When documentarian Sandi DuBowski was looking for subjects for his landmark 2001 film Trembling Before G-d—profiling gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews struggling to reconcile their sexual orientations and their roots—many people told him to contact activist and performer (and, now, Rabbi) Amichai Lau-Lavie.
Lau-Lavie, nephew to a past Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv and cousin to a past Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, descends from 38 generations of rabbis and is queer. He is the co-founder and spiritual leader of the Lab/Shul community, described as “an everybody-friendly, God-optional, artist-driven, pop-up experimental congregation.” Lau-Lavie also founded the ritual theater company Storahtelling, Inc.
DuBowski’s request for an interview with Lau-Levine for Trembling Before G-d was denied, however. The filmmaker recalled Lau-Lavie saying unequivocally, “I don’t do collage.” If Lau-Lavie was going to be interviewed for a film, he wanted to be the film’s only subject.
So DuBowski obliged. After more than two decades of filming, Lau-Lavie’s story is now the subject of Sabbath Queen, DuBowski’s newest documentary. It premiered in 2024 at the Tribeca Film Festival and has screened at 65 film festivals worldwide, and it was a New York Times Critics’s Pick.
“I don’t think either of us knew that we would go on this 21-year odyssey together,” said DuBowski.
Sabbath Queen runs Saturday, June 21, and Sunday, June 22 at Gene Siskel Film Center. 164 N. State St., with each screening at 5 p.m. Both DuBowski and Lau-Lavie will take part in discussions after the screenings
The film in large part explores Lau-Lavie’s drag persona, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, a widow who has buried six husbands, all of them Hasidic rabbis. Hadassah bills herself as being “older than Moses and younger than spring.”
DuBowski thinks Hadassah exemplifies “a shamanistic way” that Lau-Lavie was processing trauma resonating from his upbringing. As DuBowski’s cameras were rolling, Lau-Lavie decided to become ordained as a rabbi in the Conservative movement. DuBowski partially credits Hadassah for that fateful decision.
“That big blonde wig and those brooches allowed him to step into the role of a religious leader,” DuBowski explained. “She used to command rituals. It was through her that he became a rabbi. I think she gave him the courage where he could just finally take off the wig and take off the heels, step into what was for him a rabbinic dynasty that stretched back a thousand years in his family.”
DuBowski covers Lau-Lavie’s struggles with the issue of interfaith marriages, as well as his relationship with his family. He ended up as witness to a substantial showing of familial support for Lau-Lavie at the time of his rabbinic ordination.
“I asked [Lau-Lavie’s] brother, Rabbi Benny Lau, who’s an Orthodox rabbi, to be in the film, but I waited 13 years to ask him,” DuBowski recalled. “And he showed up at Amichai’s ordination, which is, you know, no small deal because he is Orthodox, and Amichai got ordained in a liberal denomination.”
Benny not only agreed to be in the film, he took part in a Q&A for Sabbath Queen in Jerusalem as well.
“These are like role models of two brothers who may not agree,” DuBowski said. “His brother showed up with love and respect, and disagreement and discomfort. But he showed up, and in these toxic polarizing times, committing to the difficult dialogue is even more important. This family with these two brothers is so biblical, right? It’s like Cain and Abel. … There’s something, for me, very profound about the brothers’ part of the film.”
DuBowski credits his husband, a meditation teacher, for helping him find patience during Sabbath Queen’s decades-long gestation period. Besides filming for 21 years, he spent six years editing 1,800 hours of original material and 1,100 hours of archival footage.
“It was like climbing a mountain,” he admitted. “That was pretty extraordinary, but I had an amazing team.”
The film’s focus on Lau-Lavie—whom DuBowski descibed as a “sister”—prevented him from ever becoming bored or frustrated with his long hours working on Sabbath Queen.
“He officiated my own interfaith queer wedding and buried my father—we’re very intertwined in many ways,” DuBowski explained. “I never thought of giving up. I always thought, “I’m just going to keep on going.”
Sabbath Queen reflects for DuBowski “how I want to take my Judaism and reimagine it for the 21st century, to have it be creative, dynamic, progressive, queer, God-optional and artist-driven.”
For the near future, he’ll be focusing on promoting the film—he estimates that he and Lau-Lavie have done about 150 Q&A’s before about 30,000 people. Screenings have “been all across the U.S. and Canada, Europe, New Zealand and Israel,” DuBowski said. “It feels like, for people, especially in times that are so dire, that this film’s like a lifeline. … People are coming back to the film multiple times. They’re bringing relatives to see it. It’s very deep, but I think somehow has touched a nerve.”
See here for more information on the June 20 and 21 screenings at Gene Siskel Film Center.