Orthodox and Gay. Two words most people never thought to combine before the release of Sandi Dubowski’s documentary “Trembling Before G-d.” Disowned by family, rejected by community, and expelled from schools, Orthodox gays remained closeted and isolated in the midst of a world they yearned to belong to, yet knew would never understand or accept them.
Over the two and a half years since the release of “Trembling Before G-d,” Dubowski traveled to more than 35 universities and 70 cities sharing the film with people of all genders, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation. What Dubowski began as a video diary, an exploration into the Orthodox world as a gay Jew, has now turned into a global movement calling for understanding and acceptance of Orthodox homosexuality. Outreach initiatives have sprung up throughout the world as internet traffic bustles through dozens of new web forums devoted to the topic. “It’s astounding to me to look at [the film’s] impact,” the 33-year-old filmmaker says.
It took six years of searching the globe to find subjects who would come forward for his documentary. Fearful of the harm such a step would cause them and their families, no one was willing to talk. Eventually, through networking and scouring the internet and the world, Dubowski found a few gay and lesbian subjects—from a young yeshiva student who openly takes us into his world of Hasidic ritual, to a married woman hiding behind a screen—willing to tell their stories.
“It’s been a real journey to find people and maintain their trust,” says Dubowski. Many interview subjects decided to pull out of the film to avoid shaming their families. Now, however, people are seeking Dubowski out as their new confidante and the word “trembler” has entered the English vernacular. And though the film was about “hidden lives,” as Dubowki says, people are no longer hiding. Since the release of the film, the filmmaker has received two thousand pages of emails from people eager to share their stories.
Even a few subjects who originally masked their identities have revealed themselves in the new sequel “Trembling on the Road.” Released in October on DVD and VHS, the film comes packaged with the original, which now includes added interviews and deleted scenes. “Trembling on the Road” takes a look at the life-changing movement created in large part by Dubowski’s original film. Across the globe, we see how that movement has united a community, transforming lives once dominated by loneliness.
We see too how Dubowski brought the first Shabbat to Sundance, home of the Sundance Film Festival where the film was officially selected for screening. And we follow the filmmaker to “Friday night Live in the Castro,” an event for San Francisco’s gay community (America’s largest) where Rabbi Langer, Chabad rabbi of San Francisco, sets up his outreach table. The “Trembling” movement has also reached interfaith audiences. In Utah, Dubowski, who grew up a Conservative Jew in Brooklyn, convened a Mormon-Jewish gay dialogue as an effort to reconcile world religion with homosexuality. And he is now working on a documentary examining gay life in the Muslim world, finding many similarities to the struggles those in the Jewish world face.
In the course of the new film, we learn that foundations such as The Steven Spielberg Righteous Persons Foundation have provided funding to help launch a Trembling Before G-d Orthodox Community Education Project. The program has trained facilitators to lead dialogues with two thousand principles, teachers, and therapists in the Israeli school system. These are groundbreaking developments for the country’s Orthodox school system, which has never acknowledged—let alone addressed—the issue of homosexuality.
The growth of the movement has not come without hostile confrontations. In “Trembling on the Road” we witness heated arguments between the filmmaker and people from various cities and backgrounds who feel that open discussion of homosexuality is a dishonor to Judaism. But although controversial among ultra-Orthodox communities and rabbis, the original film has made homosexuality a “legitimate issue on the Orthodox table,” according to the filmmaker. Dubowski has been invited by fifteen Orthodox synagogues to screen “Trembling Before G-d” to surprisingly large crowds. “It felt like the first time the community was publicly confronting the issue,” he says. Dubowski admits that the film touches hot-button questions of religion and sexuality, but says he created it out of a love for Judaism. Since making the original film, Dubowski has started to lay tefilin, experienced Shabbat for the first time, and began studying Judaism with a gay Hasid.
One of the most difficult things about making “Trembling Before G-d,” according to Dubowski, was seeing how people were cut off from their families. Their anguish gave him a sense of purpose. In “Trembling on the Road” we see more joy than pain as people begin to reconcile with their friends and family. In the original, Malka, an Orthodox lesbian living a secluded life with a woman she met in religious school, was estranged from her family. Now, though, we learn that her brother, after seeing the first film, has reconnected with her.
The release of the new DVD should bring even more hope to those in the ultra-Orthodox world still dealing with the conflicts of Orthodoxy and homosexuality. And the influence of the original film continues to be felt. This month the first-ever Orthodox Mental Health Conference on Homosexuality will convene in New York. Proof to Dubowski that the film is still helping people.
Dubowski calls his work a “film about the outsiders,” which put a human face to what until then had been an abstraction. In the process, the film relays a message to all Jews. “No one’s a perfect Jew,” says Dubowski. “We’re all struggling with how we don’t fit in.”
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www.TremblingBeforeG-D.com
