"A scene from "Praying With Lior"
Movies aimed at "people of faith" constitute one of the film industry's growth markets, and we have Mel Gibson to thank for that one. But Ilana Trachtman's documentary "Praying With Lior," not a film Gibson is likely to catch, is clearly not motivated by cynical marketplace calculation. For one thing, this compassionate, intriguing, somewhat unfocused film is about an observant Jewish family, and therefore is likely to find its primary audience among a subset of a subset of the American spiritual mosaic. Furthermore, the family of young Lior Liebling is are Reconstructionist Jews, not Hasids or some other hyper-Orthodox sect. So there's no ethnographic element here, no eccentric hairdos or 18th century garb or strict sexual segregation. Lior's parents and siblings and schoolmates present as upper-middle class Philadelphia suburbanites, which is exactly what they are.
In fact, I'm not sure "Praying With Lior" is about religious belief at all, although it's become the biggest sensation on the Jewish film-festival circuit. Lior is an adorable, extroverted kid (by now, a young man) with Down syndrome, who became a local celebrity in the world of American Judaism when his mother, Rabbi Devora Bartnoff, wrote a magazine article about him in the mid-90s. Lior found an inexplicable joy, she wrote, in "davening" (performing the rhythmic prayer ritual practiced by many observant Jews) and preferred to sing Hebrew religious songs with her instead of Mother Goose rhymes or "Old MacDonald." Was this boy, despite his limited intellectual capacity -- or because of it -- a "spiritual genius" or, as some Jewish seekers have dubbed him, a "little rebbe"? (For the best discussion I've read anywhere about this film and its place within a Christian-influenced revival of Jewish spirituality in America, see Stuart Klawans' recent article on Nextbook.)