One of the vital fascinating characters in Ondi Timoner’s 2022 documentary “Final Flight House,” which follows her 92-year-old father Eli Timoner’s choice to make use of California’s end-of-life choice, is the director’s sister Rachel. Rachel Timoner is a rabbi who brings pastoral heat and non secular perception to the grief and pleasure, rituals, and non secular reckoning of households commemorating the demise of a beloved one.
Now, in “Kids of God,” Timoner provides her sister an affirming however unemotional close-up. Nevertheless, this documentary will not be a household memoir. As an alternative, Rachel Timoner is the chief rabbi of Brooklyn’s historic Congregation Beth Elohim, with whom she shares a relationship with Bedford-Stuy, Brooklyn -The Rev. Dr. Robert Waterman, senior pastor of the equally famend Antioch Baptist Church within the Stuy neighborhood, shares the best standing.
The establishments are solely 4 miles aside, however their leaders goal to span the broader divide of racism and anti-Semitism. “All God’s Kids” tells the story of this Jewish lady and this black man attempting to unite their congregation in worship — not all the time easily — which makes this simple movie so necessary and illuminating.
The 2 leaders are shut in age and fame. Senator Chuck Schumer attends Beth Elohim occasion. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries visited Antioch. So does New York Lawyer Common Letitia James. Everybody has a singular sensibility. (“God transcends gender,” the rabbi informed a gaggle of scholars.) It’s no shock that these two would embark on a journey of larger understanding. Typically surprisingly, occasions disrupt their newly established rapport and threaten their pursuit of communal concord. As one parishioner in Antioch stated, “Love will convey us collectively, however our traditions will separate us.” Quite a lot of occasions, his evaluation proved right.
The historical past of black and Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, the which means of two completely different diasporas. The bloodbath and slavery, the Holocaust and the Crimson Summer season that devastated Tulsa’s black neighborhood are mirrored in acquainted, nonetheless painful images and newsreels.
In 2019, the yr the movie was launched, Black residents of Bede-Stuy grew to become victims of “contract theft.” This predatory follow permits third-party actors to take possession of a house with out the proprietor’s information, buy the property, and evict the precise proprietor. It has turn into a car for radical gentrification. Regardless of its title, it isn’t unlawful in New York. Given Brooklyn’s demographics, among the landlords and actual property brokers concerned on this follow had been Jewish. Almost all of these injured had been black or brown residents. Rabbis and pastors have good causes to succeed in out.
When parishioners in Antioch first visited the CBE (because the parishioners affectionately name it), guests carried out musical performances that included waving flags. The brilliant yellow letters learn “Jesus.” What appeared like an harmless incident despatched Rabbi Timoner and her deputy Stephanie Colin right into a frenzy of fear and whispering: Ought to they’ve stated or accomplished one thing? Later, issues bought a bit rocky when Timoner spoke at a gathering of attendees at two chapels.
Nonetheless, they persevered, and after the flag incident, the congregation took a joint discipline journey to the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Regardless of the acknowledgment of historic trauma, the damage and alarm brought on by the flag incident have but to totally dissipate.
Halfway via the movie, every congregation visits the opposite’s chapel in the course of the celebrations of Passover and Easter. The CBE seder went off with no hitch, apart from some significantly boring matzah balls. However issues had been even worse than the Flag Incident, the Antiochian rites that included a dramatic retelling of the story of Christ, together with the trial, crucifixion and resurrection. “Ought to we exit?” Timoner requested fellow rabbi Stephanie Korin, who was sitting within the pew.
After all, there are sufficient conditions the place we “don’t perceive.” Studying Antioch’s annual Ardour Play strictly throughout the context of Europe’s lengthy custom of anti-Semitism and “blood libels” may miss an instance that resonates extra resonantly with the folks of Moses, specifically how the story of God’s love was adopted in the US. rooted within the lives of enslaved black folks.
Issues bought so tense {that a} mediator who was expert in main discussions about anti-Semitism and racism was introduced in.
Because the difficulties proceed, viewers are justified in questioning, what precisely set Timoner and Waterman on this journey to focus so deeply on faith, which is commonly the foundation of historical and ongoing animosities? “Possibly worshiping collectively was the fallacious first step,” Timoner stated sheepishly.
However because the movie attracts to a detailed — which incorporates final October’s terror assaults by Hamas and the Israeli authorities’s killing of hundreds of Palestinians — it’s laborious to think about any of those contributors feeling such a deep connection to one another. emotion. To not face these missteps. There is a lesson right here, and the movie makes a persuasive case that at the very least two Brooklyn church buildings and their leaders have loads of sensible knowledge to share.
