The Temple Mount, religious extremism, women in Orthodoxy, observant Jews in the army–all hot-button issues in Israeli society. In the movie Time of Favor, which dominated the 2000 Israeli Academy Awards, filmmaker Joseph Cedar manages to weave all of these topics into a story of love and terror.
The protagonist of Time of Favor is Menachem (Aki Avni), a religious army officer entrusted with the command of an experimental unit composed of students from a West Bank yeshiva. While Menachem is a loyal soldier, he is also devoted to the yeshiva’s charismatic leader Rabbi Meltzer, played well by the famed Israeli actor Asi Dayan. (The casting of Dayan is an ironic choice given that the actor is strongly associated with Israeli society’s most secular currents.)
Rabbi Meltzer’s pulsating sermons generally revolve around bringing Judaism back to the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock now stands. This is the sort of rhetoric that keeps the Israeli intelligence community awake at night, fearing that a Jewish extremist will mount a successful attack on the Temple Mount’s Muslim shrines and plunge Israel into an apocalyptic conflict.
The rabbi’s headstrong daughter, Michal, brings the issue of Orthodox feminism into the picture. The rabbi expects Michal (played by the actress Tinkerbell) to marry his star student, Pini (Idan Alterman). While Pini is delighted by this arrangement and throws himself into courting his mentor’s daughter, Michal is less than enthused. Predictably, she spurns Pini’s advances, rebels against her father, and pursues Menachem, who is torn between his loyalty to his friend Pini and his attraction to Michal. Although at first he dithers, Menachem eventually decides to give up his military career, his place in the yeshiva, and his friendship with Pini.
Meanwhile, the dangerous mixture of a radical rabbi and a heavily armed military unit arouse concern on the part of a few secular Israeli intelligence agents. Their fears turn out to be justified when Pini, enraged by his friend’s relationship with Michal, thinks up a scheme that will kill a few birds with one stone. He decides to blow up the Dome of the Rock, as he believes Rabbi Meltzer would want, with explosives stolen from Menachem’s unit, thus framing his friend for the attack.
One of Time of Favor’s strengths is its authenticity. The film effectively conveys the centrality of personal trust and relationships in the Israeli army. The life of the religious Zionist yeshiva youth is also captured extremely well, from the characters’ distinctive patterns of speech to the rabbi’s tremendous influence over his students. No doubt, part of the reason why Time of Favor can so ably capture the nuances of the religious Zionist community is because writer-director Cedar himself comes from a yeshiva background and lived for several years in a West Bank settlement.
Cedar also manages to frame the controversial questions facing Israel in ways that have great resonance. Menachem’s difficult position of serving two masters, his state and his rabbi, is something that many of Israel’s religious soldiers confront. The dilemmas Michal faces similarly ring true. Many young women in Israel’s religious community find themselves torn between the lifestyle with which they were raised and the secular freedoms of modern Israel.
That said, the plot at times feels a bit forced. Time of Favor touches upon so many issues that it fails to competently deal with any one of them. Nevertheless, despite its shortcomings, the film stands as a relative success for Israel’s developing film industry and as an ambitious effort to confront some of the more raw issues in Israeli society.
