Trembling

This article was originally published in HEEB #1, Winter 2002

Sandi DuBowski is sweet, gentle, smart and charming-not someone one would necessarily expect to find in the center of controversy. But seven years ago, when he began making Trembling Before G-d, a documentary about the lives of gay Orthodox Jews, he began to grow increasingly accustomed to controversy's storm, showing great faith that the fracas would someday give way to open minds and hearts. His faith has finally been proven well-grounded: During the past year, Trembling has garnered accolades from audiences around the world, and snared awards at the Berlin Film Fest, Jerusalem Film Fest, and OUTFEST Los Angeles. The film, too, has inspired groundbreaking dialogue within Orthodox and wider Jewish communities. Heeb spoke with DuBowski during the film's extended New York run.

Mark as a Hasid (from left); Mark as a drag queen; Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the world’s first openly gay Orthodox rabbi. David (below), another queer mensch in the film.

Heeb: I'm going to ask for a little encapsulated version of your spiritual journey, from your conservative Brooklyn boyhood to where you are now.

SD: My love of Judaism was always there in deep, coastal Brooklyn. I led the whole service, from Friday night to Saturday morning, at my Bar Mitzvah. I never had any ambivalence toward the religious practice of Judaism. I was always very into it-the tunes and the music embedded themselves in me. It was a pretty traditional, very loose, Conservative upbringing.

What happened between the time you were the Bar Mitzvah boy and your college years?

In college, I was very focused on coming out as gay, and I think [Judaism] was like embers in me—they were still there, but they weren't present in the way that the film ignited them. I didn't grow up, unlike a lot of people, with hostility towards Judaism. I definitely knew that people in the shul where I grew up weren't having an engaged relationship with it, but until I went to do the film, I hadn't met people who were full, and living, and grappling, and in love with Judaism. A whole world opened up to me.

What was your coming out process?

I was scared to tell my parents that I'm gay, but I got reassured after 45 minutes of asking my mother, "Will you still love me no matter what? Will you still love me no matter what?" The floor wound up this lunar landscape of rolled up tissues, but then I knew they wouldn't throw me out, no matter what. The biggest shock for me in the film was seeing Jewish families just discard their children. That was something that always made me so upset and horrified.

It made me appreciate my own parents so much more.

Was there something that ignited this idea of researching being gay and Orthodox? When was that moment when you said, "I need to know a whole lot more about this?"
I didn't necessarily know what I was getting into-it was very intuitive. It started as a personal video diary, exploring whether there was homosexuality in the Orthodox world, but I hadn't even met anyone by then. Then I went to Israel, and I actually did meet someone who was a right-wing settler and coming out as bi. I helped him come out. Then I met Mark at an international conference of lesbian and gay Jews. He was a big queen at the time - he had completely abandoned Orthodoxy.

So what was the story with him? How did you two connect?

Mark and I became instant brothers in a yeshiva without walls. We pilgrimaged back to the yeshivas that had kicked him out for homosexual activity, which were seven in England and Israel. We went to the neighborhoods he grew up in and the shuls he davened in. It was all about return. And at this point, Mark has again returned - he's become a total Hasid with payis past his shoulders and a beard to his chest.

He just went to the Ukraine for Rosh Hashanah with 8000 Hasidim, and I'm sure his voice got hoarse from singing and dancing for four days in a row. Yet, he lives with AIDS and is still gay. Mark always had, more than anyone else in the film, an exuberant Judaism.

The people in silhouette obviously have an uncomfortable relationship with being out publicly.

Virtually no one could be out. It took me six years crisscrossing the globe just to find anyone. David was the only gay person who grew up Orthodox, who was still Orthodox, who was willing to go on camera and share his story.

We've heard a little bit about making the film. What about your screenings, what has the feedback been like?

We had one test screening early on where an ultra-Orthodox woman wearing a wig yelled, "You're a liar! You people can change! You can fight this! You can overcome this!" She then said that her daughter was a lesbian who refused to go to therapy, so they don't speak anymore. That was my first glimpse of what it would be to take this film into the Orthodox world. But I had another woman come to the theater the other night. She leaned into me and said, "My brother died of AIDS." She was an Orthodox woman, and her eyes were like doe eyes, so wide and full of pain. A rabbi asked me once, "What is your goal with this film?" And I said that if I had to crunch it into one thing, my goal is to alleviate pain and suffering. That's the simplest way to describe it. The next step after that is, how do you create livable lives for people so they don't have to cut off their spirituality to save their sexuality? That's a bigger and more difficult question.

I remember when I first saw the silhouettes, I had some problems with them. I understood their function in terms of people's privacy, but l also felt they had a tendency to be kind of sappy, and romanticize the tradition.

The whole film was a testament to the harshness of when the iconic ideal doesn't exist. The silhouettes were a way for people to recreate Orthodox life. And there was so much I couldn't film. There were individual people who could be filmed, like David, but no Orthodox family with a gay or lesbian child came forward to be filmed.

I think for a lot of these people who come from a place of brokenness, that ideal image being out of reach is very powerful.

I felt that it was much more powerful, in terms of seeing how gay Orthodox Jews could live, even as a dream, to see Leah and Malka making challah and preparing for Shabbos, than seeing the silhouettes.

For me, the silhouettes just treaded the border, as almost a dreamscape, about visibility and invisibility. There's a mantra in the gay world that says you have power once you're visible. "Silence equals death." For all these closeted people, it's very disempowering to feel like you can affect no change and have no voice unless you're visible. The risks are still really too high for some people to come out. I think to make invisibility illuminating was a powerful act for people-to come together as a community and create their image behind the screen.

I think it would have been really fascinating for the audience to have seen some of those contrivances in the film.

There was a lot that went on behind the scenes, so much intensity, like when we by this Hasidic lesbian, her husband was played by an Orthodox gay man, all of their husbands and wives.

What might you have done differently in the filming?

In retrospect, I would have filmed with less people. I would have decided who the characters were earlier. But in some ways, since making the film was my film school, I learned to shoot as an editor. I learned about coverage, I learned about distance. And I learned a lot about narrative. I think a lot of documentaries suffer because they don't have narrative.

Or because there are so many threads of narrative that need to be woven together.

Yes, exactly.

Mark again, as a good yeshiva boy (clockwise); Proof that Sandi rocked Jerusalem; the Western wall; Sandi with some of his film’s darling subjects; Malka and Leah romancing on the beach in Florida.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

One thing I want to talk about is the title of the film, the reason why the dash is there. We begin the film with the traditional Leviticus prohibition against homosexuality, but it ends with the blessing, "Blessed are you, our God, king of the universe, knower of secrets." To me, the dash in the title of the film is not just about honoring the injunction against taking God's name in vain, but it's about the impossibility of containing the Divine on paper, in a limited form. It's about the infinity of the Divine, the mystery of the Divine. And for me, it's also about the mystery of sexuality. So it ties to the end of the film, where sometimes what's hidden can be even more powerful than what is naked and revealed. There's humility in a question, and there's not always humility in an answer. We don't know God's blueprint. There are blessings in saying, "I don't know."