of a God-optional synagogue

In Jewish tradition, the Sabbath is often likened to a queen, or the Sabbath bride, conferring on the mandated day of rest a special feminized status imbued with reverence and joy as if welcoming a royal figure to your home.

It’s often remarked, by way of explaining how the Jews, of all the ancient Western Asian peoples, have still survived, that it’s not so much that Jews “kept the Sabbath,” but that the “Sabbath kept the Jews.” That weekly respite from labor and strife was such a treasured custom (a commandment!) that it kept Jewish life continuous for some three thousand years and counting. The Jews of ancient times would barely recognize the Jews of today, however, even if they share common texts.

Another way of looking at the survival of the Jewish people, in all climes, and throughout all the empires, wars, monarchs and pogroms of the millennia, is precisely the adaptability to changing circumstances and the incorporation of modern science and philosophy into Jewish thought. Such influences have come from the fringes of Jewish life, the modernizers, the transformers, the rebels, the outcasts. Thus we have, today, an astounding variety of Jewish identities, and it is possible, normative one could say, to encounter feminist Jews, Buddhist Jews, gastronomical Jews, secular atheist Jews, cultural Jews, uncircumcised Jews, communist Jews, alongside the standard Western categories of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Humanist, and much more.

Where beginning in the late 1960s there seemed to be a need to establish LGBTQ religious congregations—among Jews and Christians, for example—because the sexually “different” needed a refuge from hate, scorn, prejudice, a place they could be themselves, nowadays in most mainstream Christian congregations as well as in Jewish temples and synagogues, LGBTQ individuals and families can often find the welcome mat set out for them.

Sabbath Queen, the newly released film by Sandi DuBowski, creator of the pathbreaking 2001 documentary Trembling Before G-d, which followed the lives of queer Orthodox Jews, takes his Jewish queer fascination into new terrain, but asking some of the same questions. How much change can an ancient tradition bear? How much innovation can be brought into the corpus of belief and practice without turning it into something else?

DuBowski spent 21 years making Sabbath Queen. It originated as a germ from his first film when he met Amichai Lau-Lavie, a gay Israeli, an Orthodox-raised descendant from an unbroken line of 38 rabbis going back to the 1100s, who had arrived in New York at 28 in the 1990s and set forth on refashioning a queer Jewish life for himself that was not possible as an “other” in Israel at the time. Especially when his father was the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yisrael Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor. (Amichai added “Lavie” to honor his British-born mother’s family name. Interestingly, “la vie” is French for “life,” which is also what the “chai” part of his name means in Hebrew.)

As a young man he tried exploring who he would become as he weighed the confrontations between tradition and freedom, ritual and innovation, tribal loyalty and individuality. In the early years of his New York life, he got into performance art to challenge patriarchal orthodoxy by appearing around the city in drag as the widow of a rabbi, the Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, a woman filled with the subversive wisdom of the divine feminine. As a man in his mid-50s by the time the film ends, guess what? He’s still struggling with many of those same questions, and living life joyously and fully as he does. By now, he’s become an AIDS-widower himself, having lost his born-Catholic lover to HIV disease, and has also fathered and is helping to raise three children by a lesbian couple.

Lau-Lavie’s organizational skills led him to create a theatrical approach to the Bible, called Storahtelling, and a formally organized God-optional congregation, the Lab/Shul. One of his revered heroes is his martyred grandfather, Moshe Chaim Lau, who was chief rabbi of the Polish city of Piotkrow. Although many in his synagogue fled the Nazis, and he could have escaped as well with a legal visa, instead he chose to remain with his congregation—because that’s what a rabbi does—and was deported with 40,000 Jews from his community to Treblinka, where they all perished in the gas chambers, praising the name of God as they took their last breaths.

Steeped in Judaism as he was, Amichai practiced as a congregational leader without rabbinical ordination. In his 40s he shocked everyone he knew with his decision to enroll at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship for the Conservative movement, to become ordained. At his Lab-Shul he was famous for marrying same-sex couples as well as interfaith couples (ordination is not required to officiate at a marriage), but this would become problematic if he were ordained in the Conservative stream of Judaism.

The film traces his journey through five years of rabbinical school where, as quoted in the Forward, the dean of JTS at the time, Rabbi Dan Nevins, to his credit, welcomed him in. “We want to grow because of people like Amichai,” he said. “And yet, we also believe that there’s something to be said for having boundaries to Jewish identity.” Also to their credit, Amichai’s numerous family members, parents, siblings, cousins, do not reject him as a lost sheep, and many scenes in the film show them together. They may not agree with his approach to Judaism, but neither do they condemn him. His brother Benny, a popular modern Orthodox rabbi in Israel, honors him for living an authentic life, for being his true self, admitting that “not everything that we’ve inherited is worthy of being passed on.” Both he and their widowed mother attended Amichai’s JTS graduation/ordination ceremony.

Many traditional Jews object to interfaith marriage on the grounds that within a generation or two, those couples and their offspring—most of them, anyway—will be lost to the Jewish community. In 30 years, some predictions say, almost all the Jews in America will be Orthodox. One way the now Rabbi Lau-Lavie tried to square the intermarriage circle was to resort to ancient practice where in the Roman world Jews lived as neighbors with many non-Jews. So this issue was not new, and Jewish texts record the rabbinical disputes. One term that emerged from that era was “ger toshav,” a legal status in Jewish law denoting a “resident alien” who is part of the community, does not wish to convert to Judaism, but is willing to observe the Jewish law of the land. Since Amichai was receiving constant requests for interfaith marriages, he felt he could not in good conscience turn them away. A rabbi stays with his congregation.

You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Lau-Lavie’s story. Similar kinds of radical questioning are taking place across many other faiths, and throughout society as a whole. Merely the fact of the film’s long gestation allows the viewer to peek not only into one man’s spiritual unfolding, but  into the wild history the timeframe covers.

It’s significant to remind ourselves that according to the book of Genesis (32:28 and 35:10), the name “Israel” was bestowed on Isaac’s son Jacob after the incident in which he wrestled with the angel sent by God, and the name came to be applied to the people as a whole. In other words, by very definition, struggle, doubt of the outcome—wrestling with God, with ideas and truths—is the essence of this people. This reluctance to embrace dogma and unbending certainty is reflected in the saying, “Two Jews, three opinions.”

Sabbath Queen ends with his reactions to Israel and Palestine in the wake of October 7th, 2023. In a reflection on seeing the final cut of the film, he said, “I insisted that instead of saying ‘I stand with my family’s pain, but it doesn’t justify the suffering of Gaza’ to say instead, ‘I stand with my family’s pain, and it doesn’t justify the suffering of Gaza.’ This move from ‘but’ to ‘and’—one word—for me is significant. And as I look through the film, I see my curiosity and exploration of the ‘and,’ the weaving, the fusing, the bridging, and at times getting it wrong and going way radical to come back to a synthesis. This notion of the ‘and’ and the weaving together of what seems unweaveable is a through line that I’m glad about, because I really think that’s my main message at this moment, this notion of finding the fusions, insisting on the ‘and’ not the ‘but,’ building those bridges again and again and again.

“I hope that people who are watching it, if they’re Jewish, Jew-ish, other, queer, Muslim, Palestinian, human, troubled, excited, that they see a role model of someone who honors both inherited and chosen identity and leans into an expanded sense of empathy. That there is a possibility of being in this ‘and’ concept, of transcending our tribalism in a way that doesn’t diminish where we come from but expands our sense of being.”

The final scenes of the documentary show the rabbi at demonstrations against Occupation, against the slaughter in Gaza, as pro-Israel Jewish counter-demonstrators taunt him saying it’s too bad Jews like him didn’t die in the Holocaust. It’s remarkable—can one say an abomination?—how many Jews would rather pursue war than peace.

Filmmaker Sandi DuBowski assesses Lau-Lavie as having “taken a thick book full of hundreds of years of teachings and psalms and prayers and law and distilled it to four words. He says, ‘This is really about: Wow. Thanks. Oops. Please.’ He’s ex-Orthodox and defiantly post-denominational.”

And yet when DuBowski asks him, “Did you do the right thing?” this transformational rabbi answers, “We don’t know. We won’t know for 100 years.”

Sabbath Queen opens theatrically in Los Angeles on December 5 at the Laemmle Royal. Watch for it as it gets released for national distribution.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.