What is “becoming an adult” supposed to feel like? It’s a rudimentary question, one that feels both above and below my pay grade. I didn’t “become an adult” in any conventional or ritualistic fashion; it was just something that happened over time. If anything, I knew I was an adult when peers of mine were posting about “adulting,” and I felt too old to engage with such nonsense—e.g., I was an adult.
In Judaism, a bar or bat mitzvah is not necessarily a passage from childhood to adulthood, but a ritual that occurs at the age of 13, in which the young person in question starts to assume responsibility for themselves. This carries more weight, perhaps, in the Conservative or Orthodox sects of Judaism; in Reform congregations, most of this is symbolized by a big party, on par with a “Sweet Sixteen” or a quinceañera. There is a ceremony, sure, but a party, mostly. These are 13 year olds, mind you, with a pretty singular focus: who will slow dance with who?
In Nathan Silver’s Between The Temples, Carla (Carol Kane) regales her Hebrew teacher, Cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) with the story of the first-ever public American bat mitzvah, which occurred in 1922 (a century before the film is set). The Orthodox rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan performed the ceremony for his daughter Judith in their home. About the experience, Judith wrote:
It would be less than the whole truth to say that I was as full of ardor about the subject of this ceremony as my father was. Oh, to be sure, I passionately espoused the cause of women’s rights. Let us say that I was ambivalent (a word that had not entered the common vocabulary at that time), being perfectly willing to defy the standards of my grandmothers, pleased to have a somewhat flattering attention paid me, and yet perturbed about the possible effect this might have on the attitude of my own peers—the early teenagers (that word, too, was not yet in the vocabulary), who even then could be remarkably cruel to the “exception,” to the nonconformist.
Between The Temple’s Carla is something of a nonconformist herself: a retired elementary school music teacher who was raised as a secular Jew, a practicing agnostic, really, never considering her faith as a part of her personality. She doesn’t keep kosher. She doesn’t attend a synagogue. Yet, she finds herself compelled by the ritual. Or, if nothing else, it seems like something to do.
Ben’s curiosity about her transcends that of “teacher’s pet”—the truth is that long before Carla was his student, he was hers. She taught him to sing a few dozen years ago, a skill he’s lost since his wife died the previous year. By the grace of his synagogue’s Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), Ben’s been allowed to stay on, teaching Hebrew, but he is otherwise musically impotent, straining his way through Shabbat services. He has also regressed domestically. After his wife’s untimely death, Ben moved back in with his mothers Meira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly de Leon—so funny). They needle, they bug, they try to set him up with women. His bedroom door won’t close properly. His life is not his own.
Trapped in a grief-infused arrested development, Ben reconnects with Carla, and their budding courtship—or is it friendship? Or is it courtship?—comes to define the rest of the film. Silver and C. Mason Wells’s script is less concerned with the philosophy of Judaism (perhaps more concerned with the bureaucracy of it, which, like much of the movie, is funny) and more interested in an exploration of affection and independence. What a relief, for instance, after a run of crummy films about “age gap relationships” (see: A Family Affair, The Idea of You) to have a film in which its maybe-lovers seem to be overwhelmed by their affection for one another.
In conversation with the author Jonathan Lethem, Silver says that he and Wells and their producers were compelled by the notion of a screwball comedy—that Wells disdains Harold & Maude (he and I share that), but that reactive-character driven comedies like Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby and Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid stayed top of mind. As in The Heartbreak Kid and James Gray’s Two Lovers, Ben finds himself at a romantic crossroads, often seeking the care and company of Carla unbeknownst to his mothers or her son in lieu of the more age-appropriate Gabby (Madeline Weinstein). To a certain (Jewish, female) audience, both The Heartbreak Kid and Two Lovers play like a kind of horror movie, watching a man reject that which we embody in favor of something distinctly not. (In broader terms: choosing the blonde over the brunette.) In these films, the Jeannie Berlin character and the Vinessa Shaw character practically debase themselves for the affection of the man in their life, watching, in relative disappointment, as they are cast aside again and again. In Silver’s film, we’re presented with an almost reverse of this situation: the more beautiful, age-appropriate fit for Benjamin puts herself out there again and again, only for his attention to drift back towards the older woman with whom he’d rather spend his time.
But what Ben and Carla have is not motivated by class or sex or lust or agony; she is certainly not replacing his dead wife, nor is she mommying him any more or less than his own two mothers. What Ben and Carla grant each other is a type of freedom, a wisdom of choice. They choose each other, time and time again. It’s not so much that Carla wants a bat mitzvah to become anything she’s not, but that this is the only way she knows, at first, to see Ben, to hear Ben, to talk with Ben. Their relationship blooms in their intimate ease with one another. They don’t have to work to make each other laugh. Schwartzman indulges in Ben’s sad sack tendencies, but around the midpoint in the film, we get the sense that he’s cleaning up his act. He’s making himself a little more handsome, presentable. Kane’s beauty, on the other hand, with her wild hair and eager eyes, has never been more lovingly portrayed. I don’t know if I know a man my age—or any—who wouldn’t give it all up for a drink with her. The film never condescends nor patronizes her for her age either: her health may slip, but Carla lives as though she is fighting not to die. After time, Ben learns this, too.
The family lore goes that I was the architect of my own demise, which is to say, I was never bat mitzvahed because when my parents asked me if I was interested in learning Hebrew, I said, “No, I’m too busy with Girl Scouts.” I said no to the Hebrew classes, unaware that in a matter of years, I would be excluded from about ninety percent of the bar and bat mitzvahs from my synagogue year on account of not being in Hebrew classes with my peers. It wasn’t their fault; they barely knew me. They saw each other three times a week—maybe more, if they went to high school together; I went to high school with a single-digit number of Jewish kids, none of whom went to synagogue besides me and my brother. I stuck with weekly classes at the synagogue until I was 16, when I dropped out of my confirmation class six weeks before the ceremony. I often considered going back as an adult, as my mother did in her early 30s, but I’ve never taken a step in that direction. In truth, whatever awaits me on the other side of that ceremony sits in my heart already, without ritual or music or language lessons. What Between The Temples argues is that a bat mitzvah is a kind of music lesson, one that can happen anywhere or to anyone, so long as they know how to listen.