SUNDANCE 2024: A Cantor Learns To Love Himself In ‘Between The Temples’

V’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha — love your neighbor as yourself. These words from the Torah were central to Cantor Ben’s (Jason Schwarzman) bar mitzvah in Between the Temples, written by Nathan Silver and C. Mason Wells and directed by Silver. They’re the same words his new adult bat mitzvah student Carla (Carol Kane) will read from the Torah too. Ben tells Carla early in their lessons that to become bat mitzvah, she not only has to learn the Hebrew of her Torah portion but understand what it means.

Becoming bat mitzvah, especially as an adult who left Judaism long ago, is about choosing for yourself to be part of a bigger Jewish community and living the values of our Torah and its tradition every day. But how can you love your neighbor as yourself when you don’t love yourself?

Ben’s wife died in an accident about a year ago, and ever since, he has lost his voice, literally and figuratively. He won’t sing anymore, even though it is his passion and his job. But he isn’t looking for his voice either. His mothers, played magnanimously by Dolly de Leon and Caroline Aaron, egg him on. He needs to get out of the house. He needs to go back to the temple. He needs to date the rabbi’s daughter, Gabby (Madeline Weinstein). But Ben himself has no ambition or desires of his own anymore.

Until Carla comes along. Between the Temples seems, at first, to suffer from one of the most annoying tropes in Jewish movie-making. It’s littered with nagging Jewish mothers, a dumb rabbi, and constant references to Israel if that’s the only cultural touchpoint American Jews have. Most confoundingly, the religious school students wear kippot every day, and the sanctuary has no instruments, indicating Ben works at a Conservative synagogue, yet they use Reform prayer books.

These are the kinds of things that perhaps annoy me personally more than the average viewer, but it’s a kind of design choice that feels like it’s purposefully caricaturing its Jewishness to create a broader mass appeal. It’s a tired way of Jewish movie-making and needs to stop.

But the context of Between the Temples at least makes the nagging Jewish mothers forgivable. While the movie’s undertones are quite sincere, it’s still a comedy through and through. If we can’t laugh at our existential dread and uncertainty about the universe, who can? Those mothers are nagging not just because it’s a heuristic for how much they care but because if they weren’t, it wouldn’t put Ben into constantly awkward situations with Gabby. And the movie certainly wouldn’t culminate in the most awkward dinner scene imaginable.

The camerawork and editing in Between the Temple accentuate the awkwardness. Everything is moving at a rapid clip with lots of facial close-ups. You’re supposed to feel the knot of tension tightening in Ben’s gut with every passing scene. But you’re also supposed to feel relaxed whenever Carla is in the scene, because she is the one sane person in the whole movie, despite being its most lovable kook. I’m not sure what it says about the state of Jewish comedy that she’s also the character the least connected to her being Jewish, that she plays this role in this story, but it’s very touching nonetheless.

If there is one Jewish stereotype the movie leans into that at least feels genuine and not overplayed in other Jewish movies, it’s the way Ben’s lost singing voice makes for a perfect metaphor for the way everyone else in his life constantly tries to speak for him. I’m sure this has been true his whole life, but especially since his wife’s death, he can’t get a single word in edgewise at home or at work. Everyone just wants to set him up or do his job for him all the time.

But he doesn’t want to run away from it all, either. Despite his crisis of consciousness, he clearly loves his job and his community. Carla, through her oddity and charm, gives him a space to speak for himself and practice doing what he loves without the judgment and derision everyone else heaps upon him.

Between the Temples is a thoroughly narrowcasted movie, but as somebody in the narrow scope of its audience, I think it’s excellent. The humor is subtle but also laugh-out-loud hilarious the whole way through. And despite some of its annoying tendencies to lean on Jewish stereotypes in an unnecessary attempt to appeal to a broader audience, there’s a strong message about how the loudness of Jewish families can silence our emotional depths. Rather than merely laughing the pain off as we so often (and validly) do, Carla helps Ben confront it head-on. In a truly lovely twist on the tradition, by learning to love his neighbor, Ben learns to love himself again.

Between the Temples is playing now in theaters everywhere.