25 YEARS AGO
I was not born Orthodox but my quest for a Jewish identity led me there. As a young woman, discovering her path, I lingered a great deal before passing through the gates of Orthodoxy: I worried that crossing this threshold would mean relinquishing my independence. In other words, I assumed there to be an inherent contradiction between an Orthodox existence and a feminist one. At an early age, I had already developed a feminist consciousness, in part, because I was a third-generation feminist; both my grandmothers had fought for women’s economic and intellectual independence and had been fortunate enough to live their own lives as educated and economically independent women.
Still contemplating whether or not to join the Orthodox community, I naturally asked questions that seemed to me essential. One of the questions I asked was whether or not Orthodox Judaism recognized individual female creativity. I searched for a stream in Orthodoxy that would recognize the need for such creativity, and I believed I had found it in Modern Israeli Orthodoxy. Here was a sub-stream that apparently grappled with the troubling questions that modernity poses, and it inspired in me the hope that I would find a way to combine my two identities.
15 YEARS LATER
After I crossed the threshold and began to live a religious (Orthodox) lifestyle, suddenly, “forbidden questions” began to haunt my world. The nature of these questions was elusive. They were concealed like a “forbidden city” far from the consciousness of Orthodoxy and Modern Orthodoxy, and buried beneath open official cultural and religious debates. The first forbidden questions which I came up against related to the laws of family purity that, at the time, were considered an absolute taboo.
I have to admit that nothing in my past had prepared me for entering the halakhic world of family purity. My reproductive system had turned into a mystical kingdom, ruled by a language that forced me to oscillate between states of impurity and purity. Although from the outset, I did not identify with the dichotomy that this situation forced on me, it took a long time before I dared to challenge rabbinic decisions by asking questions that would lead me first, to study, and later, to appeal rabbinic decision-making on the subject of family purity. In my view, such decision-making represents a reality in which male religious hegemony dominates female intimacy in the name of God.
But, initially, my reaction was denial. As a young religious artist, I turned away from the forbidden religious questions that haunted me, because I was not ready to confront my Judaism.
“I decided to create critical and questioning religious cinema.”
To a certain extent, I lived in an ongoing attempt to preserve my “wholeness” as an Orthodox Jewish woman, although it was difficult to uphold the promise of a synthesis between identities. I remember my artistic desire to paint my experiences in the mikvah. That desire quickly dissipated and I didn’t even create one sketch. Later, I began to write stories that I kept in a secret place, hiding them, even in my own home.
It was a long time before I decided to embark on a confrontation, that is, to create critical and questioning religious cinema. I knew that, from the moment that I would try to present my questions, I would be taking a social risk.
Indeed, when I began to make documentary films, many people told me that even though they disagree with the halakha and have lost faith in much of the spiritual moral compass of rabbinic leadership, they still choose silence. Many were reticent; few were prepared to share their experience; even when they became characters on the screen, we still concealed the full intensity of their criticism. My films represent the tension between the revealed and the hidden. Much of what is not revealed is a function of a societal and religious reality that does not accept criticism.
In the first year after my film entered cultural and social debate, I was the target of strong criticism from the Orthodox world. My films were accused of one-sidedness, tendentiousness, hatred of Judaism, ignorance of halakha, lack of credibility and more. ‘Tehora’ for example, became one of the most controversial films in Jewish communities, worldwide. Nevertheless, by the second year after the release of both ‘Tehora’ and ‘Mekudeshet’, the first hostile wave subsided, to be replaced by the emergence of serious conversation on subjects that were previously taboo.
Unfortunately, I have to note that today the reality in Israel is only becoming more extreme. The Zionist Orthodoxy, with which I previously identified, has abandoned the path of synthesis. Modern Orthodoxy faces a dilemma as to whether to continue to be a side branch in an Orthodox society that is returning to extreme Messianic Hassidic models. Over the years that I have been a filmmaker, I have witnessed a religious movement toward extremism, alongside brave attempts to establish an independent female religious identity; attempts that are still at the boundary of the acceptable in religious society.
I continue to dream about a path of synthesis, and about the development of an independent Jewish female creativity, for the sake of a Jewish future of artistic and spiritual abundance.