The Short and Sweet of Simple
Erica Shindler Briggs | 26.Nov.09
Nowhere is it written that God must answer our questions, and yet any person who seeks to understand life must wonder, “Why does He make us feel the questions if He’s not going to give us any answers?” This may be the ultimate theological question, asked by Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor who is courageously trying to hold on to his sanity as God rips apart his 1960s Minnesota suburban life in the film A Serious Man. First, I must admit that this is not the type of film I usually pay to see. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man is one I might view by chance a year or two after its original release. It would be a pleasant discovery checked out at the library that avails a treasury of films from the odd and outrageous to the dark and daunting. Though often perplexing, I prefer the independent films, those that seem to intentionally end abruptly without any sense of closure or peace. I am not suggesting that I get some sadistic pleasure in witnessing unhappy endings. To the contrary, Hollywood people-pleasers can be emotionally gratifying, but very rarely do they stimulate my intellect or offer any sort of insight into my own suffering. I suppose this makes me a rather serious woman, (a title once given to me in the most caring way, though I understood it to mean, “Lighten up, for God’s sake!”). Herein lies the problem: I view my life through a spiritual lens, and it is for God’s sake that I take life so seriously. Thus, I prefer films or literature from which I can glean answers to real life circumstances, especially ones that offer a spiritual perspective. It is for this reason why I paid to view A Serious Man. I was not disappointed; the film offers a true to life reflection of a person seeking answers from God. Further, it provides practical, if simple, answers to complicated situations.
Larry Gopnik lives a seemingly satisfying life. He’s got a nice home in the suburbs, a wife, and two children. His job as a professor of physics has, the viewer imagines, provided a sense of security not only because of his soon-to-be tenured position, but also because of the nature of his field, one that glorifies finding mathematical solutions to complicated questions. Physics is human’s attempt to analyze nature in order to understand how the world and the universe behave. Without belittling the study, I do find it a bit arrogant. How can man, a finite being, come to understand the infinite? It seems a futile effort. As if putting an exclamation behind this opinion, the Coen brothers have devised a script of upheaval in the established order of Gopnik’s life. There is a scene that foreshadows his response to all of what is about to come. He is standing on the rooftop, looking down at his neighborhood where, of course, everything is much smaller. He scans the sky - grand, clear, distant - and then sets about his task. As charged by his son, he tries to “tune in” the aerial (a 1960s term for television antennae) to find a better signal. Aside from Gopnik’s repeated appeal, “Please, I need help,” fixing the aerial is the most requested directive in the film. The repetition alludes to the means by which Gopnik might best receive said help. Whether he consciously picks up on this signal isn’t clear; however, he does make every attempt to discover God’s intent behind the litany of life-altering disasters that occur in a very short amount of time.
I don’t want to ruin the movie by detailing all the drama that ensues; the mounting madness, and Larry Gopnik’s reaction to it, is what the movie is all about. It is significant, however, to point to the first indicator of trouble, as this initial sign threads to the last and final answer to Larry’s conundrum. While in Hebrew class, Larry’s son Danny is caught listening to a cassette recorder playing Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” Danny’s recorder is confiscated, and as today’s teenager will tell you, this is punishment enough. It is his father Larry, however, who seems to bear the consequences of Danny’s delinquent behavior, though not directly. Biblically, the sins of the father are the burden of the sons. In A Serious Man, however, it seems the sins of the son are the father’s burden, as are the sins of the daughter (who is stealing money for a nose job), the wife (who is ripe and ready to commit adultery), and the brother (an unemployed gambler).
The tension begins for Larry when he notices that his neighbor (a very waspy man, who hates Jews second only to Asians,) is encroaching on his property. This becomes a reoccurring issue, that of defining boundaries. What does one do when the line between what is right and wrong blurs, or worse, when that line is completely erased and, as Gopnik states after learning his wife wants a divorce, “everything I thought I knew is wrong”? After the divorce process begins, he is then confronted by Sy Ableman, the man stealing his wife, whose passive aggressive style is so clearly adversarial, even a sit down discussion becomes a non-verbal set-up: him and the wife against poor Larry, the sap sitting alone on the other side of the dining table. Then, a foreign student tries to bribe him for a better grade. When Larry refuses and accuses the student of bribery, the student sends his father to threaten a lawsuit for defamation of character. When his tenure is questioned by the committee due to “moral turpitude,” Larry swallows the worry as if conceding to that inner knowing that this is just one more loop in a tapestry that only God can see. Practically, however, it’s a tangled knot as nasty as the cyst on his brother’s neck that is in constant need of draining.
As the Coen brothers keep stacking the cards against Larry, the audience waits for him to crumble under the pressure. They manage to avoid making Gopnik the stereotypical “poor-me” Jew by keeping him transparent through it all: “I’m not even sure how to react. I’m too confused.” It seems that this uncertainty becomes the next theme in the film: to whom or what do we turn to when we don’t know the answers? “You should go see the Rabbi,” is the advice Larry is given, to which he follows, but instead of seeing the Rabbi, he meets his underling whose summary solution - “You need a different perspective” - sounds hollow in Larry’s widening cavern of discombobulation. Still, he tries the approach, at least verbally, but the disconcerting stare of his divorce attorney makes his shoulders collapse under the weight of his own doubt. It is in this state I have come to learn that when you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. My old pattern was to do anything just to be doing something; after all something is better than nothing, right? Wrong, at least that’s what I discovered the hard way.
When I couldn’t control my circumstances, I’d get on my high horse and chase down the first situation (or person) I could control, throw my lasso around it, tighten, and bring it down into submission. I’d stand over the dominated entity proudly, declaring victory over something. Though I gained temporary control, this reaction almost always backfired. It is the same for Larry. From him we learn that when we react badly towards a negative situation, it only makes a difficult situation more complicated, as evidenced by Gopnik hollering curses out of his window at the foreign student, the distraction averting his attention away from the car stopped in front of him. The crash is sufficient to halt any further movement in that direction. Resigned, he seeks another Rabbi, whose advice comes in the form of a story.
Anyone who tries to help someone by telling a story should know this: the story is only as good as the storyteller – that is to say that advice is only as good as the giver of the advice. Because we all fall short of goodness, our advice, as honest and heartfelt as it may be, can never be the best. The best advice we can hope for in any given situation is: Don’t do anything that will make things worse. This is the advice Larry should have received. Instead, the second Rabbi poses another question: How does God speak to us? And then proceeds to tell the story about a dentist who finds Hebrew engraved on the back of a patient’s teeth. “What can such a sign mean?” Rather than offering his interpretation, the Rabbi leaves the question dangling, which confounds Larry even more. The questions keep repeating, even in his dreams where he is writing out “the uncertainty principle” – an equation that fills up every square inch of a chalkboard as long and wide as a two-car garage door. “Even though you can’t figure anything out,” Larry professes, “you are responsible for it on the exam.” His subconscious screams what he can’t seem to admit to himself: God only knows, and he’s not going to tell you! That would be like cheating on the test. Yet, I feel for Larry. He wants to do the right thing, and genuinely seeks the right answers. He is a devout Jew, and has followed the rules up to this point. Shouldn’t an all loving, all knowing God at least provide a study guide?
Of course, there’s Job. His story is the ultimate reference for what to do when tried by fire. But Larry doesn’t reach for the Old Testament; he reaches for a joint offered by the hot and sexy temptress next door. In his heightened state, he is confronted with yet another wild card when the police show up with his brother, arrested for gambling. So much for trying to escape his problems; that reaction never worked for me either. It is at this point in the film when a thought occurred to me, one that I have had to revisit often in my own life. What if there is no meaning for what is happening except to test my reaction? Worse, what if I fail? The latter question isn’t so hard if I make the timely discovery that I am, in fact, being tested. As an educator, I have a hard time convincing students that the purpose of the test is not to cause inconvenience, stress, anxiety, or beat down confidence. It is to reveal what is known and unknown, what has been learned, and what areas are in need of improvement. This explanation doesn’t work for my students, so it’s no surprise that it doesn’t go over well with the children of God either. Still, once I become conscious that “this is only a test” (which requires considerable discernment, a lesson unto itself), I can take a step back, review the circumstances and hopefully identify what is being tested. The prerequisite before accepting the test is to identity what I am supposed to learn from this situation – patience, humility, discipline, obedience, discernment, courage, honesty? Then comes the actual test: Be still and know that God is a ready and able teacher, and then be willing to learn regardless of the teaching methodology.
We should be concerned if we are not tested now and again; it means we are not learning anything new. We are not growing or even stretching to reach our full potential. Larry was settled; he needed to be shaken up. He might argue, “Why so violently?” to which God might reply “Because of who you are.” There is only one Larry Gopnik. His circumstances reflect his unique character, personality, history, weaknesses and strengths. In fact, his testing is testament to the way God views him: He gave Larry much to carry because He had confidence in Larry’s ability to bear the burden. And he does, though he lugs and tugs and pulls the weight which exhausts him more than burden itself. Anyone familiar with weight training techniques understands that improper lifting of excessive weight not only drains us of our strength, but can lead to significant injury. Properly balanced resistance, however, increases our strength over time. Larry’s failure is his imbalance and rush to find solutions, making up his own answers rather than waiting on God. As a result, he may end up dropping the load on his own foot. At least that is what the ending suggests; the movie leaves the viewer hanging in traditional independent film fashion.
Interestingly enough, the moral of Larry’s ending is offered at the beginning of the film. A quote from Rashi, a biblical scholar, gives the answer to the spiritual test: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” Larry’s struggle was his conviction that God was telling him something. Thus, he spent his every waking hour trying to figure out what God was trying to say. He was out of balance; this is not uncommon for serious folks. I treat life as if it were a dream to which there is some deep hidden meaning behind every simple occurrence. Why did the soup I spent all day cooking for friends fall in their driveway? Is my soup unrighteous? In my meager ways, I make things more complicated. My antenna gets bent out of shape, or I slip and fall off the roof while trying to tune it in. Ultimately, when I focus on the problems - that which has gone wrong - I choose the wrong solutions. When I try to be as smart as God, I end up looking stupid.
Thus, it is not surprising when Larry’s obsession to interpret the turmoil keeps him from seeing what may have been a clear answer. His son, preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, is memorizing what will be tested during the ceremony. Assuming Larry went through the same rite of passage when he was of age, he should have recalled Isaiah 55:8, a verse that guides believers through times such as these: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” Based on Larry’s final act in the film, it can be assumed that he did not accept this truth. If only his son had shared with his father the enlightening counsel from the Rabbi (the one Larry had been trying to see but was denied repeatedly,) with whom the son is permitted to meet following his ceremony. (How he is able to pass is by God’s grace; he was high the entire time.) The Rabbi asks the lyrically genius question posed by Jefferson Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies/and the joy within you dies…….”. The Rabbi pauses. “Then what?” The son is dumbfounded. The Rabbi slowly slides the confiscated cassette recorder across his desk before giving the answer, “Be a good boy.” Though a good life is not always sweet, good answers should always be short and simple. A Serious Man advises that we keep tuning our aerial reception to the simple stations in life.
Larry Gopnik lives a seemingly satisfying life. He’s got a nice home in the suburbs, a wife, and two children. His job as a professor of physics has, the viewer imagines, provided a sense of security not only because of his soon-to-be tenured position, but also because of the nature of his field, one that glorifies finding mathematical solutions to complicated questions. Physics is human’s attempt to analyze nature in order to understand how the world and the universe behave. Without belittling the study, I do find it a bit arrogant. How can man, a finite being, come to understand the infinite? It seems a futile effort. As if putting an exclamation behind this opinion, the Coen brothers have devised a script of upheaval in the established order of Gopnik’s life. There is a scene that foreshadows his response to all of what is about to come. He is standing on the rooftop, looking down at his neighborhood where, of course, everything is much smaller. He scans the sky - grand, clear, distant - and then sets about his task. As charged by his son, he tries to “tune in” the aerial (a 1960s term for television antennae) to find a better signal. Aside from Gopnik’s repeated appeal, “Please, I need help,” fixing the aerial is the most requested directive in the film. The repetition alludes to the means by which Gopnik might best receive said help. Whether he consciously picks up on this signal isn’t clear; however, he does make every attempt to discover God’s intent behind the litany of life-altering disasters that occur in a very short amount of time.
I don’t want to ruin the movie by detailing all the drama that ensues; the mounting madness, and Larry Gopnik’s reaction to it, is what the movie is all about. It is significant, however, to point to the first indicator of trouble, as this initial sign threads to the last and final answer to Larry’s conundrum. While in Hebrew class, Larry’s son Danny is caught listening to a cassette recorder playing Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” Danny’s recorder is confiscated, and as today’s teenager will tell you, this is punishment enough. It is his father Larry, however, who seems to bear the consequences of Danny’s delinquent behavior, though not directly. Biblically, the sins of the father are the burden of the sons. In A Serious Man, however, it seems the sins of the son are the father’s burden, as are the sins of the daughter (who is stealing money for a nose job), the wife (who is ripe and ready to commit adultery), and the brother (an unemployed gambler).
The tension begins for Larry when he notices that his neighbor (a very waspy man, who hates Jews second only to Asians,) is encroaching on his property. This becomes a reoccurring issue, that of defining boundaries. What does one do when the line between what is right and wrong blurs, or worse, when that line is completely erased and, as Gopnik states after learning his wife wants a divorce, “everything I thought I knew is wrong”? After the divorce process begins, he is then confronted by Sy Ableman, the man stealing his wife, whose passive aggressive style is so clearly adversarial, even a sit down discussion becomes a non-verbal set-up: him and the wife against poor Larry, the sap sitting alone on the other side of the dining table. Then, a foreign student tries to bribe him for a better grade. When Larry refuses and accuses the student of bribery, the student sends his father to threaten a lawsuit for defamation of character. When his tenure is questioned by the committee due to “moral turpitude,” Larry swallows the worry as if conceding to that inner knowing that this is just one more loop in a tapestry that only God can see. Practically, however, it’s a tangled knot as nasty as the cyst on his brother’s neck that is in constant need of draining.
As the Coen brothers keep stacking the cards against Larry, the audience waits for him to crumble under the pressure. They manage to avoid making Gopnik the stereotypical “poor-me” Jew by keeping him transparent through it all: “I’m not even sure how to react. I’m too confused.” It seems that this uncertainty becomes the next theme in the film: to whom or what do we turn to when we don’t know the answers? “You should go see the Rabbi,” is the advice Larry is given, to which he follows, but instead of seeing the Rabbi, he meets his underling whose summary solution - “You need a different perspective” - sounds hollow in Larry’s widening cavern of discombobulation. Still, he tries the approach, at least verbally, but the disconcerting stare of his divorce attorney makes his shoulders collapse under the weight of his own doubt. It is in this state I have come to learn that when you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. My old pattern was to do anything just to be doing something; after all something is better than nothing, right? Wrong, at least that’s what I discovered the hard way.
When I couldn’t control my circumstances, I’d get on my high horse and chase down the first situation (or person) I could control, throw my lasso around it, tighten, and bring it down into submission. I’d stand over the dominated entity proudly, declaring victory over something. Though I gained temporary control, this reaction almost always backfired. It is the same for Larry. From him we learn that when we react badly towards a negative situation, it only makes a difficult situation more complicated, as evidenced by Gopnik hollering curses out of his window at the foreign student, the distraction averting his attention away from the car stopped in front of him. The crash is sufficient to halt any further movement in that direction. Resigned, he seeks another Rabbi, whose advice comes in the form of a story.
Anyone who tries to help someone by telling a story should know this: the story is only as good as the storyteller – that is to say that advice is only as good as the giver of the advice. Because we all fall short of goodness, our advice, as honest and heartfelt as it may be, can never be the best. The best advice we can hope for in any given situation is: Don’t do anything that will make things worse. This is the advice Larry should have received. Instead, the second Rabbi poses another question: How does God speak to us? And then proceeds to tell the story about a dentist who finds Hebrew engraved on the back of a patient’s teeth. “What can such a sign mean?” Rather than offering his interpretation, the Rabbi leaves the question dangling, which confounds Larry even more. The questions keep repeating, even in his dreams where he is writing out “the uncertainty principle” – an equation that fills up every square inch of a chalkboard as long and wide as a two-car garage door. “Even though you can’t figure anything out,” Larry professes, “you are responsible for it on the exam.” His subconscious screams what he can’t seem to admit to himself: God only knows, and he’s not going to tell you! That would be like cheating on the test. Yet, I feel for Larry. He wants to do the right thing, and genuinely seeks the right answers. He is a devout Jew, and has followed the rules up to this point. Shouldn’t an all loving, all knowing God at least provide a study guide?
Of course, there’s Job. His story is the ultimate reference for what to do when tried by fire. But Larry doesn’t reach for the Old Testament; he reaches for a joint offered by the hot and sexy temptress next door. In his heightened state, he is confronted with yet another wild card when the police show up with his brother, arrested for gambling. So much for trying to escape his problems; that reaction never worked for me either. It is at this point in the film when a thought occurred to me, one that I have had to revisit often in my own life. What if there is no meaning for what is happening except to test my reaction? Worse, what if I fail? The latter question isn’t so hard if I make the timely discovery that I am, in fact, being tested. As an educator, I have a hard time convincing students that the purpose of the test is not to cause inconvenience, stress, anxiety, or beat down confidence. It is to reveal what is known and unknown, what has been learned, and what areas are in need of improvement. This explanation doesn’t work for my students, so it’s no surprise that it doesn’t go over well with the children of God either. Still, once I become conscious that “this is only a test” (which requires considerable discernment, a lesson unto itself), I can take a step back, review the circumstances and hopefully identify what is being tested. The prerequisite before accepting the test is to identity what I am supposed to learn from this situation – patience, humility, discipline, obedience, discernment, courage, honesty? Then comes the actual test: Be still and know that God is a ready and able teacher, and then be willing to learn regardless of the teaching methodology.
We should be concerned if we are not tested now and again; it means we are not learning anything new. We are not growing or even stretching to reach our full potential. Larry was settled; he needed to be shaken up. He might argue, “Why so violently?” to which God might reply “Because of who you are.” There is only one Larry Gopnik. His circumstances reflect his unique character, personality, history, weaknesses and strengths. In fact, his testing is testament to the way God views him: He gave Larry much to carry because He had confidence in Larry’s ability to bear the burden. And he does, though he lugs and tugs and pulls the weight which exhausts him more than burden itself. Anyone familiar with weight training techniques understands that improper lifting of excessive weight not only drains us of our strength, but can lead to significant injury. Properly balanced resistance, however, increases our strength over time. Larry’s failure is his imbalance and rush to find solutions, making up his own answers rather than waiting on God. As a result, he may end up dropping the load on his own foot. At least that is what the ending suggests; the movie leaves the viewer hanging in traditional independent film fashion.
Interestingly enough, the moral of Larry’s ending is offered at the beginning of the film. A quote from Rashi, a biblical scholar, gives the answer to the spiritual test: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” Larry’s struggle was his conviction that God was telling him something. Thus, he spent his every waking hour trying to figure out what God was trying to say. He was out of balance; this is not uncommon for serious folks. I treat life as if it were a dream to which there is some deep hidden meaning behind every simple occurrence. Why did the soup I spent all day cooking for friends fall in their driveway? Is my soup unrighteous? In my meager ways, I make things more complicated. My antenna gets bent out of shape, or I slip and fall off the roof while trying to tune it in. Ultimately, when I focus on the problems - that which has gone wrong - I choose the wrong solutions. When I try to be as smart as God, I end up looking stupid.
Thus, it is not surprising when Larry’s obsession to interpret the turmoil keeps him from seeing what may have been a clear answer. His son, preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, is memorizing what will be tested during the ceremony. Assuming Larry went through the same rite of passage when he was of age, he should have recalled Isaiah 55:8, a verse that guides believers through times such as these: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” Based on Larry’s final act in the film, it can be assumed that he did not accept this truth. If only his son had shared with his father the enlightening counsel from the Rabbi (the one Larry had been trying to see but was denied repeatedly,) with whom the son is permitted to meet following his ceremony. (How he is able to pass is by God’s grace; he was high the entire time.) The Rabbi asks the lyrically genius question posed by Jefferson Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies/and the joy within you dies…….”. The Rabbi pauses. “Then what?” The son is dumbfounded. The Rabbi slowly slides the confiscated cassette recorder across his desk before giving the answer, “Be a good boy.” Though a good life is not always sweet, good answers should always be short and simple. A Serious Man advises that we keep tuning our aerial reception to the simple stations in life.
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1. Posted on 27.Nov.09 From: Rachel Hernandez
Well written review; this is a movie I probably would have skipped. Now it's on my must-see list.