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Time of Suffering
David B. Green
FATHER DOESN'T ALWAYS KNOW BEST: Rabbi Meltzer (Asi Dayan) and his strong-willed daughter Michal (Tinkerbell) |
The night before I met with Joseph Cedar, 32-year-old writer and director of the film "Time of Favor" ("Hahesder" in Hebrew), Prime Minister Ehud Barak visited the hospital where victims of a school-bus bombing from the Gaza Strip settlement of Kfar Darom were being treated. At an impromptu press conference, Barak, who's often noted the deep affinity he feels for the Jews who've settled the hills, valleys and plains of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, spoke emotionally of the need to stand firm by the Jews living in the settlements in these days of ongoing Palestinian attacks. "The Land of Israel will be redeemed through suffering," Barak intoned with determined resignation; and indeed, the November 20 attack killed two adults, and left nine children and adults wounded, and was followed by a week of Palestinian violence (and Israeli counter-attacks), much of it directed against civilian settlers.
The Talmudic line had particular resonance, as I had heard it just a day earlier at a screening of Cedar�s film, which picked up nearly all the principal awards at Israel's Academy Awards ceremony in mid-November � best film, screenplay, lead actor, lead actress, photography and editing. Midway through the picture, Michal (the female lead, played by the actress who goes by the somewhat jarring stage name of Tinkerbell), the daughter of the charismatic rabbi of a West Bank settlement, complains to her developing love interest, Menachem (Aki Avni), that her father is so devoted to his cause that "if I were killed in a terrorist incident," his reaction would be, "'The Land of Israel is redeemed by suffering.'"
Menachem, an Orthodox army officer, is in the intensive hesder program, which combines yeshivah study with service in a battle unit. He learns at the small yeshivah run by Rabbi Meltzer (Asi Dayan), at an isolated settlement surrounded by the stark, stunning hills of the Judean desert. Meltzer preaches fanatically about the need for Jews to be able to return to pray on the Temple Mount, something that won�t be possible as long as it is in Muslim hands. Meltzer, a man with vision and plans, has convinced the army to establish an all-Orthodox company � it will be a "spearhead," he says, though not explicitly for what. Its commander is to be Menachem, a great warrior, we are told, with impeccable character � as well as a hunk, as played by the talented Avni. Menachem and Michal long silently for one another, but when Rabbi Meltzer gives Menachem to understand that he intends to make a match of his daughter and his finest student, Pinchas, or Pini (Idan Alterman), Menachem finds himself caught in a dilemma, wanting neither to defy his rabbi nor hurt his friend Pini by making a bid for Michal's hand.
Michal, though, isn't interested in Pini, and makes this clear. Young men may tremble at her father's commands, but she's having none of it. Scorned and embittered, Pini then begins to advance a plan to clear the Temple Mount of its Muslim shrines. When the Shin Bet and army finally get wind of the plot, it's not at all clear whether Meltzer or Menachem are involved, or whether it will be possible to foil the plan. One needs little imagination, particularly after the events of the last two months, to understand what the global implications could be of a Jewish attack on the Dome of the Rock or Al-Aqsa mosque.
"Time of Favor" was a film just waiting to get made: What could lend itself more readily to a movie plot than a conspiracy by settlers to blow up the golden Dome of the Rock, the quintessential symbol of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In the wrong hands, though, it's a film that could ring false in a hundred different ways. Vilifying the settlers is easy; allowing the viewer to sympathize with them at the same time you offer a critique of what you see as their dangerous single-mindedness is something else altogether, and the difference is what makes Cedar's film credible, authentic and moving. Despite the fact that it's not at all the movie he set out to make.
The son of Tzippi and Howard Cedar, she a psychodrama therapist, he a 1999 winner of the Israel Prize for his work in molecular biology, Joseph grew up in the Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit Vegan, after his family moved to Israel from the U.S. when he was 5, in 1973. Those were the years when Gush Emunim, the national-religious settlement movement, was at its peak, and the synagogues and schools of Bayit Vegan were one of the sources of its strength. Joseph belonged to the modern Orthodox youth movement Bnei Akiva, and attended the prestigious religious high school Netiv Meir. He recalls that "my most adventurous and vivid childhood experience was the evacuation of Yamit. My Bnei Akiva group went out to Sinai to stop the government." The 1982 evacuation, a condition of the peace agreement with Egypt, went ahead on schedule, Joseph's efforts notwithstanding.
So when Cedar moved out to a settlement in Samaria in 1995, with the intention of writing a screenplay, he didn�t have it in mind to come out against the settlement enterprise. He had finished a bachelor's degree in philosophy and theater at the Hebrew University, and studied film at NYU, but neither of these contacts with the secular world had changed his national-religious orientation.
CEDAR HAD READ IN THE PAP-ers about a religious officer from Kiryat Arba, the settlement town adjoining Hebron, who was picked up on suspicion of plotting to kill an Arab. "One day he was arrested by the secret service, maybe 'kidnapped' is a better word, interrogated for two weeks, and then one day, just released, without any charge." Cedar never met the man, but thought about him a lot: "I'm sure that he had to deal with clearing his name. Having his home in Kiryat Arba and a kippah on his head, had been used as evidence against him."
The movie that Cedar was imagining then, even before the Rabin assassination, "was about how the religious sector is persecuted, because of the religious stereotype. I thought, I�m going to write a story that shatters the stereotype," making his hero a "national-religious patriot."
But something happened to Cedar during his three-year stay in Samaria. "I think I can pinpoint the moment," he recalls, during an interview (his first ever, he says) at his quiet North Tel Aviv apartment, a few blocks from the sea, where he lives with his wife, Vered Kelner, a reporter for the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir. "It was on Independence Day. As children, we always had to interrupt the Independence Day ceremonies. To show how disrespectful we could be. It was humorous. At my first Independence Day on the settlement, everyone was wearing white. Some of the adults even put on their army reserve uniforms, which is a scene I can only compare to Italian movies about the Mussolini era. People who didn�t fit into their uniforms got into them and saluted the flag. Everyone was so darned serious, and I was asking myself, where�s the humor? And when I concluded that there wasn�t any, I felt, if I can laugh at something that everyone else is serious about, maybe I don�t belong here. From then on, I looked at everything with a wink. And I began thinking about the price that the younger generation is paying for their parents� adventure. It�s a huge price.�
Cedar, gregarious and articulate, with large, sharply intelligent eyes, has not given up being Orthodox, and still wears a yarmulke. He says he retains �huge respect� for the settlement movement. But he adds that he concluded that its members� willingness to suffer for the redemption of the Land of Israel blinds them. �In two ways. One is to their neighbors, the Palestinians. They think they�re the ones paying the price, but their neighbors are paying the real price for the occupation.� Cedar weighs his words carefully, but compares the situation to apartheid.
The other blindness became the subject of his movie, which doesn�t have any Palestinian characters. �When you are swept up with total conviction regarding your mission, and moral righteousness,� he explains, �the individual human being loses his importance. Now, sometimes that�s necessary, but I�m not sure that we live in a time when that�s the case. I raise the question, what is the price the individual person should pay for the larger group?� Menachem is happy to pay successive prices, �until it becomes too painful, and he snaps and says, sorry, I�m not anyone�s representative. I have my own desires.�
The flip side of individual desire is individual responsibility. Part of the film�s suspense revolves around our uncertainty regarding Rabbi Meltzer�s role in the Temple Mount plot. Even if he is not directly involved, the question is asked: Doesn�t he bear responsibility by talking to his impressionable students constantly about the need to redeem the Mount? It�s a question with special resonance after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; even five years later, it�s unclear whether Yigal Amir was acting with rabbinical license. For Cedar, that question is less pressing than one might imagine; for him the individual bears responsibility for his actions. �Maybe Amir had a rabbi who gave him an order, though I don�t think so. But even so, he�s still to blame. The rabbi�s a lunatic, but Amir�s still to blame.�
Menachem�s �snapping� is provoked by his realization that he is unwilling to defer his love for Michal. As played by the 22-year-old up-and-coming Tinkerbell, Michal is small, with girlish features, but she won�t allow anyone to push her around, not even her rabbi father, who has a yeshivah-full of grown boys completely under his power. When her father persists in trying to make a match between her and Pini, and Menachem seems unwilling to defy him, even though he�s declared his feelings for Michal, she ups and leaves for the city. Like Cedar, Menachem has an epiphany. His takes place at a Sabbath dinner of his company, held in a tent. The white-shirted student-soldiers are seated around the table singing zemirot with the kind of male energy and religious fervor that can be startling the first time one encounters it in yeshivah boys. And Menachem, distracted and troubled, is unable to join in. For the first time, he is not �with� his men, as he thinks about Michal. She, in the meantime, is alone in her dimly lit Jerusalem dorm room, welcoming the Sabbath by herself, as she sings a lonely Kiddush. She has defied her father and left her home, but she hasn�t forgotten who she is, even if the man she loves hasn�t yet revealed the courage to take her for himself.
�Time of Favor� is Joseph Cedar�s first film. But with the help of a seasoned photographer, editor, producers, sound people and an acting crew excellent almost without exception (only Alterman, whose Pini may be the most complex role in the film, is unconvincing as a Talmudic genius who becomes obsessed with �putting history back on its course�), he has directed a work that is good by any standard, and should be comprehensible to any audience. Cedar insists that the credit for the achievement must be shared: �Each person, in his or her role, in many cases, saved the movie from collapsing .... The luck was that I was wise enough to let them correct my mistakes.�
As winner of the Israeli �Oscar� for best picture of the year 2000, �Time of Favor� automatically becomes the country�s contestant for a place as one of the five nominees for best foreign-language film in the U.S. Academy Awards ceremony next March. Cedar�s determined to be in the final five, and says that �we are charging L.A. on every front.� Considering that he convinced investors to put up close to a million dollars to make the movie � and the result � there�s no reason not to believe he�ll get what he wants.
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