One of the more engaging figures in Ondi Timoner’s 2022 documentary, “The Last Flight Home” — about the decision of her 92-year-old father, Eli Timoner, to use California’s end-of-life option — was the director’s sister, Rachel. A rabbi, Rachel Timoner brought a pastoral warmth and spiritual insight to the sorrows and joys, rites and spiritual reckoning of a family honoring their beloved’s departure.
Now, with “All God’s Children,” Timoner gives her older sister an affirming but unsentimental close-up. Still, this documentary isn’t a family memoir piece. Instead, Rachel Timoner, the chief rabbi of Brooklyn’s historic Congregation Beth Elohim, shares top billing with Reverend Dr. Robert Waterman, the lead pastor of Brooklyn’s equally storied Antioch Baptist Church, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuy neighborhood.
The institutions are a mere four miles apart, but their leaders aim to traverse the wider gulfs of racism and antisemitism. “All God’s Children” follows this Jewish woman and this Black man as they try to unify their congregations in worship — it does not go smoothy — which makes this straightforward film so consequential and instructive.
The two leaders are near in age and reputation. Sen. Chuck Schumer attends Beth Elohim. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has visited Antioch. So has New York Attorney General Letitia James. Each has a maverick sensibility. (“God is beyond gender,” the rabbi tells a class of school kids.) That these two would embark on a journey toward greater understanding isn’t a surprise. What does come at times as a wonder are the events that pinch their fledgling rapport and threaten to upend their quest for communal harmony. As one of Antioch’s parishioners puts it, “Love will bring us together, but our traditions will keep us apart.” More than a few times, his assessment proves spot-on.
The histories of migrations — Black and Jewish — to Brooklyn are touched upon, the meaning of two different diasporas engaged. Pogroms and slavery, the Holocaust and the Red Summer that found Tulsa’s black community decimated, are reflected in familiar, still-wrenching photos and newsreel footage.
In 2019, the year the film opens, Black residents of Bed-Stuy had been victims of “deed theft.” The predatory practice allows third-party actors to take the title of a home without the owner’s knowledge, buy the property and evict the actual owners. It had become a tool of aggressive gentrification. And despite its name, it was not illegal in New York. Given the demographics of Brooklyn, some of the landlords and realtors engaging in the act were Jewish. Almost all the injured parties were Black or brown residents. Rabbi and preacher had good reason to reach out.
When the parishioners of Antioch visit the CBE (as its affectionately called by congregants) for the first time, a musical performance by the visitors includes the waving of flags. A bright yellow one says “Jesus.” What seems innocent enough sends Rabbi Timoner and her second, Stephanie Kolin, into a concerned, whispered frenzy: Should they say or do something? Later, when Timoner does speak out at a gathering of participants from both houses of worship, it’s a little bumpy.
Still, they all persist, and after the flag incident, the congregations go on a shared field trip to D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And while there is a shared acknowledgement of traumas rooted in the histories, the hurt and wariness of the flag incident hasn’t fully dissipated.
Midway through the film, each congregation visits the other’s house of worship during celebrations of Passover and Easter. The seder at CBE goes off with nary a hitch, apart from some especially bland matzah balls. But things go even worse than the flag incident when the Antioch service includes its theatrical retelling of the Christ story with its trial, crucifixion and resurrection. “Should we walk out?” Timoner asks fellow rabbi Stephanie Kolin, sitting miserably in a pew.
Of course, there’s enough “not getting it” to go around. To read Antioch’s annual passion play strictly within the context of a long European tradition of antisemitism and “blood libel” is to perhaps miss a more People of Moses-resonant case of how that story of God’s love took hold in the lives of America’s enslaved Blacks.
Things get so frayed, a mediator skilled in leading discussions on antisemitism and racism gets called in. She makes the journey to Brooklyn from Kansas City, Mo., more than once.
As the difficulties continue, a viewer can rightly wonder, what on earth possessed Timoner and Waterman to begin this journey with such a deep focus on religion, often the cause of ancient and ongoing enmity? “Maybe starting with worshipping together was the wrong first step,” Timoner says somewhat sheepishly.
But then as the film heads toward its conclusion — one that includes last October’s terrorist attacks by Hamas and the killing of thousands of Palestinians by the Israeli government — it’s hard to imagine that any of these participants would have felt as deeply about each other were it not for confronting those missteps. There’s a lesson in that, and the film makes a persuasive case that at least two Brooklyn congregations and their leaders, have a great deal of practical wisdom to share.
Read the full article here
