How did you first meet Amichai?
Sandi Dubowski: In the late 1990s, I was looking for people to be in my film Trembling Before G-d, which was about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are lesbian or gay. I went to Jerusalem, and everyone kept saying, “You've got to meet this person, Amichai, because his uncle is a Chief Rabbi of Israel, and Amichai is gay.” So we connected, and I asked him to be in the movie, and he refused, because he wanted his own movie. We became fast friends, and then he basically got his wish: I started filming with him in 2003. It's been twenty-one years of filming.
When you met him, what was your first impression?
SD: He was incredibly sparkly and charismatic, very playful and such a renegade. He comes from this dynasty, from thirty-eight generations of rabbis. I think of him like he's from the Kennedys of Judaism. I didn't know anyone who could trace their ancestry back 1,000 years. I was very intrigued. It was very different than my Jewish background, where I don't know past my great-grandparents and they were peasants in Eastern Europe.
The way he played with tradition, the way he owned tradition and was super literate, gave him license to fully upend it and radicalize it and interrogate it in ways that were mind-expanding and felt in line with values, instead of just being a regurgitation of prayers and rituals that seem to be calcified. He blasted them open.
Also at that point, he was doing this Hasidic rabbi's widow drag character, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross. She was incredibly hilarious and compelling and subversive. In the beginning, I actually was more interested in filming this performance character. It was a little bit less about him and more about her. Obviously, that changed over time.
Did you have any idea at the outset that you were going to go on a twenty-one-year odyssey with this film?
SD: There's a lot of holding of the unknown in the film, of time being really expansive. This film is the antithesis of what we're dealing with now in terms of our feed of social media on our phone. It is really holding time: ancient time, and very newsworthy time and contemporary time, and past, present and future all at once. Unlike so many people I know, Amichai lives every minute in past, present and future.
So it was having the patience to let a very epic journey unfold and allowing the twists and turns of life. I don't know where I got the patience from, but I am a patient person. And I was always inspired. Some filmmakers finish their films and they're so exhausted, they're like, “I just can't look at it.” I'm still so intrigued and so captivated by Amichai as a human, as a person, as a character, as a rabbi, as a spiritual leader, as a thinker, as a ritualist, as an artist performer. He's got so many elements to him.
As you went on this journey, what were the real surprises, the twists of the story?
SD: One big one was when we began the film, Amichai had zero desire to become a rabbi. He kept saying, “Artists are the new rabbis.” There was a real opposition to becoming a rabbi. Then all of a sudden, he shifted. And Amichai is a shapeshifter. He is surprising. His life is a constant work in progress. He's constantly interrogating and changing and questioning. And then the fact that he was going to go to a very conservative Jewish seminary to become a rabbi, I think that threw a lot of people. And he flipped it. He began saying, “Rabbis are the new artists.”
Then there was another surprise, which is not only was he going to become a rabbi of the conservative Jewish movement, but he was going to try to obey its rules, which demanded that he could not attend or perform an interfaith marriage. He had done interfaith marriages before. And from our contemporary sensibility and the fact that 72 percent of liberal Jews in America are in love with and partnered with non-Jews, it was just like, that's our world. You want to make change from within, but … I know people who he had to turn away and say, “I can't marry you.”
And hanging up Hadassah and becoming a retired drag queen—her whole journey was also a surprise. The fact that he made three children as a queer bio-dad. The evolution of Storahtelling into Lab/Shul and what did it mean to create this everybody-friendly, God-optional, artist-driven, pop up experimental congregation? I don't know any synagogue in the world that defines themselves as God-optional. I don't even know any church that does that. So that was also like, “Huh. Wow.” Amichai has a way of phrasing deep theological concepts in very fresh, contemporary ways.
Were there moments as you filmed where you felt yourself actually witnessing the legacy of this 1,000-year-old genetic chain of rabbis?
SD: I did. Amichai is deeply irreverent, but he takes everything incredibly seriously. So when he is doing a Sabbath Queen or a soul spa ritual and he's being super flippant, it's so deeply rooted in the ancient wisdom of this chain of rabbis that he's in conversation with. It's pretty magnificent. He's 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.
But I also saw that when he was about to become a rabbi—and we did a lot of filming leading up to that ordination ceremony—that all of a sudden, his grandfather came back. His grandfather led his congregation into the gas chamber and said Kaddish with them, the mourners’ prayer, said the Shema, the prayer of unity. His grandfather had a visa to get out but he didn't want to leave his congregation. So I saw when Amichai was becoming a rabbi and really, really debating whether he was going to do interfaith marriage or not, I felt the grandfather hovering on his shoulder. Amichai would bring him up in an interview: “What would my grandfather think? What would he say to me now?” He was in a dialog, both in his dreams and in his waking life, with his ancestors. And I think that’s what allows him to say one of the most profound sentences in the film, which is when I asked him, “Did you do the right thing?” And he says, “We don't know. We won't know for 100 years.” The fact that he can have the humility to hold the potential that he was wrong and that he upended the tradition in a negative way, there's something there. This isn't someone who lightly changes religion or tradition, he takes it very seriously. He carries the weight of it.
What was it like getting his brother, an orthodox rabbi, to agree to be part of the film?
SD: I worked on this film for many, many years before I felt like I had an opening to go to his brother Benny. Benny is so prominent, a very major orthodox rabbi. You say the last name of this family, Lau, and it carries weight. So when his brother agreed to go to Amichai’s ordination—which was no small thing because he is Orthodox—the fact that he was willing to stretch himself and to come to New York felt to me like, “Now I can ask him to be in the film.” A month later I flew to Jerusalem and interviewed him and brought him into the movie. I was very nervous when Amichai showed him the cut, but he wrote a beautiful, praising email to me about the film. There is political and ideological disagreement between the brothers, but they're in conversation and there's so much love and respect even with their differences. In this toxic, polarized time, that is inspiring for me. Many of us are dealing with serious disagreements in our families, in our friendships and communities. It's not been easy, but they have maintained a real relationship across difference.
We see Amichai changing. But what about you? How did you change in those 21 years, and how did that affect the film?
SD: When I finished Trembling Before G-d, I actually became a part-time Orthodox Jew, which is a contradiction in terms because there is no part -time Orthodox Jew. But I became more orthodox. I was inspired—Hasidic and Orthodox people were my portal into Jewish tradition, without the homophobia attached. But because it was a very intense process, I wound up taking a sabbatical, and I sort of reinvigorated my body, my home, my spirituality, my sexuality. So much happened in that time, and I started to go on this path—religiously, spiritually, Jewish-ly—with Amichai. For anyone who really did grow up in Orthodoxy and who then encounters liberal Judaism, there's always a big shock and adjustment. I had to undo something in order to go on this path of real experimentation and God-optionalness.
I feel like I was freed from the kind of God that was punishing, dictating, and demanding to have a much more fluid relationship to the divine, to the ability to make the tradition in our own image and in what we need for today. I didn’t know that I would get married. And my husband and I really worked with Amichai to craft a ceremony that was so our own, to really play with what does it mean to have the seven blessings, and to take out the language that's traditional and play with different ways that people could be part of the tradition in performative ways, in playful ways.
I felt this real ability to craft. When my dad died, I wound up doing a part of the Kaddish club of Lab/Shul. Kaddish is the prayer that we say for the dead, and that came out of Amichai’s loss of his dad. He needed a circle of mourning, and so we encircled him and supported him and lifted him through his mourning. And then other people lost loved ones, and so that circle kept continuing. And then I lost my dad, and so I became part of this Kaddish club, and now I'm one of the circle holders of it. But I also created a ritual called Mourners Corner, where I would go to the park and I would invite anyone who was in mourning to come and do a pop-up mourning ritual in the park in New York. And we would end with a cinnamon roll hug. We would spiral around each other and hug in a really silly way to laugh. People brought poetry. We said the Kaddish prayer, but we made a ritual that spoke to our lives.
So I think Amichai has really opened for me the ability—whether in love, in wedding, in death, in mourning, all kinds of ways—to feel like I own the tradition. It's not just given to me as something I can't change. There's so much around patriarchy, around queerness, around the relationship between Jew and non-Jew. All of this needs to be really interrogated—around protest, around Israel and Palestine. I think generations feel much more imbued with the freedom that our ancestors didn’t really have to upend. Amichai enabled me to change in a profound way over the years of making this film. He is my friend. He is my rabbi. He is the protagonist of the film. We have a very multi-layered, complicated relationship where I’m constantly moving between these different modes, and I think that gives the film a great richness.
How did you know the film was done?
SD: I just changed a line and a word in the past few weeks, since October 7. I mean, we've been navigating the last two minutes of the film for seven months, trying to figure out how to speak to the present moment. I really feel like it holds the message. After October 7, I sent a crew for two days to film Amichai when he went back to Jerusalem.
There is a montage, which is almost like a coda, of the things that Amichai has been pushing towards in these past few years, the multi-faith work that he's doing, the holding of Muslim and Jew, of Israel and Palestine. There is a scene in the film from 2014 during the Israel Hamas war then when a pro-Israel protester says to Amichai, “You should have died in the Holocaust.” I've done test screenings and there is a chill in the room after that moment, it's just so shocking.
Do you want to say anything about what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank now in terms of the timing of the film and its release?
SD: As someone who comes from a very prominent Israeli family and who is not afraid to protest what's happening, Amichai is holding the pain of his Israeli family and he's calling for a ceasefire. And he's calling for a peace negotiation. He's an anti-war, anti-occupation voice and I think we need those voices. He's coming out of the Israeli left. He's been doing this peace work for decades. The times we're in are horrific and horrendous and I think his heart is shattered right now, but he's insisting on approaching this through humanity and trying to push back on the more right-wing voices. And some of that's happening publicly, and a lot of it is also happening privately. But Amichai is going to be doing this until he dies. He will be fighting for peace until he dies.
Right now, I'm also seeing a real breakdown around the generations magnified by this moment, and I think there's something in this film that can amplify and build intergenerational dialog around very sensitive and delicate issues.