Message Detail Subject: A wonderful movie Author: schweitzer@axxent.ca Date: 12/26/2005 With all due respect to Dodi-Lee Hecht's recent review of Upshizin, there are a few points where I profoundly disagree. Firstly, with the assumptions she made in analyzing the behavoiur of the protagonists. She notes that in the movie we are given the impression that if a Jew is faithful and prays hard enough, he will get what he wants. Careful viewing of this movie will show, in fact, that this is not the message at all. The message is: God sends us trials. Recognize them, overcome them and maintain your faith and you just might get what you want. The theme in the movie which was not overemphasized is that Moshe Belanga has a temper. He used to be a violent criminal. He is now trying to be a Bratzlaver kollel man. Having rejected the secular world, he is trying to hide in the religious one to become a better person. But that temper is always there and his fear is that, confronted by the right set of circumstances, he will explode. And what is his path to God's blessing? Keeping his cool. His prayer for a sukkah is answered but very imperfectly. His prayer for a child is not answered until the end of the movie, only after he is forced to confront his temper and control it, not through learning, not through praying, but through a supreme effort of self control which shows that he is not just wearing the clothes of a religious man (as his friend Eliyahu Scorpio suspects) but that he wears the soul of one too. We do not know if the couple has gone for fertility testing and besides, could they afford it? Many non-Jewish couples here in rich Canada have only prayer to rely on given the prohibitive cost of the procedures so to criticize the Belangas for relying on prayer is a bit contemptuous. The bottom line messages of the move are (a) faith is not a lodestone around your neck keeping you from being happy in this life, a message in direct contradistinction to Hollywood movies featuring religious characters (b) it's not enough to have faith. You must allow that faith to strengthen you and change you for the better. In that regard, I wish I had more in common with Moshe Belanga.