'A Serious Man'

At the urging of good friends, Ruthie and I went to see the film “A Serious Man” some two weeks ago. Our friends came along to witness the film for the second time. So much controversy about the movie’s quality had been engendered that our friends desired to get my take on it. The film includes three rabbis in short roles. Why not a fourth rabbi to explicate the mysteries and the oddities that mark the film from its beginning to the end?

The story is about a truly good man, Larry Gopnik, smitten by a series of severe disasters, including a broken marriage, a looming threat of dismissal from his post as a university physics professor, imminent financial bankruptcy, sassy and egotistical children, treacherous friends and an anti-Semitic neighbor. Larry is an observant Jew, a synagogue frequenter and a strong believer in the capacity of a rabbi to bring both good advice and solace to people in need of both. He is particularly anxious to see Rabbi Marshak, a venerable spiritual leader. But this sage is apparently too busy to see him.  So he visits two other rabbis, each of whom showers him with platitudes and clichés (“that’s life,” “get over it,” “regard the beauty of this world”). He tries to get to Rabbi Marshak and once again is told by the lady at the desk that the rabbi is busy. Larry exclaims that he had just seen the rabbi through the open door, and there was nobody with him. The response: “The rabbi is busily thinking.”

Three or four times through the film we hear an old Yiddish folk song whose key words are: “The world is still here, we have reason to hope just as long as we inhabit it.” At the very beginning of “A Serious Man” there is a difference of opinion between a man and his wife regarding a holy man standing at their door. The husband identifies him by name. The wife insists that the holy man is long since dead and that what they now see is a dybbuk occupying the visitor’s body.

The Coen brothers, who produced the film, have been negligent in their failure to tell their audiences just what a dybbuk is — doing so would have greatly clarified the events in the rest of the film. In the old mystic tradition, a dybbuk is a malignant obsession within the heart of a human being that is the result of a serious promise to which he or she committed in the past and that needed to be fulfilled. Miracle-working exorcists succeeded in chasing the dybbuk out of the human body so that a human being can be himself again.

Larry Gopnik’s dybbuk was the constant compulsion to do the right thing, no matter what disasters were brought about. Flunking a particularly poor student was the right thing. That it was to cause Larry “some unmerciful disaster” that “followed fast and followed faster” never entered Larry’s mind. God, the Coens seem to say, is no part of your endless troubles. You have not been punished by God. You have been punishing yourself by a mindset that does not accord with the realities of life.

Larry’s boy becomes a Bar Mitzvah and leads the Torah and the Haftarah beautifully. It is he who gets the interview that his dad failed to get — the visit with old Rabbi Marshak. The venerable one compliments the lad on his pulpit performance. He advises him to live with himself and do the best he can.

So what do I think of the picture, Rosemary and Stan? I think it is one of the most thought-provoking films I’ve ever seen.

Lecture date changed
The date of Rabbi Margolies’ third lecture in this fall’s series on anti-Semitism, on the Edgardo Mortara Affair in 19th-century Italy, has been changed. Instead of Nov. 18 at Congregation Beth Shalom, 14200 Lamar Ave., the lecture will now be held at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 2, at the synagogue’s 9400 Wornall Road building. It is free and open to the public.

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