Three Rabbis – and a Rom-Com!

The idea of linking a 20^th century comic British film, two ancient Talmudic sages and some serious Torah study sounds like a work from the theatre of the absurd.

But hang on  …

Lights! – Camera! – Action!

 

Enter centre stage, Rabbi Dr Gil Nativ, the immediate past incumbent of the Kehilat Hakerem Masorti Synagogue, Karmiel, whose Sabbath morning sermon to a mixed crowd of regular congregants and visitors on a Masa Israel trip, combined the day’s Torah reading, local 3^rd century CE celebrity savants, Bar Kappara – with ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’!

Rabbi Nativ, a third generation Israeli who fought as a paratrooper during the 1967 Six Day War, was speaking barely three kilometers (about two miles) from the Bar Kappara family tomb in the suburb of Givat Ram.

 

Noting that those in the Masa Israel crowd would not have been born when the movie was first released in 1994, Rabbi Nativ explained that the Torah employed ‘unique’ Hebrew terms to list sexual offences like homosexuality, bestiality and intercourse with two women (mother and daughter), all of which sins carried the death penalty.

He added that Bar Kappara expounded on the words’ meaning at the wedding of Rabbi Simeon ben Rabbi – “An amazing similarity to the wedding speech of Hugh Grant in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’.

Rabbi Nativ may also have observed that the movie presented a gay relationship of  stability and affection that was in stark contrast to those of the brief, faithless heterosexual affairs around it.

This is exemplified in the funeral oration given by the surviving partner  when his lover dies and he recites ‘Funeral Blues’, a universally loved poem by Anglo-American W H Auden – also a homosexual.

Indeed, Hugh Grant, as Charles says:

“Ladies and gentlemen, l'm sorry to drag you from your desserts. There are just one or two little things I feel I should say, as best man. This is only the second time l've been a best man. I hope I did OK that time. The couple in question are at least still talking to me. Unfortunately, they're not actually talking to each other. The divorce came through a couple of months ago. But l'm assured it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Paula knew Piers had slept with her sister before I mentioned it in the speech. The fact that he'd slept with her mother came as a surprise, but I think was incidental to the nightmare of recrimination and violence that became their two-day marriage. Anyway, enough of that. My job today is to talk about Angus. There are no skeletons in his cupboard. Or so I thought. I'll come on to that in a minute. I would just like to say this. I am, as ever, in bewildered awe of anyone who makes this kind of commitment that Angus and Laura have made today. I know I couldn't do it and I think it's wonderful they can. So, back to Angus and those sheep”.

 

The film was conceived and written by Richard Curtis, whose father was a Czech refugee of Italian heritage and whose own long-time partner is Emma Freud, great granddaughter of Sigmund.

© Natalie Wood (26 April 2021)