From radical drag queen to rabbi, film depicts journey of a Jewish law breaker

Most rabbis ordained by the Conservative movement don’t have a drag alter-ego, officiate at an intermarriage ceremony where the gay grooms bow down to a Buddhist goddess under the huppah (wedding canopy), or count non-Jews in a minyan (prayer quorum).

But Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is as innovative in breaking traditions as he is in rebuilding them as a Jewish spiritual and congregational leader.

How Lau-Lavie became who he is now and where he hopes to take Judaism into the future are at the core of the epic documentary “Sabbath Queen” by Sandi DuBowski. The film, which follows Lau-Lavie for over 21 years, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2024. It has continued to play to sold-out audiences at film festivals and theatrical releases worldwide. It will be released theatrically in Florida and San Francisco in February, and will be shown at festivals in San Diego, Atlanta, and Cincinnati.

“There is a yearning for Jewishness that looks [21st-century] reality in the eye with compassion and kindness [and inclusiveness]… At the same time, who knows what the future holds for Israel? Who knows what the future holds for American Jewry? So, to be honest and humble, I don’t know. I feel like my convictions are real. I’m coming from a real place of being in service. But who knows?” he said, when asked how history may treat his chosen path.

When Lau-Lavie was born 55 years ago in Israel, the son of a Holocaust survivor father and a British immigrant mother, it was highly likely that he would join the family business. Lau-Lavie is a scion of 38 consecutive generations of rabbis dating back a millennium. His uncle Yisrael Meir Lau and cousin David Lau were chief Ashkenazi rabbis of Israel, and his brother Benny Lau is a well-known Orthodox rabbi, author, and community leader.

However, when he was publicly outed as gay without his consent as a young man, it became evident to Lau-Lavie that he was not going to fit into the world from which he came, and would have to figure out his own Jewish way forward.

“I imagine myself looking in the eyes of my grandfather [Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau, who was murdered at Treblinka, together with his congregants] and of all the other rabbis who would consider what I am doing a breach, when I am sitting on their shoulders,” Lau-Lavie said in the film.

“I am totally an ‘other’ and I understand that,” he said.

Filmmaker DuBowski first met Lau-Lavie when he arrived in New York in 1997. By then, in his late 20s, he wanted to live freely as a queer person. DuBowski had hoped to include Lau-Lavie in his award-winning 2001 film, “Trembling before God,” about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews trying to reconcile their sexuality with their religious practice. Lau-Lavie refused the offer to participate, saying he had moved beyond Orthodoxy and was no longer living that lifestyle. He was already involved with the Radical Faeries, a counter-culture movement focused on queerness and spirituality.

“We were worshipping everything under the sun and laughing at it,” Lau-Lavie said in the film.

Nonetheless, DuBowski and Lau-Lavie became friends, and the filmmaker began shooting footage of Lau-Lavie when he appeared in drag as Hadassah Gross, a character that occurred to him when he had had one too many vodkas to drink on Purim.

Hadassah Gross’s fictional backstory is that she was born into a Hasidic family of Hungarian dancers in the 1920s and is the widow of six rabbis. She is irreverent, funny, and theatrical, but she is knowledgeable about Judaism and enthralls audiences seeking a new approach to the religion.

“Kinderlach (children), redemption will only come through transgression,” she tells them.

Dresses, heavy makeup, and substantial blond bouffant wig aside, Hadassah Gross was a way for Lau-Lavie to connect with and unleash the feminine or non-gendered aspects of God that patriarchal Jewish tradition ignores. Moreover, this drag persona highlighted for Lau-Lavie the power of theatricality in reaching people searching for a connection with Jewish text, traditions, and practices. This led to his establishing Storahtelling, a performance-based theatre company promoting Jewish literacy by making biblical Jewish texts accessible to various audiences.

Fascinated by what his friend was doing, DuBowski would capture the performances on camera. However, he had no idea early on that this would lead to following Lau-Lavie for 21 years, as he continued to innovate and shapeshift.

“I was really just filming these rituals and these performances. And then it kept getting more serious… I went with [Amichai’s] family to Poland, and the film got even more serious because we knew that this would be his father’s last trip to Poland,” DuBowski said.

“There was like a deepening that kept happening, but I don’t think Amichai or I knew back in those early days that this was going to be such an ultra-marathon, that it was going to be this amazing, long journey of collaboration between myself as an artist and Amichai as someone who was an artist who became a rabbi,” he said.

Much raw footage was dedicated to Lau-Lavie’s social justice and Israel/Palestine peace activism, but only snippets ended up in the film. Another documentary on that and Lau-Lavie’s Israeli identity could be made.

Make for yourself a community

In 2013, Lau-Lavie used Storahtelling’s success as a springboard to launch Lab/Shul, which bills itself as an “artist-driven, everybody-friendly, God-optional, pop-up, experimental community for sacred Jewish gatherings based in New York City, reaching the world.” According to Lau-Lavie, Lab/Shul has 450 paying family partners worldwide, attracts hundreds for Shabbat programming, and 2,000 people on the High Holidays.

“There was no way to have predicted Lab/Shul at the beginning of this project. I also didn’t see other things coming, like his becoming the [involved] bio-dad of three children [born to a lesbian New York couple]. Nor did I — or most people — ever expect him to enroll in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary,” the director said.

This move provoked controversy within Lab/Shul’s community. Many of its board members questioned why their leader would put himself in a position where he could not perform intermarriages (the Conservative movement forbids its rabbis from officiating at or attending such weddings) when so many people chose Lab/Shul for its openness to gentiles and Jews in loving relationships. Lab/Shul cofounder Shira Kline, who is deeply put off by the patriarchal nature of the rabbinate, felt betrayed that her colleague, who for so long claimed that “the artist is the new rabbi,” was becoming an actual rabbi.

Lau-Lavie stuck with his studies and was ordained in 2016. A year later, he was forced to resign from the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, after he officiated at an intermarriage (the one with the gay grooms bowing down to the Buddhist goddess). After much deliberation and writing a proposal titled, “Joy: A halakhic and historical inquiry into interfaith marriage,” he decided to continue performing intermarriage ceremonies as he had before becoming a rabbi. In the proposal, he reclaims the ancient ger toshav (resident alien) model as a basis for modern-day intermarriage.

Losing his professional association with the Conservative movement was painful, but a natural step for Lau-Lavie, who serves Lab/Shul’s extremely diverse community.

“A rabbi doesn’t leave his congregation,” Lau-Lavie said, echoing his grandfather’s decision to lead his followers into the gas chamber and say the Kaddish and Sh’ma prayers as they all died.

Judaism on the spectrum

Lau-Lavie’s ordination got him to where he wanted to be, which is at the center of the Jewish religious spectrum, enabling him to be inside the conventional system and in conversation with more liberal movements and the Orthodox.

“I am still very much aligned with the philosophy and the theology of the Conservative movement…and I wanted to get the permission to work in the field as an ordained rabbi. To be the change agent I want to be in the world means I have to come from the middle,” he said.

Lau-Lavie said he wanted the knowledge of Jewish law and historical context that would grant him access to the “creative loopholes” that lead to change over time.

“Call it subversions of halacha. Call it reformation. Call it change. Call it adaptation. Whatever it is, it has gotten us to the point where we have women counted in minyans, women rabbis, and gay rabbis. LGBT people are not being pushed out. We even have women in leadership positions in Orthodoxy now,” he said.

Throughout the film, Lau-Lavie’s brother, Rabbi Benny Lau, serves as a thoughtful foil. He constantly questions his younger brother’s pushing of boundaries. He makes viewers, mesmerized by his fascinating and charismatic younger brother, think about what kind of Judaism they want to be a part of and where they draw red lines — or not — for themselves.

Despite his unconventional, evolving path, the film shows Lau-Lavie as a vital, accepted, and loved part of his family. His mother and brother attended his JTS ordination ceremony. At recent Israeli film screenings, his brother participated in panel discussions.

“How have we stayed close? In one word: my mother. And also my brother. A lot of insistence — mine and theirs — in being in dialogue and letting time do its thing,” Lau-Lavie said. “I think there’s a lot of love there at the end of the day.”