If you can call Mrs. Dalloway a love story, then Kadosh is a love story.  The story of orthodox Jews living in an ever more secular Jerusalem, Kadosh (translated as Sacred or Holy), directed by Amos Gitai, paints an intimate portrait of love and faith.  Beginning with the gender lines drawn by Orthodox Jewry, Kadosh outlines a world of male/female, religious/secular and bad/good dichotomies.  As is obvious from the very first scene, Kadosh has serious problems with the former while very blatantly treasuring the latter. 

Kadosh opens with Meir (Yoram Hattab), a thirtiesh orthodox Jew rising one morning from a separate bed than his wife.  He wakes with a prayer in which thanks god for the commandment to wash the hands, and for not making him a woman.  As his wife Rivka (Yael Abecassis) sleeps, he dresses placing his tallit (prayer shawl) around his shoulders and laying teffilin.  To an outsider unfamiliar with the custom of teffilin, this act is sheer absurdity.  The teffilin is taken out of its velvet pouch, the boxes fitted around the bicep and the forehead while its leather strap is wrapped around and around Meir’s arm.  It is impossible to say there is not a statement being made here about the logic of ritual and the devotion of the faithful to it. 

We learn that Meir and Rivka have been married for ten years, and have not been able to conceive a child.  According to orthodox custom, if after ten years a wife does not bare a child, the husband must take on another wife.  While it is obvious that Meir and Rivka are in love, this situation frames the struggle of the film – the struggle between personal love and religious faith. 

This struggle is further captured in a more typical sense with Malka (Meital Barda), Rivka’s beautiful younger sister who is in love with her teenage sweetheart, a strapping Yaakov (Sami Hori) who left yeshiva to join the Israeli army – grounds for excommunication in their orthodox world.  Malka is victim to an arranged marriage, an orthodox custom long disdained by the secular world.  Gitai seems to present Yaakov as the new Israeli, ready to live in a millenial world of balance.  Yaakov comments that he prayed every moment when he was alone in the tanks during his army duty and with one foot in the religious world and one foot in the secular, Yaakov exudes a modern piety that Gitai obviously applauds.  This is the lifestyle Malka desperately wants for herself.

Kadosh is an old story told with the fresh backdrop of this new Israel, which by now is not so new anymore.  It is no secret that Orthodox Jews are the minority in Israel, and that modernization, westernization – whatever you might call it-- has had a profound affect on Israel.  Israel, along with becoming the home to thriving metropolitan communities has also become a leader in a high tech industry and the question of modernization is nothing new in Israel.  What is new about Kadosh is the intimacy Gitai allows us to have with his characters and the freshness with which their struggles are developed.  Rivka and Malka are desperately modern, knowing full well that there is a world other than the one they inhabit. 

Not unsurprisingly, Yaakov, the only secular man in the film, is the only sympathetic man in the film.  The men and their rituals according to Judaism are shown as little more than arrogant tyrants, or, in the case of Meir, at the very least spineless.  The men’s tallit and teffilin are laughable, while the ritual reserved for women, that of the ritual bath or mikva is shown in as a cathartic bastion of empathy and motherly love. 

This is a film about gender as much as religion and it is not an unfair characterization to say that it has its biases.   But it is hard not to be biased when love is overruled by dogma, at least in the new Israel where personal satisfaction is the utmost value – a western ideal not lost in Kadosh.

Kadosh is currently playing at the Embarcadero Theater.