The Women's Balcony

The film opens on a bar mitzvah and ends on a wedding. In both the religious element is subordinated to the communal celebration. 

In the first ceremony the boy becomes a man. We don’t see his part in the service, though, just the parade of food and rain of candies.  In the second the older student betrays his rabbi master to serve his bride, again choosing community over the letter of religious law.  
In Jerusalem, of course, the daily life is suffused with the holy. It’s tempting to take the collapsed balcony as a sign of God’s wrath — if one assumes divine authority unto oneself, as the handsome young ultra-orthodox rabbi does. The film’s primary thrust is to prefer communal harmony and trust over the harshness of a literalist faith. 

The bar mitzvah boy feels responsible for the synagogue’s destruction because he’d prayed to be saved from embarrassment at being ill prepared for the ceremony. That’s a comic version of the young rabbi’s assumption of extraordinary power and authority, especially when he presumes to teach the old rabbi he plans to supplant. 

The film takes a clearly feminist position on orthodox Jewish life. Specifically the film valorizes the women who refuse to be marginalized by the young rabbi. They raise the money and campaign to restore the women’s balcony in the rebuilt synagogue. 

It’s not an easy fight, because the rabbi succeeds in shattering their friendships and cowing their men. Ironically, the women’s campaign is not for the Conservative or Reform Jew’s integration of women into the congregation but for the Orthodox insistence on their separate place. They are rebels for a conservative cause. 

For all the Jewish reference the film can be read as the universal tension between any religion’s orthodox fear of women and the modern liberalism. The film should play as pointedly to a Muslim or a Mormon audience as to a Jewish.

But the theme ranges even beyond religion. The central evil here is the young rabbi’s sophistry. His domination of the community is due to his ability to hijack an essential truth and twist it to his subversive purposes. His opening sermon to the men is about the superiority of women over men. They embody the scripture to a degree that men cannot achieve through a lifetime of study. But this ostensible respect serves only to diminish the women’s worth.

This strategy goes well beyond religion into politics and indeed any debate over values and truth. The devil can quote scripture. The tyrant can apparently espouse the argument for liberty, the most self-serving elitist populism. Though the film’s plot specifically deals with religion, its overall theme is the danger of false pretences and the abuse of logic and authority for dogmatic advantage.
     So too the fragmentation of the community — the disruption of friendships and marriages and neighbourhoods — is here attached specifically to a religious difference but can be read more widely as well, as a political drama or as a matter of philosophic dispute bringing more destruction than light. The power of the letter of any law — religious or otherwise — shrinks before the value of the love Zion and Etti exchange over his anonymous gift of a fruit salad and her return of his gleaming, empty bowl.