Making Religion Matter for Secular People

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In recent years, an impressive number of particularly charming actors have played rabbis on TV. Adam Brody, Sarah Sherman, Daveed Diggs, and Kathryn Hahn have all donned a kippah, wrapped themselves in a tallis, and shown how fun loving (even sexy) it can feel to carve a path between the rock of tradition and the hard place of modernity. I'm not sure why progressive rabbis are the clerics to whom pop culture tends to assign this role, as opposed to, say, quirky priests or wacky imams. Maybe Judaism is well suited as a religion that revels in questioning and doubt. Maybe rabbis are just funnier.
Add to the scroll of TV clergy Rabbi Léa Schmoll, played by Elsa Guedj. In Reformed, a new French series now streaming on Max, Léa has the joyful burden of making millenia-old rituals matter anew. Unlike many other shows that feature rabbis, this one focuses on the actual work of rabbi-ing—and it isn't easy. The drama (and sitcom-style comedy) of Reformed comes out of her struggle against both the nihilism of our fallen world, which provides no answers to the bigger questions of life, and a rigid form of Orthodoxy that provides too many easy answers.
In the middle stands utterly human Léa, who has the sweetly befuddled air, wild mane, and wide eyes of a young Carol Kane. Her shirts are often misbuttoned and half-tucked. She's perpetually late. And she is brand-new to the job, having just taken her first rabbi gig when the show opens in her hometown of Strasbourg, in eastern France. She is also a woman rabbi in a country where they are rare—the show makes a running gag of what title to use for her, because both the French word for a female rabbi, rabbine, and a stuffier alternative, Madame le rabbin, sound so unfamiliar that they regularly provoke giggles. After rabbinical school, she moves back into the book-lined apartment of her misanthropic father, a weathered Serge Gainsbourg look-alike (Éric Elmosnino, who actually played Gainsbourg in a biopic). He's a psychotherapist and a staunch atheist for whom a rabbi daughter is a cosmic joke at his expense. 'There was Galileo, Freud, Auschwitz,' he declares over dinner when she discusses her new job. 'I thought the problem was solved. God doesn't exist. The Creation is meaningless. We're alone. We live. We suffer.' (In French—I promise—this sounds like a very normal dinner conversation.)
Already in the first episode, in her very first interaction with a congregant, Léa has to defend one of the most primitive forms of religious practice: circumcision. A new mother asks for Léa's help in convincing her non-Jewish partner to get over his resistance to their son having a bris. She senses—after many initial bumbling missteps—that what pains the father is that his son's body will be different from his own, no longer an extension of himself. Léa reaches for a biblical story, the binding of Isaac. As they stand outside the synagogue, where the father has been nervously pacing, drinking espressos, and smoking cigarettes (again, France), she offers her explanation for God's seemingly sadistic command that Abraham sacrifice his son. This was done, she argues, not to test Abraham's faith—God, being omniscient, would presumably know Abraham's faithfulness already—but ultimately to stop Abraham's hand before he brought his knife down, proving the limits of a parent's power over their child's life.
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As Léa tells it, this brutal story becomes a comforting parable about learning to stop projecting yourself onto your children, about letting them go. 'The binding of Isaac is actually the moment when he is unbound from his father,' Léa says. 'God says to the Hebrews, 'Your children are not your children. They come from you. But they are not you.''
A bar mitzvah, a wedding, a Passover seder, and two funerals will follow. And though the same dynamic repeats, Léa's confidence grows as she learns how to give sense to the rituals. 'In the end, our job is about accomplishing certain gestures and trying to understand their meaning,' she says, providing a pretty good synopsis of the show. Interpretation is her creative act, and part of what makes Reformed enthralling is that she gets really good at it.
Reformed is roughly based on the book Living With Our Dead, by Delphine Horvilleur, which was published in an English translation last year. Horvilleur is a liberal rabbi (she'll even accept 'secular rabbi') who has become something of a celebrity in France. The book would not seem to be an obvious fit for adaptation into a comedy series—in it, she recounts 11 instances of mourning, and how she has worked to integrate death into her life. She also argues eloquently for her more liberal form of the religion. The birth of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 C.E., was the moment, she writes, when exegesis began to trump blind obedience. The rabbis were exiled, and had no temple where they could make sacrifices to God. They invented a religion that was a form of 'literal a-theism,' she writes, 'a world where God doesn't intervene and where human decisions prevail when there is controversy.'
In the show, Léa has an antagonist on this point, a soulful local Orthodox rabbi named Arié (Lionel Dray) who was once her teacher. The friction in their relationship is more than just theological—their 'Will they? Won't they?' sexual tension adds another sitcom element to the show (though given his black fedora and many children at home, I'm guessing they won't). They tussle in a friendly, and sometimes not-so-friendly, way about whether an 'authentic' form of Judaism exists. In one climactic scene, while on an interfaith panel discussion, their argument overwhelms the event. Arié refers to Léa's approach to Judaism as 'à la carte': She picks and chooses what suits her interests. 'Why not practice meditation or oriental-spirituality seminars, if the goal is to confirm one's own beliefs?' he asks her. Léa shoots back by asking him if he practices polygamy. Religion evolves, she says, and besides, 'many people aspire to connect with the wisdom of biblical texts, and they have a right to it, even if you claim exclusive ownership of them.' That's fine, Arié responds, but 'don't call it Judaism. Because that's not Judaism. It's something else.'
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As someone who is on Léa's side of this debate—I agree with Horvilleur that 'Judaism doesn't require its adherents to pass a final exam'—I appreciated her fierce defense of this more open-ended version of the religion, as well as her look of self-doubt as she was arguing it. Judaism that tries to be alive to a changing world has an inferiority complex. It's not even a fair fight when one side takes the accommodation of reality as its mandate and the other cites the direct mandate of God. Léa's work seems more rewarding, though, because the comfort she provides feels more like grace. When she teaches a man sitting alone with his mother's coffin about the Jewish tradition of tearing a piece of your clothes when in mourning, explaining that it symbolizes 'that the survivor will never be entirely whole again,' the gesture breaks the stark nothingness on the son's face.
I'm moved by watching a show that finds drama in all of this, because, at the moment, I'm helping my 12-year-old daughter prepare for her bat mitzvah. She has to write a speech responding to the section of Torah she will be reading, one that includes the biblical proscription to 'not boil a kid in its mother's milk.' From this, early rabbis extrapolated the strict dietary laws that prohibit mixing milk and meat. My daughter had a different reading, though. In a commentary on the text, she found that in the ancient Near East, meat cooked in soured milk was a delicacy. Maybe God didn't intend for this to be a restriction on food at all, she wondered. Maybe he was just asking people to not show off by eating fancy dishes. Maybe he was telling them to live simply. I liked that in the old words she found her own significance, one an Orthodox rabbi like Arié would find ridiculous but that Léa would smile at.
Reformed is a lot more entertaining than this doctrinal back-and-forth would suggest. The show is ultimately about people feeling confused as they face life at the moments that most require an injection of meaning. Can religion still have purpose for those of us who don't believe? The show answers with a qualified yes—as long as it is religion that is never too sure of itself. 'There are lots of rabbis full of certainties,' Arié tells Léa in one consoling moment. 'Perhaps all those who are looking for something else need you.'
Article originally published at The Atlantic