Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

The Dude Abides

Home
Progressive Christian
Film reveals a softer side of fundamentalists

Film reveals a softer side of fundamentalists

Last updated on: January 19, 2015 at 2:51 pm by Cathleen Falsani

Film reveals a softer side of fundamentalists 2015-01-19T14:51:41-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Chicago Sun Times
October 28, 2005 Friday, Final Edition

Copyright 2005 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc. All Rights Reserved Section: RELIGION; Pg. 52; Religion
Length: 1015 words
Byline: Cathleen Falsani, The Chicago Sun-Times

Fundamentalists are scary. They’re the new Russians.

For a while, every villain in an action movie sounded like Boris Badenov. Over time, the Borises were replaced by menacing South American druglords, and then, a few years later, by generic pan-Arabian “terrorists.”

Glinty-eyed, scheming fundamentalists (of whatever religious persuasion) are the latest incarnation of celluloid villainy, oppressing liberals, spreading small-mindedness like the avian flu and generally frightening the masses with their vengeful, jealous God.

They’re supposed to be meanies. We’re not supposed to like them. I mean, Kevin Bacon’s dancing rebel is the hero of “Footloose,” not John Lithgow’s daughter-smacking pastor, right?

Making fundamentalists lovable would be edgy, man, like casting a chubby gal as Brad Pitt’s love interest, complete with steamy nude sex scenes. And Hollywood doesn’t like edgy, especially when it comes to religion.

Ask Albert Brooks. Earlier this fall, Sony movie execs scuttled plans to distribute his new film, “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” unless he changed the title. They were afraid of the “M” word, apparently, and thought it might offend some people, and that’s bad for box office. (Happily, Brooks has found another distributor and the film, which is about his character — a comedian — being dispatched to India and Pakistan by the U.S. government to find out what makes Muslims laugh, will be released early next year.)

That’s part of what makes Israeli director Gidi Dar’s new film such a triumph on so many fronts.

Dar’s “Ushpizin” — a Hebrew word that means, basically, “holy houseguests” — which opens in Chicago-area theaters today, manages to make fundamentalists funny and lovable, without making them laughable. The film, which is the first secular feature-length film to be shot inside Jerusalem’s Ultra-Orthodox community, is a dramedy about the spiritual, physical and psychological struggles of a cash-strapped Hasidic couple during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

Sukkot, which was celebrated last week, commemorates the wandering of the Israelites in the desert, where they lived in temporary dwellings, or sukkah. During Sukkot, observant Jews erect little huts outside there homes where they eat and (often) sleep for seven days. It is considered a particular blessing to have guests, ushpizin, during Sukkot.

In Dar’s film, the couple, Moshe and Malli Bellanga, played by real-life husband-and-wife actors Shuli Rand and Michal Bat Sheva Rand (who are themselves Hasidic and live in one of Jerusalem’s Ultra-Orthodox communities), are broke and, after five years of marriage, childless. Some years earlier, they had made the commitment to become “religious,” i.e. to embrace the Ultra-Orthodox lifestyle and while they are spiritually richer, they are penniless.

They argue, they pray, sing, dance, laugh and look for signs from God. And then, they believe, a miracle happens. It’s about this time that the ushpizin arrive: two ne’er-do-well, not-so-ex-convicts who knew Moshe Bellanga before he was such a holy roller.

This refreshingly sweet, surprisingly droll film is so unique that I don’t want to give any more of the plot away than I already have. Suffice to say, tension, enlightenment and hilarity ensue.

Dar, 45, who describes himself as a thoroughly secular Jew, shot the film, which was written by Shuli Rand — himself a one-time A-list Israeli actor who left the business a decade ago after he became a kind of born-again Jew and embraced the Hasidic lifestyle — inside Jerusalem’s Ultra-Orthodox Breslau neighborhood. All the extras in the film are actual Hasidim from the ‘hood.

With his secular background, some people may have expected Dar to mock Jewish fundamentalists rather than present them as the complicated, profound and funny people that they are. His intention, the director told me on the phone the other day, was to try to cross the abyss that lies between secularism and fundamentalism, a rift that is a perennial source of acrimony in his native Israel.

“The issue of faith, even more than religion, is interesting to me,” Dar said. “It is one of the main issues I am dealing with always: the space between the imagined and the real. At the end of the day, what lies between those two lines is faith. Any kind of faith. Not just religion. We all live in some kind of faith. None of us lives in the realm of the real. . . . We cannot touch the real.”

Where you wind up — on the secular side of life or in the midst of a fundamentalist bunker — depends on how you interpret the signs, Dar said.

“We’re all surrounded by signs, they’re being thrown at us, an endless amount of signs,” he said. “We choose which ones we ignore, which ones we take. And when we make those choices, we actually define the way our reality is going to be. That is the practice of faith.

“When you look at a very religious person doing that, it is very easy to see. But we all do that, not just religious people. So in a way this movie shows faith in a very authentic way. In another way, it follows the mind of the believer, which is a very different story. It’s my story.”

As Dar talked, I thought about something the church historian Martin Marty once told me about fundamentalists (which, for the purposes of this discussion, are defined as religious folks who adhere strictly to a conservative interpretation of their tradition and feel entirely threatened by the modern, pluralistic world and, therefore, react strongly against it). Marty says in some ways fundamentalists have more in common with each other, whether they’re Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Sox fans, than they do with mainline or liberal members of their own religion. It’s a mind-set that they share, not a set of beliefs, and every religion has them.

Ushpizin, and my chat with Dar, also reminded me about the nature of faith. Faith is a thing, like joy or heartburn. There aren’t different faiths, just different ways of expressing it.

Faith is the same.

And for a lot of us, that’s a scary thought.

e-mail: [email protected]

ARCHIVED COLUMNS

GODSTUFF

Previous Post

October 28, 2005

Next Post

October 30, 2005 'This is a church where you can bring your whole self': Episcopal priest makes church a refuge for gays, lesbians

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A little happy ARCHIVED COLUMNS BECOMING FAMILY BelieberNess BREAKING NEWS! Disquiet Time DJ JEFF'S SPINTASMS falsani FILM from OCRegister From Sojo.net God Nods GODSTUFF I Take Requests incubatespirit LURKING IN THE NARTHEX On My Nightstand ONEMOMS Polling the Room PONTIFEXCELLENT Thru My Eyes TWO CENTS Uncategorized Upcoming Events VASCO VASCO'S HEART

Select a Month January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 July 2014 May 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 April 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 October 2003 March 2003 December 2002 October 2002 January 2001

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

True or False: David committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged for her husband Uriah to be killed.

Select your answer to see how you score.

FALSE TRUE