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By Arnold Flick
 LA JOLLA, California-- I recently saw A Serious Man, a movie by the Coen brothers. I had heard it was a movie based on the Book of Job, that it was a movie that would insult a Jewish audience. Instead, I found myself profoundly affected and unsettled. On leaving the theatre, I encountered several Jewish acquaintances, all of whom shared my sense of disequilibrium.
“What do you think? What are the Coens saying? Could a Gentile relate to this movie?” These were the common questions. Neither my acquaintances nor I are what can be described as religious.
It is quite conceivable that the Coens themselves are not sure of what this movie represents, or that they started it in one direction and that it got away from them and finished somewhere else. Regardless, for me, this movie is a statement of love, painful love, but nonetheless love and affirmation of being a Jew. Probably, when the Coens were making it, it clarified for them as well the many paradoxes of a modern Jew in a subtly hostile world.
On the surface, yes, there are features of Job. If this were all, this would not account for its effect on a Jewish audience.
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It will not lessen your involvement with this movie if I tell you something about it. It starts with a strange parable—In a shetl hut, a devout and learned Tzadik, an invited guest by the husband, is stabbed by the superstitious and fearful wife, and leaves the hut to face probable death in a winter storm. It ends as the “serious man,” having for the first time in his life compromised his honor, faces a grave illness and his son faces death as a tornado approaches while his teacher struggles to unlock a door that will provide access to a tornado shelter. Thus the movie comes full circle.
Between this beginning and end is a story of a suffering Jew, the Serious Man. He is devout enough that he seeks advice for dealing with his “tzuris” from several rabbis—all of them portrayed as charlatans or fools. The junior Rabbi tells him to seek HaShem in the parking lot, it is “perception.” The middle Rabbi tells him, in essence, that bad things happen. The senior Rabbi refuses to see him, but later tells the son to find truth from a Jefferson Airplane song—I think the lyrics are “When the truth is found to be lies and all the joys within you dies…” And although these bits are presented as strange and surprising jokes within the movie, at the end, these seem to me to be the message.
“A Serious Man” is about being Jewish and accepting it. There are no answers, there is injustice, but there it is—ancient and enduring, a way of life.
This movie is a love statement, regretful and sad perhaps, but nonetheless affirmative to being a Jew. See it.
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