Between the Temples: A Movie for Every Season

Cantor Ben Gottlieb doesn’t want to be inscribed in the Book of Life. Having buried his wife and lost his singing voice, he wants to die. He actually lies down in front of a truck, but the driver refuses to run him over and instead drops him off at a bar. There, he drinks too many mudslides, picks a fight, and gets punched in the face. This bad-to-worse sequence that seems to be his life at the opening of Between the Temples (2024, directed by Nathan Silver and available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and elsewhere) forces Cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) into a soul-searching place.

It all reminds me of the High Holy Days season of teshuvah (return) and Elul, the Hebrew month that ushers it in. As Jews, we are taught to ask ourselves, “Who am I now? Who do I want to be?” Ben has to answer these questions, and choose to change, because the current version of him just isn’t working.  

Over the course of the film, and with help from two women he meets, Ben gets a glimpse of a possibility of some answers and some change. These women remind him of who he once was and teach him who he could be (or be again).

Though it’s emotionally a movie for the High Holy Days, it’s set in late winter, another time of reflection and renewal. Emotions and psychological developments don’t follow the Jewish calendar, much as we might wish they did.

The first woman Ben meets is Mrs. Carla O’Connor (née Kessler), his music teacher from elementary school, played by Carol Kane. At the bar, she tends to his face and drives him home. She pops up again during a b’nei mitzvah class he is teaching to a group of youngsters and announces that she wants to have an adult bat mitzvah. Seeing his old music teacher reminds Ben of his lifelong love of music. We see him looking at old photos of himself singing in Mrs. O’Connor’s class. In their reversed roles, Ben teaches Carla her Torah portion, the same one he chanted for his bar mitzvah. Still unable to sing, he can’t demonstrate to Carla how the portion should sound, so they go to her house and watch his childhood bar mitzvah video. “I remember me!” he exclaims. He also remembers his love for Judaism. (Then, in a surreal moment, “Little Benny” jumps out of the TV screen and Carla comments that they must be drinking the “wrong kind of tea.”)  

Carla isn’t really new to Ben, but their relationship, in which he is the teacher, she is the student, and both are adults, is new. It’s renewed. Through Carla, Ben reconnects with a younger, perhaps more essential version of himself. 

Rabbi Rachel Timoner, senior rabbi at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, where I’m a member, loves to teach how the word Elul is said to be an acronym for the phrase, “Ani l’dodi v’dodi li,” or “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” The relationship in this phrase, which is also often used in wedding ceremonies, is often imagined as being between the Jewish people and God or one person to another. But it can also refer, Rabbi Timoner says, to the relationship between a person and oneself—a person and one’s own soul.

The second woman Ben meets is Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), daughter of Ben’s boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel). Gabby looks just like Ben’s late wife, Ruth (also played by Madeline Weinstein—another surreal element), who was a novelist. Gabby flirts with Ben by asking to borrow a copy of Ruth’s novel. 

Gabby and Ben have a date, of sorts, at the cemetery where Ben is visiting Ruth’s grave. In this scene, the themes of remembrance, return, awakening, and renewal come crashing together. Gabby drives up to Ben in Rabbi Bruce’s SUV and unlocks all the doors with a dramatic “thup.” Ben gets in, and Gabby hands him Ruth’s novel, telling him that it made her “excited.” Then Ben plays for Gabby one of the 700-something sexy voicemail messages that Ruth had sent him during their relationship. Gabby repeats the message word for word herself, and seduces him with it, telling him to unbuckle his belt. Through Weinstein’s double casting, Gabby/Ruth manages to be simultaneously old and new in Ben’s life, as in that phrase from the Hashiveinu prayer: “Chadeish yameinu k’kedem.”  Renew our days, as of old.    

In a musical mixed metaphor, the music that plays after Gabby kisses Ben for the first time is a pop-inflected organ rendition of J.S. Bach’s “Sleepers Awake.” Is this moment an awakening? Shofar blasts punctuate the movie. We also see Rabbi Bruce putting golf balls into a shofar in his office. On one hand, yes, the cemetery scene is an awakening for a man that grief has put into a daze. Ben loves again, in the sexual sense. His desire is reawakened. 

But connecting this sex scene, and the accompanying music, to the shofar doesn’t feel quite right to me. First off, the music (which I like very much) strikes me as being overtly Not Jewish. It’s too on-the-beat, too major. Earlier in the film, Ben visits a church, where he asks an organ-playing priest for spiritual advice, and “Sleeper’s Awake” hearkens back to that scene. I wonder if organ music, by reminding us of church, is supposed to signal a transgressive straying from Judaism. (“Are you allowed to talk to me?” Ben asks the priest.) 

Or does the music signal the transgressiveness of Ben and Gabby having sex in a cemetery, practically over Ruth’s dead body? For the most part, I think that’s exactly what it signals! But part of me counters that the couple isn’t hurting anyone, so why should we care? Later Rabbi Bruce informs Ben that he left his yarmulke in the SUV. 

Ben’s yarmulke has fallen off once before in the film, with Carla. She’s trying to help him regain his voice by teaching him to belly breathe, on his back. In that scene, though, he immediately asks Carla where his yarmulke has gone and keeps it neatly on his chest until he’s vertical again.

Ben’s relationships with these two women collide at a Shabbat dinner at the home of Ben’s moms (plural), to which Gabby and Carla are both invited, and at which he declares his love for Carla. She’s his former elementary school teacher and his current bat mitzvah student slated to have her rite of passage the next day. This is not the move of a man who has regained his footing in life. It’s not even clear if he loves Carla, sexually. What is clear, or clear as mud, is that Ben can love again: physically, emotionally; people, music, Judaism. Having returned to that part of himself, he can move ahead.   

There’s a metaphor that says the soul is a light, like a candle, and we are the vessels that carry it. Here I imagine an old brass lamp with glass panes and a flame inside. The flame is always there, always lit, but depending on the state of the vessel, it shines through more brightly or less so. I like this analogy because in it, the soul never gets lost or exiled or destroyed. It’s just the lamp that needs polishing on occasion. 

Who is Cantor Ben? He’s the person he’s always been, a soul who loves music, who loves people, even though at the moment he can’t sing and the person he particularly loved has died. Through the people he meets in the film, through remembering his childhood, he begins to reconnect with himself. At the end of the film, leaves reappear on the trees, and Ben’s light starts to shine a little brighter. 
Between the Temples is available to stream at YouTube, Google Play, Apple TV, Fandango At Home, and Amazon Prime Video.