San Francisco — Because of an inevitable glitch during a recent screening of “Trembling Before G-d,” Sandi Simcha DuBowski found himself doing live narration of a scene involving New York yeshiva high school sweethearts.
For several intense moments, the filmmaker unknowingly revealed just how close he had become to his work.
As if channeling the voices of this Orthodox couple — closeted lesbians “Malka” and “Leah” — DuBowski recited dialogue in sync with the women’s silent, moving lips.
“It’s a role that I’ve inhabited throughout the making of this film,” DuBowski said in an interview. “That I have to … be this messenger, for all these people that are too scared to speak.”
There are plenty of them to speak for, he said.
Mostly through word of mouth, DuBowski has met with countless gay men and lesbians in San Francisco, Jerusalem, New York, Miami, Los Angeles and elsewhere — people who would not go on camera for fear that their families, rabbis and yeshivas would shun them.
Others, like Malka and Leah, agreed to appear only with special camera angles, distortion or silhouetting.
But precisely because DuBowski documented, for the first time ever, Orthodox gay men and lesbians — bochers and rebbitzens of close-knit, fervently religious communities — he is shattering the silence.
In fact, “Trembling Before G-d” has become a vehicle to talk about homosexuality in new ways, bringing about several “firsts.” Among them:
• Rabbi Yosef Langer of Chabad of S.F. reconsidered earlier advice in favor of homosexual aversion therapy.
• A New York rabbi who first accused DuBowski of “Orthodox-bashing” during a rabbinical retreat later delivered a d’var Torah on gay and lesbian inclusion and invited a screening of the film at his Orthodox shul.
• Even DuBowski’s own parents, slow to accept their openly gay child, have been shepping nachas from their 30-year-old son’s filmmaking achievements.
Projects choose you
Raised in Brooklyn in a Conservative home that emanated “a deep love of Judaism,” DuBowski no longer knows what to call himself in relation to Judaism’s streams.
“I didn’t realize this film would make me more religious,” said DuBowski, who dresses more fashionably than frum but sprinkles his sentences with unfeigned Yiddishkeit.
Looking back, he cannot pinpoint the exact catalyst for “Trembling Before G-d.”
“My parents brought me to the shmurah [guarded] matzah factory in Crown Heights when I was 3 years old and I put my head on the banister and I didn’t want to leave. And in many ways, that was where the film started.”
DuBowski, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, also speaks of the film as a “personal video diary” for him to learn about homosexuality in the Orthodox world.
Then he speaks of his friendship with a charismatic Londoner named Mark, who had abandoned formal Orthodoxy (and has since returned, as a Hasid). “He became almost like my hevrusa in a yeshiva without walls, and we were learning partners — we became like brothers.”
As part of his footage, DuBowski accompanied Mark — one of the few allowing his identity to go undisguised — as he revisited the numerous yeshivas he was expelled from for homosexual activity.
Citing Mark as another catalyst for the film, DuBowski summarizes its genesis with the statement: “Sometimes I feel like you choose projects, and sometimes I feel like they choose you.”
But taking on the task of prying open this particular closet leaves DuBowski vulnerable to criticism by both the gay and Orthodox worlds — neither of which he wants to alienate or pit against each other.
At one particularly volatile screening with a New York religious audience, DuBowski felt as if he had to referee. One woman called him a liar, yelling that her daughter was a lesbian who would no longer speak to her, had left Orthodoxy and “refused to change.”
But Dubowski refused to determine who was “right.” He pressed the mother about whether she spoke about her child. Nowhere, never, she responded, crying. Though she had kicked her daughter out of the house, Dubowski empathized. “She had no place to discuss what she was struggling with,” he said.
“The whole point of this is to find a grapevine of support in Orthodox communities,” said DuBowski, who avoids getting entangled in halacha’s intricacies or looking for Leviticus loopholes. “Engaging with Jewish law” is the next stage, he said.
But the public debate has been started by others, like Rabbi Steve Greenberg, who became the first Orthodox spiritual leader to come out in March 1999 in the Israeli daily Ma’ariv. Greenberg — also featured in the film — has just finished a book due out next year entitled “Wrestling with G-d and Man” about homosexuality and devout Judaism.
For the most part, DuBowski and Greenberg find that “Trembling Before G-d” is gaining the momentum to create community rather than instigating a backlash against one.
After that explosive session with the religious woman, DuBowski said a younger woman approached him privately, revealing that the screamer was her mother, and that she was the lesbian’s sister. “I love [my sister],” she told him, “and I want to do anything I can to help move this film in the community. Here’s my number.”
“Trembling Before G-d” opens Oct. 4, 7:30 p.m., at The Oriental Theater. Tickets are $10. It is presented by the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival, which is presented by the Film Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It is co-presented by the Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, which runs Dec. 2-6 at Marcus Theatres’ North Shore Cinema. For more information, contact Micki Seinfeld at the JCC, 967-8235.
Loading ...