(Warning: This post contains spoilers. And is long.)
I watched A Serious Man the other night before bed, which was a giant mistake because I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I was trying to sleep. It was such a classic Coen movie, old-school in the way they cast character actors with amazing faces, bodies, and voices. The movie simply wouldn’t have worked with their other technique of taking well-known actors or movie stars and forcing them into quirky, Coeny roles.
The depiction of middle-class Jewish culture and religion was incredibly evocative for me. Although I wasn’t alive during the mid-60s, when the movie is set, I identified with so much of it. Everything from the pointless boredom of learning Hebrew by rote to the mild paranoia of Jews finding anti-Semitism where there may or may not be any brought back memories of my own experiences, either ones I lived through or ones I spent hours listening to my older relatives talk about.
In addition, viewing the movie through my own secular viewfinder, I discovered a biting commentary on the faith of the Jews. I was mesmerized by the examination of the ways in which faith in Hashem can provide true support and comfort, and the ways in which it is tyrannical and causes more pain than it heals. At one point, a friend of the Job-like protagonist Larry reminds him that as Jews, they are not alone, and can turn to the stories of their people to alleviate their suffering. The woman who says this has braces on her legs, which is never explained but one could surmise that this is the way she has found to cope with her own suffering. She is sincere in her faith and truly believes that seeing the rabbi will help Larry.
As an “accommodationist” (I suppose), I am glad that some people are able to find strength and comfort in their faith. I haven’t been disabled for that long, and when I hear about people who have had CFS for 10, 20, 30 years or more, I am by no means going to be the one to poke holes in a religious faith that has sustained them for that long. But the movie certainly doesn’t leave it at that. It begins with a story, in fact, one with an ambiguous ending in which a mysterious visitor is either a dybbuk impersonating an old friend who has died, or the friend himself, actually alive. I did notice that Fyvush Finkel is credited as “Dybbuk,” but I believe the import of that story is that it doesn’t answer the question either way.
In fact none of the Jewish stories to which Larry is subjected, in hopes of improving his understanding of why so many terrible things have happened to him, have any real resolution. As he sinks further and further into a quagmire of bad luck and bad associations, he consults rabbis to seek the answer to a question we can all relate to: why are these terrible things happening to a good person? The rabbis are, frankly, hilarious. The first, an eager youngster, is full of enthusiastic hot air about how God is everywhere, his face glowing as he contemplates a banal parking lot. His words are useless to Larry, and I don’t think you have to be an atheist to see how.
The second rabbi tells another story, a fascinating tale of a Jewish dentist who discovers Hebrew characters spelling out the words “help me” inscribed on the teeth of a gentile. With the most perfect depiction of rabbinical condescension, he blows off Larry’s (and our) insistence to know the end, and the meaning, of the story. All he can offer is patronizingly wise nods of the head to Larry’s increasingly desperate desire to find answers to why God is punishing him. I was reminded strongly of the Conservative rabbi I consulted only a month or two before my wedding, on a matter I could not bring up with the Reform rabbi who was officiating. The Conservative rabbi ignored my question in order to exhort me to cancel the wedding to the love of my life because he is a gentile. I went to that rabbi for wisdom and guidance, and instead received implicit orders to marry another Jew and spawn a brood of pureblood Jewlings, which was exactly as useful as the story about the teeth.
In fact the only concrete and useful words come from the most revered rabbi, one who is so eminent and mysterious that Larry’s impassioned pleas to see him are rejected on the basis that he’s busy “thinking.” Larry’s son, who has just had his bar mitzvah, goes for his traditional meeting with the holy man, and receives a moment of bonding over Jefferson Airplane, and an appeal to “be a good boy.” And that’s it.
Larry never gets his answers, because despite the reverence towards the Jewish stories that are supposed to bolster faith, there are no answers to be found. He is tortured by the question of why he is being tortured even as he struggles to remain a good man, and he receives nothing but very sincere gibberish from the people he seeks out for help. I don’t know whether the Coens are religious or secular Jews, but either way I found a real indictment of the (religious) Jewish search for the meaning of life. We all, at one time or another, ask “why is this happening to me?” The reason Jews like Larry are tortured is because their question is slightly different: “Why is God doing this to me?” Well, how are you supposed to turn to God for comfort when he’s the one smacking you around?
I kept thinking throughout the movie that Larry’s life might be much more explicable to him if he were a secular Jew. There is a certain measure of comfort in knowing that you are doing the best you can to be a good person, and that the terrible things that happen to you, that are not triggered by actions of your own, are simply the randomness of the universe at work. There is no meaning in the fact that Larry’s car accident and that of his wife’s lover happened at the same time, but he cannot see it that way. He doesn’t feel buffeted by the indifferent cruelty of chance; he feels personally persecuted by God. At one point he cries out “I am not an evil man!” But it’s only under the thumb of a judgmental deity that this makes any difference as to how you get treated. I wanted someone to say to him “You are a good man, there is no Hashem punishing you for no reason; your efforts to be good do mean something and your troubles are nothing but terrible coincidences.” To me, this line of thinking is an enormous relief.
A Serious Man succeeds so elegantly and touchingly both at bringing to life the cadences, concerns, and fears of Jewish culture and communities, as well as sneakily exposing ways in which the Jewish religion fails so utterly at providing answers to those who seek them — even believers. If your life is about being good for God, then where is the motivation to continue being good if God decides to beat on you anyway? My heart broke repeatedly for Larry, whose morals and ethics were constantly twisted this way and that by this question, but I take comfort in knowing how many Jews have shrugged off that terrible pressure and decided to go about their lives with their own moral compass pointing to true north.
