Talking to God

I wish I could begin my first article of 2021 with a Happy New Year, but unfortunately everything feels very bleak out there. The UK has headed deeper into lockdown and the US is reeling from an unprecedented attack on its democracy. So perhaps we could all do with a little humour. The articles in my blog often tell terrible tales of suffering and loss, so by way of contrast, here’s something funny and uplifting to help take our minds off all the doom and gloom in these cold, dark days.

Talking to God is a 2019 film written and directed by Maya Batash, who also stars in the lead role as Rebecca, an insomniac New Yorker who will try anything to find happiness – and to help her get to sleep. Nothing works until she joins a bunch of equally desperate women on a trip to Uman, the town in Ukraine where the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) has become a pilgrimage site for religious Jews. The picture was partly filmed on location in Uman.

But don’t worry, this isn’t a moralistic tale to convert the viewer to Orthodox Judaism. Surrounded by praying pilgrims at the Rabbi’s tomb, Rebecca remains utterly unmoved. But after a while she realises she’s sleeping better, in spite of the stiflingly hot dorm room she’s sharing with a dozen other women, one of whom crunches crisps (potato chips) noisily in the middle of the night.

In search of the answer to the universal question, “What makes us happy?” she discovers The Fixer, a cheery fiddle player who lives in a tiny shack in the forest and looks like he belongs in a Sholem Aleichem adaptation. The Fixer’s narrative is a modern a take on a short story written by Rabbi Nachman himself, A Tale of Faith. In the original, a king goes on a quest to find out if his subjects are truly happy and discovers that the happiest man in his kingdom is completely destitute.

“I wanted to connect the two stories,” Batash told the Jewish Press in December 2020. “I tried to modernise Rabbi Nachman’s story and connect it to this modern-day one-woman journey. Since we don’t live in an age with little villages with a king, I turned the character into the king of Hollywood. The basic story premise and message is still there.”

The movie mogul is a thoroughly nasty – and unhappy – character, while the Fixer, played by Australian Zebedee Row, is imbued with such an innate joyousness that you just want to bottle it up and take a drop when you need something to cheer you up. “I think people in the world need to laugh more. The world can be a serious place,” Batash says.

The moral of the story is that “A person must enlist all his strength to be joyful at all times. It is human nature to be drawn to depression and sadness because of life’s daily events.” And I’m sure that’s good advice to all of us struggling through these dark, depressing times.

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