The Unorthodox

This very engaging, touching story takes us down two interweaving rabbit holes: a spectrum of Israeli orthodoxy, social and religious, which layers citizens according to their historic origins — Sephardic, Eshkanazi, Mizrachi — and the compromises that idealists perforce make in venturing into effective politics. Though the referents are specifically Israeli, the exposure of political maneuvering is clearly global.

What’s most Israeli is the tension between the religious and the secular. Hero Yaakov’s political awakening begins in a domestic issue: his daughter is expelled from the seminary on apparently false charges of excessive worldliness. The allegations of a slit denim skirt and a TV in the home are fake news.

That personal injustice drives the hero into politics. His personal campaign grows into a municipal movement. That success leads to a campaign for the Knesset. Each success breeds new problems, as the stakes rise.

Another campaigner softens into lay sentimentality when he hears The Bee Gees. More seriously, a shortcut in name-taking threatens the entire revolution. A campaign contribution melts into an apparent bribe. The need to succeed opens into the thuggery of bare-knuckled politics, within the parties as well as between them.
     The title works two ways. Its initial register is the religious, where there is a profound conflict between the isolation of the Talmudic scholar and the need to become politically active. But there is a parallel tension between the purity in political orthodoxy and the temptation to compromise its idealism — in order to become effective. That’s where the winners lose.
     Though the film specifically traces the development of the Shas party in Israel, the dynamics it details apply wherever politics is practiced.