Arts & Culture

Hulu’s ‘The Patient’ Gets At A Arts & Culture Dynamic Rarely Seen On TV: Orthodox-Reform Tensions

By Linda Buchwald

(JTA) — Episode three of “The Patient,” the well-received psychological thriller series on Hulu about a serial killer who kidnaps his therapist, involves a flashback to an Orthodox wedding.

Ezra, son of the protagonist therapist Alan Strauss and Reform cantor Beth Strauss, is marrying an Orthodox woman named Chava. Guitar in hand, Beth sings “Dodi Li,” a traditional Jewish wedding song, knowing that women are not allowed to sing in the presence of men in this Orthodox community. As she performs, some men get up to leave. Ezra and his bride stay but look uncomfortable.

The moment gets at the tension that Ezra’s transition out of the Reform lifestyle of his upbringing and into Orthodoxy has wrought within the Strauss family. But the scene was not originally written this way.

Although the show’s creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg are both Jewish, they weren’t aware of the Orthodox prohibition against women singing in front of men and had first written the moment as a nice memory of a mother singing at her son’s wedding. The show’s consultant, Rabbi Menachem Hecht, a teacher at the Modern Orthodox YULA yeshiva high school in Los Angeles, informed the duo of the rule — which thrilled them because they said it made the scene more interesting and complicated. The final product got across the viewpoints of both denominations in a fair way, Hecht said.

“There’s definitely a way to run that scene where it just makes Orthodox Jews look anti-women and bigoted,” Hecht said. “The point wasn’t just to make them look bad. It was to show how there could be real tension here.”

The scene and the consultation behind it points to the level of Jewishness that Fields and Weisberg wove into the fabric of “The Patient,” which debuted on Aug. 30 and is still releasing weekly episodes on FX on Hulu through the finale on Oct. 25. The pair, who also created the acclaimed Cold War spy drama “The Americans,” have spoken at length about their Jewish backgrounds — Fields as the son of a Reform rabbi and Weisberg as the son of Reform parents who attended a Conservative Synagogue.

In “The Patient,” Alan — played by the non-Jewish Steve Carell, a casting choice they were asked to defend on a press tour — is a widower, having lost his wife Beth (Laura Niemi) to cancer. She was a cantor at a Reform synagogue and their son Ezra (Andrew Leeds) turned to Orthodox Judaism in college, a path that his parents didn’t understand. A deranged new patient named Sam (Domhnall Gleeson) kidnaps Alan in an attempt to cure his own murderous impulses. Part of Alan’s work with Sam is getting him to understand other viewpoints — just because someone says something that Sam doesn’t like or perceives as rude, it doesn’t mean they deserve to die.

“I think on some level consciously and on some level unconsciously, we were dealing with general and specific themes of intolerance, and it seemed interesting to explore the challenges of differences that from the outside might seem relatively small but from the inside seem like a chasm,” Fields told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Fields and Weisberg don’t spend screen time educating the viewer on the intricacies of Orthodox practice that show up in the series. In another scene, Ezra, his sister and their families are having dinner at Alan and Beth’s house. Beth serves her

Laura Niemi as Beth Strauss and Steve Carell as Alan Strauss in "The Patient." (Suzanne Tenner/FX)

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Continued from Page 17 daughter’s children ice cream as Ezra’s children look on, unable to partake, eating food they brought in Tupperware. The entire scene is less than a minute long, so the audience needs to understand quickly what is happening.

“We are not believers in exposition. We don’t want to spell it out. We used to joke on ‘The Americans’ that ‘who could understand this? We barely understand this.’ Nobody’s going to understand it, but as long as they feel it, that’s what’s good,” Weisberg said.

Fields and Weisberg worked with the production design and set decorating team to ensure that all the details were right, such as paper plates for Ezra’s family, who could not eat on the dishes that are normally used to serve unkosher food.

Though Beth’s actions in that scene might seem cruel to some, they fit the character of a woman who devoted her life to Reform Judaism.

Reform Rabbi Robyn Frisch, of Temple Menorah Keneseth Chai in Philadelphia, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that when her son turned to Orthodox Judaism at age 16, she felt rejected at first.

“We raised our kids we thought with this meaningful Jewish life. He never said it straight out, but there clearly things we did that were not what he wanted,” Frisch said.

She said her work with interfaith couples as the director of the Rukin Rabbinic Fellowship for 18Doors — a national nonprofit organization that helps interfaith couples and families — helped her eventually accept her son’s choices. She added that she wants to start a nonprofit like 18Doors for families with children who become Orthodox, to help them through the challenges and blessings of such a change. “To be a Jew in America is to know a bunch of people who have gone through similar iterations of this sort of family dynamics,” Fields said. In addition to the family divides, Judaism plays an important role in other aspects of the story. In one episode, Alan dreams of himself in the barracks of Auschwitz. “It seemed obvious to us that a Jewish person locked in a guy’s basement facing death as Alan Strauss was would associate with that imagery,” said Weisberg. “We grew up with that imagery and that history really infused in our lives, in synagogue, in Sunday school, in our regular schools, and at home. Anybody tries to kill me, I’m going there.”

As Alan tries to teach Sam about empathy, so that he can start thinking of his victims as people and consider what their families need, he talks about Jewish rituals associated with death, including the Mourner’s Kaddish. The episode released this Tuesday is titled “Kaddish,” for the prayer that holds significant meaning to Fields and Weisberg.

“I remember my dad telling me about the Kaddish when I was very young. It’s not like he sat down and explained prayers to me, but I remember him saying that it was a prayer that began as students giving thanks for their teachers, and then it became something that we said to give thanks for everybody, for those who meant something to us in life,” said Fields. “And it was a prayer of thanks, not a prayer of loss, and that always stuck with me.”

Fields and Weisberg recorded versions of the prayer for Carell, who had to recite it in its entirety in the show.

“I loved being able to assure him that he sounded great when he was saying it, because in any American congregation, it’s not like there’s the right way,” Weisberg said. “Every Jew is saying it differently and pronouncing all the words differently, so he sounded a lot like me and everybody else I knew.”

When the pair first reached out to Hecht, he assumed that the main plot of the show revolved around Jewish themes.

“They put so much thought into it and so many resources into this Orthodox story, and I figured that was the show. And then when I finally saw the script I was like, ‘Wait, this isn’t the show at all, this is like a minute and a half of the show across the whole season,’” Hecht said. “I just thought this speaks to who these folks are who are putting this together and the degree to which they’re approaching this with a sense of respect and with seriousness and with rigor.”

Fields said it was a product of how deep their Jewish identities run.

“It’s been really meaningful to be able to tell a story that we hope is relatable to everybody, that we hope ultimately is about everyone’s common humanity and common experience, but is expressed through particular character dynamics that are just deep inside us culturally,” he said. “One doesn’t often get the chance to do that, so it means a lot.”

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In ‘Last Flight Home,’ A Jewish Family Helps Their Father End His Life

By Andrew Lapin

(JTA) – When Rabbi Rachel Timoner’s dad Eli told his family of his decision to end his life, Rachel knew what would soon be asked of her: to officiate his funeral, something he had told her he wanted since she became ordained.

This presented a challenge for Rachel, the senior rabbi at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim. Being her father’s rabbi “wasn’t what I wanted,” she says in the new documentary, “Last Flight Home,” which chronicles Eli’s final days from the perspective of his family. The film, directed by Rachel’s sister Ondi Timoner, is a raw, intimate document of the realities of end-oflife care, as well as a meditation on the ways Jewish law encourages setting one’s affairs in order before the moment of death.

A former airline executive and prolific fundraiser for Miami’s Jewish federation, Eli Timoner was felled by a stroke in his 50s and spent 40 years of his life with a physical disability — the first in a series of painful steps that led to him losing much of his wealth and stature in the business and philanthropy world. (He suffered his stroke a few months after a plane operated by his airline, Air Florida, crashed into the Potomac River, killing 78 people; the film doesn’t discuss the crash, but January, one week before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, marked 40 years since it happened.)

When Eli’s health began to get markedly worse in 2020, he began to insist that he end his own life and began the legal process by which he could acquire the lethal medication in California.

“He made a sudden decision, and he was very adamant about it,” Ondi Timoner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He would go from calling one of us to the next, to the next: ‘Please, help me die. If you love me, help me die.’ He was saying the Shema to Rachel.”

Ondi’s first instinct, she said, was to grab a camera. As a prolific director, her documentaries (including “We Live In Public” and “Coming Clean”) have won awards at the Sundance Film Festival. But at first, she didn’t think she was filming anything more than a memorial video, and only wanted “to bottle up and capture his personality, his voice, for the family.” So she filmed gatherings even as she grieved along with her subjects (including her dutiful mother Lisa and apprehensive brother David), who often pop out from behind the camera to share a tender moment — or even attempt to “direct” a scene.

It was only in the months after Eli’s death, as Ondi was editing the footage and seeing the gut reaction her friends and family had to watching someone in pain make the decision to end his own life, that she decided to try to turn it into a feature film.

The film chronicles the two weeks in early 2021 before Eli takes the “goodbye powder,” as a series of doctors sign off on his death and he bids farewell to his family and friends from the comfort of his Pasadena home, where he is on bedrest. It also depicts the “T-team,” as the Timoners call themselves, helping Eli go through the traditional Jewish end-of-life ritual of viddui, or seeking forgiveness for one’s sins before death. Later, after his death, we also see them performing the act of tahara, or cleaning his body for burial.

“I’m more of just a generally spiritual person, but it was these rituals. They were like touchstones for us,” Ondi said.

During the process, Rachel finds herself less and less willing to be her father’s rabbi. “As he’s getting closer and closer to death, I am more and more clear that I am his daughter,” she says in the film.

But there was a happy coda after all the grief, Ondi said. Six months after Eli’s death, the “T-team” reunited at the Telluride Film Festival to screen the documentary — where Rachel, in her capacity as

Ondi Timoner and her father Eli Timoner in "Last Flight Home," Ondi's film about Eli's assisted suicide. (MTV Documentary Films)

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Filmmaker Ondi Timoner, second from right, marries her partner Morgan Doctor in Telluride, Colorado, in September 2022 following a screening of “Last Flight Home,” a film about her father’s death. Her sister, Rabbi Rachel Timoner, center, officiates. (Courtesy of Ondi Timoner)

LAST FLIGHT HOME

Continued from Page 19 rabbi, officiated Ondi’s wedding to her partner, Morgan Doctor, who composed the music in the film.

“It was the most perfect hour of our lives,” Ondi said. She recalled how Eli had blessed their union on camera, on his deathbed (a moment that made it into the film). Now they were getting married at an event celebrating his life, under a makeshift huppah that included a tablecloth from Eli’s mother, with the entire family present once again.

“If you think about the film, and you think about what Dad says to me the night before he dies: I say, ‘So wasn’t it important to say goodbye to all these people?’ And he says, ‘Yes, but look forward. Don’t look back,’” Ondi recalled. “And I feel like that was the energy that this occasion brought.”

For a Jewish family that was never particularly spiritual growing up, Ondi said, their patriarch dying brought everyone, including Eli, closer to Judaism.

That was true even though “Last Flight Home” captures the Timoners helping someone end his life, which is emphatically discouraged by Jewish law and tradition. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinical arm of the Reform movement that includes Rachel Timoner, announced in August that it would support Canada’s laws permitting medical aid in dying. It said it would not support California’s law, which the Timoners relied on, because America’s lack of universal healthcare “means that we cannot be certain that an individual in the U.S. considering medical assistance in dying is not being affected by their own or their family’s financial situation, or by obstacles to obtaining necessary and appropriate treatment.”

Though Rachel Timoner is a prominent activist on a range of social issues, she didn’t anticipate end-of-life care being one of them. But knowing how the image of a rabbi paying for her father’s lifeending drugs on film would seem to the Jewish community, she wrote an op-ed in the Forward prior to the movie’s release explaining her decision.

“I do not wish to create controversy on this issue, and I would not have chosen to make this film,” Rachel Timoner wrote. “I would not have chosen for my father’s death to be viewed by the public at all, and I would not have chosen to champion this issue. But I have cared for others who desperately wished for this choice at the end of their lives, and I think it might be time for the Jewish people to reconsider our views on this important matter.”

Now there’s a good chance “Last Flight Home,” and the Timoners’ story, will become a Jewish face of the right-to-die debate. Death With Dignity, an organization that advocates for policies allowing medically aided death, reached out to Ondi Timoner after the film’s screening to ask if they can use it in their own materials.

It’s a prospect she welcomes, she said, adding, “It’s a dream for me as an artist, and as a daughter, that my father’s suffering could come to this kind of healing for people.”

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