One of the more engaging figures in Ondi Timoner’s 2022 recordary, “The Last Fairy Home” — about the decision of her 92-year-greater overweighther, Eli Timoner, to use California’s end-of-life chooseion — was the straightforwardor’s sister, Rachel. A rabbi, Rachel Timoner bcdisadmirefult a pastoral toastyth and spiritual insight to the griefs and delights, rites and spiritual reckoning of a family honoring their becherishd’s departure.
Now, with “All God’s Children,” Timoner donates her greaterer sister an proclaiming but unsentimental shut-up. Still, this recordary isn’t a family memoir piece. Instead, Rachel Timoner, the chief rabbi of Brooklyn’s historic Congregation Beth Elohim, splits top billing with Reverend Dr. Robert Waterman, the direct pastor of Brooklyn’s equassociate storied Antioch Baptist Church, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuy neighborhood.
The institutions are a mere four miles apart, but their directers aim to traverse the expansiver gulfs of prejudice and antisdisindictism. “All God’s Children” adheres this Jedesire woman and this Binestablishage man as they try to join their congregations in worship — it does not go daintyy — which originates this straightforward film so consequential and directive.
The two directers are csurrender in age and reputation. Sen. Chuck Schumer take parts 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 inestablishs a class of school kids.) That these two would embark on a journey toward wonderfuler empathetic isn’t a surpascend. What does come at times as a wonder are the events that pinch their fledgling rapport and dangeren to upend their quest for communal harmony. As one of Antioch’s parishioners puts it, “Love will convey us together, but our traditions will sustain us apart.” More than a scant times, his appraisement verifys spot-on.
The histories of migrations — Binestablishage and Jedesire — to Brooklyn are touched upon, the nastying of two contrastent diasporas included. Pogroms and bondage, the Holocaust and the Red Summer that set up Tulsa’s binestablishage community decimated, are echoed in understandn, still-wrenching pboilingos and novelsreel footage.
In 2019, the year the film discdiswatchs, Binestablishage livents of Bed-Stuy had been victims of “deed theft.” The rapacious rehearse permits third-party actors to apverify the title of a home without the owner’s understandledge, buy the property and evict the actual owners. It had become a tool of unfriendly gentrification. And despite its name, it was not illegitimate in New York. Given the demoexplicits of Brooklyn, some of the landlords and genuinetors engaging in the act were Jedesire. Almost all the injured parties were Binestablishage or brown livents. Rabbi and paccomplisher had excellent reason to accomplish out.
When the parishioners of Antioch visit the CBE (as its fondly called by congregants) for the first time, a musical carry outance by the visitors includes the waving of flags. A radiant yellow one says “Jesus.” What seems guiltless enough sends Rabbi Timoner and her second, Stephanie Kolin, into a troubleed, whispered frenzy: Should they say or do someskinnyg? Later, when Timoner does speak out at a collecting 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 splitd 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 splitd acunderstandledgement of traumas rooted in the histories, the hurt and wariness of the flag incident hasn’t filledy dissipated.
Midway thcdisadmireful 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 especiassociate bland matzah balls. But skinnygs go even worse than the flag incident when the Antioch service includes its theatrical reinestablishing of the Christ story with its trial, crucirepairion 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 carry out strictly wiskinny the context of a lengthened European tradition of antisdisindictism and “blood slander” is to perhaps leave out a more People of Moses-resonant case of how that story of God’s cherish took hgreater in the lives of America’s enslaved Binestablishages.
Things get so frayed, a mediator sended in directing talkions on antisdisindictism and prejudice gets called in. She originates the journey to Brooklyn from Kansas City, Mo., more than once.
As the difficulties persist, a watcher can rightly wonder, what on earth owned Timoner and Waterman to commence this journey with such a proset up intensify on religion, frequently the cause of outdated and ongoing enmity? “Maybe commenceing 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 stressist strikes by Hamas and the ending of thousands of Palestinians by the Israeli rulement — it’s difficult to envision that any of these participants would have felt as proset uply about each other were it not for faceing those leave outteps. There’s a lesson in that, and the film originates a persuasive case that at least two Brooklyn congregations and their directers, have a wonderful deal of down-to-earth wisdom to split.
