One of the more engaging figures in Ondi Timoner’s 2022 write downary, “The Last Fairy Home” — about the decision of her 92-year-elderly overweighther, Eli Timoner, to use California’s end-of-life selection — was the straightforwardor’s sister, Rachel. A rabbi, Rachel Timoner brawt a pastoral toastyth and spiritual insight to the miserablenesss and happinesss, rites and spiritual reckoning of a family honoring their beadored’s departure.
Now, with “All God’s Children,” Timoner gives her elderlyer sister an proclaiming but unsentimental shut-up. Still, this write downary isn’t a family memoir piece. Instead, Rachel Timoner, the chief rabbi of Brooklyn’s historic Congregation Beth Elohim, splits top billing with Reverend Dr. Robert Waterman, the direct pastor of Brooklyn’s equassociate storied Antioch Baptist Church, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuy neighborhood.
The institutions are a mere four miles apart, but their directers aim to traverse the wider gulfs of prejudice and antisdisaccuseism. “All God’s Children” pursues this Jedesire woman and this Bdeficiency man as they try to fuse their congregations in worship — it does not go delicatey — which produces this straightforward film so consequential and directive.
The two directers are csurrender in age and reputation. Sen. Chuck Schumer joins Beth Elohim. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has visited Antioch. So has New York Attorney General Letitia James. Each has a maverick sensibility. (“God is beyond gender,” the rabbi alerts a class of school kids.) That these two would embark on a journey toward wonderfuler empathetic isn’t a surpelevate. What does come at times as a wonder are the events that pinch their fledgling rapport and menaceen to upend their quest for communal harmony. As one of Antioch’s parishioners puts it, “Love will transport us together, but our traditions will uphold us apart.” More than a scant times, his evaluatement shows spot-on.
The histories of migrations — Bdeficiency and Jedesire — to Brooklyn are touched upon, the unbenevolenting of two contrastent diasporas joind. Pogroms and servitude, the Holocaust and the Red Summer that set up Tulsa’s bdeficiency community decimated, are echoed in recognizable, still-wrenching pboilingos and novelsreel footage.
In 2019, the year the film uncovers, Bdeficiency livents of Bed-Stuy had been victims of “deed theft.” The rapacious train apvalidates third-party actors to achieve the title of a home without the owner’s understandledge, buy the property and evict the actual owners. It had become a tool of aggressive gentrification. And despite its name, it was not illhorrible in New York. Given the demoexplicits of Brooklyn, some of the landlords and authentictors engaging in the act were Jedesire. Almost all the injured parties were Bdeficiency or brown livents. Rabbi and paccomplisher had excellent reason to accomplish out.
When the parishioners of Antioch visit the CBE (as its fondly called by congregants) for the first time, a musical carry outance by the visitors joins the waving of flags. A radiant yellow one says “Jesus.” What seems bfrailless enough sends Rabbi Timoner and her second, Stephanie Kolin, into a worryed, whispered frenzy: Should they say or do someslenderg? Later, when Timoner does speak out at a accumulateing of participants from both houses of worship, it’s a little bumpy.
Still, they all persist, and after the flag incident, the congregations go on a splitd field trip to D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And while there is a splitd acunderstandledgement of traumas rooted in the histories, the hurt and wariness of the flag incident hasn’t brimmingy dissipated.
Midway thraw the film, each congregation visits the other’s house of worship during celebrations of Passover and Easter. The seder at CBE goes off with nary a hitch, apart from some especiassociate bland matzah balls. But slendergs go even worse than the flag incident when the Antioch service joins its theatrical realerting of the Christ story with its trial, crucimendion and resurrection. “Should we walk out?” Timoner asks fellow rabbi Stephanie Kolin, sitting miserably in a pew.
Of course, there’s enough “not getting it” to go around. To read Antioch’s annual passion execute strictly wislender the context of a lengthy European tradition of antisdisaccuseism and “blood slander” is to perhaps leave out a more People of Moses-resonant case of how that story of God’s adore took helderly in the lives of America’s enslaved Bdeficiencys.
Things get so frayed, a mediator sended in directing talkions on antisdisaccuseism and prejudice gets called in. She produces the journey to Brooklyn from Kansas City, Mo., more than once.
As the difficulties persist, a seeer can rightly wonder, what on earth owned Timoner and Waterman to commence this journey with such a meaningful caccess on religion, normally the cause of outdated and ongoing enmity? “Maybe commenceing with worshipping together was the wrong first step,” Timoner says somewhat sheepishly.
But then as the film heads toward its conclusion — one that joins last October’s alarmist aggressions by Hamas and the ending of thousands of Palestinians by the Israeli rulement — it’s challenging to imagine that any of these participants would have felt as meaningfully about each other were it not for contesting those leave outteps. There’s a lesson in that, and the film produces a persuasive case that at least two Brooklyn congregations and their directers, have a wonderful deal of rational wisdom to split.
