Prejudice and discrimination in the Jewish Orthodox Community
Using the orthodox jewish context was genuinly refreshing, perhaps because it is such an extraordinary closed and unknown society yet imprinted in everybodies conciousness largely through the bible and the consequences of the history of anti semitism.
The film raises big questions for which there are no quick answers. Emancipatory rehtorics which fit other situations perhaps are shown to fail.
For myself as a gay man, the question did stand: What does happen to Jewish orthodox-raised children who grow to develop gay and lesbian feelings ?
I found myself judging this community. The idea of the modesty police i thought was questionable as was the scare tactics used to eject anybody who threatened a very conservative idea of conformity. Religion was used as an excuse to socially organise, very much along the patriarchal lines which Feminism has already exposed and examined and that there was nothing new or acceptable about the way prejudice was enacted within this community.
The question of lust is universal and separate from the question of sexual orientation. This separation allows for the possbility that a gay couple can worship equally in a religious temple and they too, like husbands, fathers and sons, must grapple with their own relationship between their faith and their lust. The bodily religious regalia, when stripped away, is revealed to be nothing more than a disguise, a costume and underneath, these people's bodies were no different or special in apperance to any other human body.
Sometimes Jewish discourses on sin come very close to an exceptional degree of liberalism through it's propensity towards understanding. This film illustrates that in one particular scene. It's not the wisdom of religion but rather the social customs enacted as law which prohibit gay and lesbian members of orthodox families to become accepted. It's a fetishisation of cultural identity over righteousness, to the point it can no longer hear and see it's own offspring.