Finding His Religion — In Film

Volatch,, said his imagination was being smothered in the haredi world.

Volatch,, said his imagination was being smothered in the haredi world.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

David Volach, the 37-year-old Israeli director whose acclaimed first feature “My Father, My Lord” opens here on May 16, has said that his time as a student at the ultra-Orthodox Ponevezh Talmudical yeshiva was the beginning of a long process of secularization. In conversation, Volach embraces that seeming contradiction with good humor.
“I like to call myself an atheist, but these days it’s like saying you’re a communist,” he says with a laugh, his blue-gray eyes twinkling behind his black-rimmed Elvis Costello-style glasses. With his heavy Israeli accent, “atheist” comes out sounding more like “a deist,” and for a moment one is slightly baffled by the paradox. But as Volach continues, it becomes obvious that, despite his film’s intensely spiritual tone, it is no longer

God that its title invokes.
“In a way, in Israel [being secular] is very easy,” he says. “It’s very different [there] how you deal with the hagim [religious holidays]. Your [Jewish] identity is no problem at all because you are in Israel.”
Besides, he argues, secularism is as much a Jewish tradition as chasidism.
“We’ve forgotten about Spinoza,” Volach says earnestly. “Secularism is a very important part of the Jewish masoret [tradition].”
And the Jewish tradition is a very important part of his film.
“My Father, My Lord,” which won the best narrative feature award at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, recounts the story of a haredi family — father, mother and young son — by showing us their day-to-day routine and investing it with its own intensely felt spirituality, a sacred presence that can be felt in the light shimmering on a damp teacup or the sun gilding the surface of the Dead Sea. But the film throws a terrible monkey-wrench into this seemingly idyllic unit when the boy drowns while his father is praying with his community. Is the father’s devotion to ritual a counterintuitive kind of idolatry? Is his failure to register the danger to the boy a perverse re-enactment of the binding of Isaac, but without the Torah’s seemingly happy ending?
Whatever else it may be, Volach sees the film as a reply to a similarly themed work by the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. In the first of the 10 short films that make up Kieswlowski’s “Dekalog,” he too uses a modern-day variant on Abraham’s last test as a comment on following instructions as a form of idolatry.
“In the beginning, I had the idea to do a very different story, starting with the death of a child,” Volach recalls. “But Kieslowski, he really broke me; he showed me the emotional place of religion in childhood, in purity and innocence, in kindness. Those are all related to believing.”
Elsewhere, Volach has spoken about Kieslowski’s mastery of the intimate, saying that the Polish filmmaker’s development of character takes place on his character’s faces. By contrast, one might say that Volach achieves the same degree of intimacy and the same powerful sense of his characters’ inner lives through his use of the objects and spaces with which they interact. There are few close-ups of the actors in “My Father, My Lord,” yet the film feels as intimate and emotionally charged as a Strindberg play.
That is a remarkable achievement for a first-time director, but Volach happily credits his cast for some of that success.
Working with veteran leads like Assi Dayan and Sharon Hacohen Bar made his job easier, he says.
“It’s not that you come in and say ‘you do this, you go here,’” Volach says. “You don’t ‘direct’ actors like these. You tell them the truth about the characters. And you learn from their knowledge of the characters.”
His interlocutor suggests an English paraphrase of a Mishna from Pirke Avot, and Volach snaps out the exact lines in Hebrew. You can take the boy out of the yeshiva but...
In truth, this boy has been out of the yeshiva for a long time. Volach, who says that like the child in his film he was “always interested in animals and ‘The Other,” found living in the haredi world as one of 19 siblings to be increasingly stifling. He wanted to express himself through theater and he felt that his imagination was being smothered. At 25, he left the family behind and moved to Tel Aviv where he abandoned his religious training. The result was a few years of estrangement from his parents, “but time heals everything,” he says, smiling.
Film school gave him the rudiments of his newly chosen career, but he says that his best lesson came from many years of shooting and editing wedding videos to make a living.
“Ten or 15 years ago, I was young and arrogant,” he says with a self-conscious grin. “I was editing a client’s video and I decided to leave out this one uncle who I found loud and irritating. And the family said, ‘Why isn’t Uncle in the video?’ I said, ‘It’s a better film this way,’ and my boss looked at me like I was an idiot. He said to me, ‘These are customers. You are making the video for them.’ I’ve had a lot of study, but I had to learn to understand that.”
The way that Volach translates that lesson for himself is that whatever he may decide to do in the course of making a film, he can’t lie to his audience.
One suspects that this deeply held concern for truth is one of the reasons that, as he puts it, “a lot of my friends like the film very much.”
He adds, “Nobody is insulted [by the film]. Most of the time when you criticize religion you criticize people, you make them less appealing. But I try to say ‘No, the problem is with ideas, not with people.’”
As for his own place in this equation, Volach says, “I’m secure in my identity. I can forgive and forget bad things that have been done. I really like this evolution.” n
“My Father, My Lord,” written and directed by David Volach, opens May 16 at Lincoln Plaza (62nd St. and Broadway) and Cinema Village (22 E. 12th St.).

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