Kadosh
June 30, 2000

The movie Kadosh really requires hours to present and analyze its plot, background, subtexts and pretexts. To speak about it in fifteen minutes or less obviously requires me to focus very tightly on a brilliant, troubling and yet illuminating film. For those who did not see it in the limited engagement, the plot is fairly straightforward.

Meir has been married to Rivka for ten years and they have not had children. They live in Meah Shearim in Jerusalem, one of the most fundamentalist Jewish communities. They are Sephardic, though I am not sure in which sub grouping. Maimonides, a Sephardic Jewish authority of highest regard living in the end of the 12 th century, wrote in the Mishna Torah, quoting a Talmudic tradition, that if a man and woman were married for ten years without children, he must divorce her, and if he doesn’t want to, he is forced to do so. The underlying assumption is that she is barren, and not that he is sterile. The movie follows this line of development. Meir’s father, the Rabbi, forces his son to do this even though Meir doesn’t want to. He briefly argues with his father. Rivka’s mother, matron of the mikveh, has to supervise the immersion in the mikveh of her ex-son in law’s new wife Chaya. Rivka will ultimately die from the trauma of this experience. Rivka has a sister Malkah. A shidduch has been obviously arranged for her with Yosef, who is quite coarse. Malkah truly loves Ya’akov, who has left their fervently Orthodox community and lives in the modern world. While she ultimately subjects herself to marriage, Malka has a dalliance, or more, with Ya’akov, and she, too, will ultimately leave her world. One sister who is divorced from the man she loved exits through death. One sister, who hates the man to whom she was married, leaves through infidelity and presumed divorce.

This is the plot in simplicity, which is anything but simple. There is significant character development and intricacies of Jewish law. The society of Meah Shearim and their view of Jewish life are complicated and distant from us. My concern is that many people, Jews and non-Jews, will see this movie and, not understanding its context, see it as a mockery. We may disagree with its principals and philosophies, but this is their life, this is their world, and they have the inherent right to live in it, as they believe. Their community is part of the spectrum of the Jewish people.

I would like to focus on one aspect of the movie, its name – KADOSH – HOLINESS. This is the crux of the movie.

What is kadosh?

If there are hierarchies of what are kadosh, what is the highest?

What does this mean?

The movie’s brilliance shows us Jewish categories, to determine what is kadosh:

Procreation is the cardinal mitzvah, having children, which perpetuates society, and the reason for marriage; life is kadosh;

Kiddushin is the Jewish word for marriage, which is the relationship of the man and woman;

Personal Piety, placing oneself in God’s presence is being kadosh;

While not involved in the movie, time, the holy days, the land of Israel, and the Torah scroll are all kadosh;

Sex is holy. Judaism sees it as a physical act that enables the divine attribute of creation, as an act that links to souls beyond two bodies.

To use an idiom perhaps a bit foreign though it is thoroughly Jewish and a corner stone of Judaism, The Word of God is holy.

The movie shows the tension in a life where a person voluntary accepts an unadulterated,uncompromising, unmodified by modern times, trends, attitudes or knowledge, lifestyle that is governedentirely by The Word of God. This is highest. If God is all inclusive and everything belongs to God, then we, our decisions and life itself, are directed and determined by what God says and by those who interpret it for us, and in which texts it is recorded. Ultimately Meir could not win in arguing with his father. Ultimately Malkah had to marry Yosef. Ultimately Meir had to divorce Rivka. There were no choices. The movie powerfully portrays this. It is absolute.

Yet this concept, of following God’s commandments, listening to His voice as embedded in the prophets, of observing the Judaism created by the Rabbis, is very much the core of our faith. In the early morning prayers we say:

The Artscroll Siddur translates it: “Compel our evil inclination to be subservient to You.”

The Silverman Prayer book translates it: “Bend our will to Thy service.”

The translations capture the essence: compel and bend. The understanding is that we yield to, as the Hebrew National advertisement says, a higher authority, even as there is the continuing Rabbinic development of Judaism.

Perhaps that is the element that needed to be injected into this movie. Its absence makes the point. Religious authorities after Maimondies discouraged and disallowed divorce for being barren. He was a doctor who would have appreciated scientific knowledge, in this movie, that Rivka was not barren; Meir was sterile, which was not allowed into the equation. The Rabbinic requirement for the woman to agree to divorce as well as to consent to marriage was also absent. The absence of the continuing development of Judaism, which Conservative Judaism and even Modern Orthodox Judaism has tried to do, created a tension between the holiness of the God’s Word and the holiness of the individual. Individually, all of the elements, which are kadosh in the movie, are good and true. It is the lack of a continuing development of our understanding of His Word and what is demanded, the inability to question, the seclusion and isolation from the current world, that caused the demise of two marriages and four lives.

Amen.