March 9, 2008

The film about Reb Shlomo, You Never Know, by young Israeli film maker Boaz Shahak, is making its U.S. debut this Thursday in Berkeley at the JCC East Bay.

"The film features no external narration, a feat of great courage for such a young filmmaker. Neither does he distract the viewer with subtitles of the names of the interviewees, who are all, instead, listed at the end of the film. This helps transform the film from documentary to art, and adds to a feeling that we are experiencing it in real time." Toby Klein Greenwald (GoJerusalem, Dec. 12)

I am one of the four main narrators in the film, and will be moderating a discussion afterward.

I met Boaz when he came to the U.S. in 2005. He came to the Bay Area twice to film me, the second time with his camera person. He asked me to take them around San Francisco so we went to all kinds of places: to the locations of the first House of Love and Prayer and the second one, to Haight Street (very different in 2005 from 1965), to Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park where we all jumped in (men on one side of the bridge and women on the other) with Reb Shlomo for a mikveh at dawn on Shavuot in 1969, and the San Francisco Marina with it's imposing view, from the bottom up, of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I was very impressed with this young religious Israeli, his sincerity, his idealism and optimism, his humility, his dedication to telling Reb Shlomo's story. There is more to tell about our time together and perhaps I will go into it in a future post.

In all honesty I have mixed feelings about the film. On the one hand, the part of my story that Boaz has chosen to show is the 10% where I talk about my Haight Street, hippie days, rather than the 90% where I talk about Reb Shlomo and the House of Love and Prayer. As my son Adam says, he was really interviewing my "inner hippie!" On the other hand, the film as a whole, as the above reviewer conveys, was done with great daring and great artistry, and is worth viewing both for the mood and spirit it evokes about Reb Shlomo, and for its approach to the art of the documentary.

For me, I see moderating the discussion afterwards as a kind of warm up for my book tour which with God's help will come in the not too distant future.