Praying with Lior Explores Spiritual Life of a Boy With Down Syndrome
Reviewed:
Praying with Lior, Dir. Ilana Trachtman, Ruby Pictures, Inc., 2007
Lior Liebling is a young member of Congregation Mishkan Shalom, a Reconstructionist Synagogue in Philadelphia. The son of two rabbis, Lior attends an Orthodox day school. He is also one of the most vocal and enthusiastic daveners in the entire congregation. This would be unsurprising, if it were not for the fact that Lior was born with Down syndrome.
Lior is the subject of a new documentary, Praying With Lior, directed by Ilana Trachtman and starring Lior and more or less everyone he knows. The film tells the story of the year leading up to Lior’s Bar Mitzvah, and the arduous preparations he undertakes in order to lead the 3-hour service and deliver a dvar torah.
Trachtman followed Lior for a few months that year, and the viewers, in turn, feel as if they have taken up residence in the Leibling household. We watch Lior, his father, his step-mom, and three siblings as they eat Shabbat dinner, wrestle, sing, and live their lives.
The documentary is framed by the death of Lior’s birth mother, Devora Bartnoff. Home video footage of her singing “Shalom Aleichem” with Lior before she passes sets the themes of the film in motion: Lior relishes both the singing and the attention, while his siblings form a supporting cast.
Before her death, Bartnoff wrote an essay for The Jewish Exponent entitled “Praying with Lior,” in which she explored the immense pleasure she got from Lior’s davening. She wrote of him as her spiritual teacher and spoke joyously of the purity and authenticity of his prayers. Lior, she wrote, communed with the Divine more readily and naturally than anyone she had ever met.
The film picks up where the article leaves off, asking how we should relate to such a child. Does his lack of self-consciousness bring him closer to God? Is he a “spiritual genius?” Is he, like any other kid, just looking for attention? And what does it mean to be close to God if you can’t critically reflect on the experience?
These questions abound in the community that surrounds Lior, and while the film does not hand us the answers, it guides us in and out of them. The interviews are at times painful, as when one of Lior’s sisters tells us how distant she feels from him, and at times exceptionally moving, as when the young boys from Lior’s day school reflect on how impressive Lior’s prayers are, and how they feel it is their mission to make him feel accepted.
It is in watching his preparations for his Bar Mitzvah that we get the clearest vision of Lior. He tells his father that he wants to talk about how the Torah is passed down “from generation to generation in our community.” When his father asks him what “generation” means, Lior smiles sheepishly and says, “I don’t know!”
It remains clear, however, that when Lior talks about community and about God, there is something essentially true in his recitations. He may not have any deep mystical understanding, but there is more to Lior’s spirituality than a memorized collection of stock phrases.
While Trachtman and her crew have done a remarkable job of bringing viewers into Lior’s life and that of the community that surrounds him, they insist on the place of the story in a broader campaign. The complicated place Lior occupies in the community raises important questions about the place of disability and difference in society at large. To be reminded of these questions in the context of a film about a marvelous and amusing young man is certainly worth the price of admission.
Praying with Lior opens at Cinema Village in New York for a one-week run February 1st.
