Not Your Conventional ‘Sabbath Queen’

Two decades in the life of Amichai Lau-Lavie, a spiritual Pied Piper for countless disenfranchised Jews, are captured on film in ways that will resonate deeply with many.

Teaching Torah in creative ways, Lau-Lavie has built LabShul into a large, dynamic spiritual community in New York.

Imagine a film whose Jewish characters include a Conservative rabbi, a Chasidic rebbetzin, a drag queen, the scion of a famed rabbinic dynasty, the father of three children whose mothers were a lesbian couple, and the founder of a spiritual theater company that became a popular God-optional New York congregation. 

Too much?

Well, it turns out that the “characters” are one person. And the film is a documentary, made over the course of 21 years.

Welcome to the world of Amichai Lau-Lavie, 55, a dynamic maverick whose spiritual journey and personal encounter with his Jewish identity, from gay, outsized rebel to rabbinic troubadour, addresses critical issues on what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century - who’s in the tent and who’s out. 

Lau-Lavie and his struggles, successes and ongoing questions about reconciling tradition and modern life are the subject of a fascinating, emotional and incisive 105-minute film, “Sabbath Queen,” that is being shown in film festivals in the U.S. and around the world. It opens theatrically at the IFC Center in New York on Nov. 22.

In keeping with Lau-Lavie’s overall goal of inclusion, building bridges and promoting face-to-face encounters with the widest possible range of participants, many of the showings include Q and A sessions with Lau-Lavie and director Sandi Dubowski, and, on Friday nights, Shabbat rituals and meals. 

“We try to infuse ritual in these events,” he told me during a Zoom interview I had with him and Dubowski this week. They were in Amsterdam for the opening of the film there, and deeply moved by the warm reception from the community. “People want to be together,” especially in difficult times like now, noted Lau-Lavie. “They want to laugh and cry and process together.”

Combining performance art, Jewish education and innovative religious practice has been one of the few constants in Lau-Lavie’s multi-layered life. 

With him each step of the way since 2002 has been his Boswell, Dubowski, best known as the director of the award-winning 2001 documentary, “Trembling Before G-d,” a poignant portrait of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews trying to make peace with their faith and sexuality. 

Just as that film made a powerful impression on the Orthodox community, resulting in greater empathy for gays, this film may well open hearts and minds for those who feel closed in by boundaries – political, religious, cultural or gender-related. 

Most recent and relevant is Lau-Lavie’s renewed commitment, in the wake of the current Mideast war, to reject “either-or” approaches in confronting the conflict, just as he applies fluid solutions to halachic dilemmas, like whether or not to officiate at interfaith marriages.

“Sabbath Queen” ends with scenes of Lau-Lavie in Israel, observing hostage posters and footage of the destruction in Gaza. “I hold the pain of my Israeli family,” he says, “and our trauma and need for safety does not justify starving and killing tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the continued occupation. This horror must stop.”

Dubowski told me that the original ending had Lau-Lavie saying “but our trauma” rather than “and our trauma.” They agreed to change the wording because they wanted to underscore that, as Lau-Lavie explained, the film is about “both hands, holding my pain and your pain, and one can’t be at the expense of the other. … The message I hope people take away from the film is the power of ‘and.’

“I know the price of trauma and being victimized,” he said. “We cannot be victimizers.”

In its showings, particularly in Europe, “Sabbath Queen,” it is Dubowski whose persistence and ability to serve as filmmaker and follower of Lau-Lavie in tracking the twists and turns of his close friend’s life that makes “Sabbath Queen” an artistic gem. Going through 1,800 hours of film he shot to come up with less than two hours – an editing process that took six years – was a Herculean task. He acknowledged that “every image in the film is a minefield, on every level” as it explores a series of personal and communal crises in Lau-Lavie’s life, constantly pushing boundaries and radically reinventing approaches to prayer. 

Brotherly Love

Lau-Lavie’s biography begins long before his birth in Israel. He is the product of a rabbinic dynasty that goes back 40 generations. He is the nephew of the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yisrael Meir Lau; his cousin, David Lau, was the immediate past Chief Rabbi of Israel; his father, Naftali Lau-Lavie, was a prominent Israeli diplomat whose career included a stint as Consul General in New York; and his brother, Benjamin “Benny” Lau, is a major figure in Israeli Modern Orthodoxy, one of the first to welcome a woman as a member of the clergy of his congregation.

But Amichai’s decision to break with traditional Orthodoxy as a young man, propelled by his being publicly outed in Israel as gay and coming to America for a fresh start, was a river too wide for his family.

“I think he’s playing a game with Judaism,” Benny Lau says at one of several points in the film where he expresses frustration with his brother. “There must be boundaries in the Jewish home,” he says later.

One of the poignant themes of “Sabbath Queen” is the evolving relationship between Lau-Lavie and his family, particularly his mother, Joan, and Benny, who are shown gradually accepting Amichai for who he is. An emotional highlight is when the brothers embrace at Amichai’s Conservative rabbinic ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York in 2016. (Their father, Naftali, died in 2014.)

Much of the film takes place in New York. Amichai arrived in 1997 and felt liberated by the openness of the gay community, which he became active in, initially joining the Radical Faeries, an irreverent counter-cultural group of gay men who practiced secular spirituality. In 1999, on concluding that liberal synagogue services were long and boring, Lau-Lavie created Storahtelling, a semi-subversive theater group that acted out Biblical stories with innovation and, often, humor. One outgrowth was Lau-Lavie’s creation of Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, a drag character – widow of six Chasidic rabbis – who wore a blonde wig, spoke in a European accent and dispensed Jewish wisdom and one-liners. 

Rebel rebbetzin: ‘Hadassah Gross’ was a popular role for Lau-Lavie. He stopped performing as her a decade ago and says she resides “in the depths of the Dead Sea.”

Ten years ago Storahtelling morphed into LabShul, a hip, downtown spiritual community Lau-Lavie founded that describes itself as “god-optional, pop-up, experimental” and open to all “with an open heart.” He is its leader and it has grown in size and depth, a beloved home to many, including interfaith families. 

The question of whether and to what extent non-Jews should be accepted – and more specifically whether Lau-Lavie should officiate at interfaith marriages – led to a pivotal period in his career. It came to a head in 2017, and is used by Dubowski as the dramatic frame of “Sabbath Queen,” opening and closing the film with Lau-Lavie, having broken ranks with the Conservative movement over his decision, officiating at his first interfaith wedding. 

This was not easy for him.

He had spent five years at JTS preparing for ordination and knew that the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly (RA) did not permit members to officiate at interfaith weddings. He hoped he might change its policy from within but he was torn between his commitments to both tradition and change.  

“One of my fears is that Jewish life will be reduced” by weakening the community, he told me at that time. “I don’t want to open the floodgates to an ‘anything goes’ position,” he said. Yet he noted that his “firsthand encounter with the pain of rejection and its consequences to the couple, to me and to our community convinced me of the need for an urgent solution.”

I spent time with Lau-Lavie at that time, interviewing him and attending a LabShul salon during which he explained how, on a personal level, and through a year of intense study of Jewish texts and in conversation with rabbis and congregants, he found a path he believed would enable him to officiate at the marriage of a Jew and non-Jew while adhering to a minority strain of Jewish tradition.

In practical terms, the result was a new form of wedding ceremony, incorporating certain Jewish rituals, preceded and followed by a commitment by the couple to study and engage in Jewish life. Lau-Lavie prefers that the non-Jewish partner be known as a “Joy,” as in “a Jew’s who’s also a goy,” though he acknowledged it may be viewed as too cute, if not offensive, a title to others.

LabShul members were divided. Some were ready to support his adhering to the Conservative movement’s policies. Others insisted his first responsibility was to the community he created. One dramatic scene in the film records the debate at a LabShul board meeting when Lau-Lavie announced that he planned to join the RA, and was confronted by a member who spoke passionately against it. “My family needs you,” he told his rabbi, reminding him that he had created a community based on inclusivity. 

That exchange was instrumental in changing Lau-Lavie’s mind, he acknowledged. He stepped down from the RA and began officiating at interfaith weddings where he believes the couple is committed to living a Jewish life. Seven years later, the RA policy hasn’t changed; Lau-Lavie says he is “still in the fluid” mode of “holding the complexity” of the moment, whether the issue is interfaith marriage, the Arab-Israeli conflict or the countless other challenges “to peoplehood, love, family and continuity.”

The answer, he asserts, is “empathy and more empathy, love and more love.”