Nolan Lebovitz, a rabbinical student, is returning to Highland Park, where his love of filmmaking was born, with a documentary, “Roadmap Genesis,” and a goal of updating religion and fostering interfaith dialogue.
He will present the film at North Suburban Synagogue Beth El on Tuesday, June 9 at 7:45 p.m. The free screening is open to the public.
“Roadmap Genesis,” subtitled “The Map for Mankind,” chronicles Lebovitz’s own spiritual journey of discovery from the perspective of the Book of Genesis. A diverse and distinguished gallery of talking heads, including Alan Dershowitz, the late Francis Cardinal George, and Mike Huckabee, offer their commentary on the text’s relevance and the lessons it teaches.
Lebovitz, 35, ihas cross-crossed the country, showing his film exclusively in synagogues and churches. Beth El, he said, will be especially meaningful because it’s where he became a bar mitzvah and Vernon Kurtz, who appears throughout the film, was rabbi.
Lebovitz is in his final year at the Ziegler School for Rabbinic Studies at American Jewish University. Once he is ordained, he just might be the only rabbi with an Internet Movie Database page. The Highland Park High School graduate’s love of film was nurtured by inspirational teachers, he said, and programs such as Focus on the Arts fed his passion.
He graduated from the film program at the University of Southern California and realized his dream of being a director with the 2008 suspense thriller “Tortured,” starring Laurence Fishburne and Academy Award-nominee James Cromwell. He also had a sitcom in development with the Fox network. But here comes the plot twist. After he got married in 2005 and had a daughter four years later, he began to question whether he was making a positive contribution to the world.
“Hollywood is a lot of hurry up and wait,” Lebovitz said, “and I was waiting on several different projects. After I became a father, I started to look for direction and I went back to something I had not read since I was a child — the Torah.”
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He began to read from the Five Books of Moses.
“It resonated deeply inside me,” he said. “I wondered why this was happening, and why I was connecting with this narrative that seemed totally unfamiliar to me even though I learned its words as a child. I wanted to study and learn what other rabbis had to say about it.”
It is one thing as a young adult to tell your parents your dream is to go to Hollywood to make movies. It is quite another to tell your wife you want to quit Hollywood to become a rabbi. But she supported him, he said, with one caveat.
“She never liked me saying that I used to be a filmmaker — past tense,” he said. “She’s happy that I’ve come back to making movies because she didn’t believe that I learned those skills for nothing and that they could be instrumental for what I do in the future.”
And what he wants to do is use films such as “Roadmap Genesis” to reimagine religion for a new generation, one-third of whom indicate they are unaffiliated with any faith, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
Lebovitz gets it. “When I hear people don’t follow religion, I think it really means that they want to be inspired,” he said “We don’t expect children to wear the same clothes or listen to the same music as their parents or grandparents, and yet we expect they will find the same exact meaning sitting in the same seats in the same building and reading the same books. The messages (of Judaism and Christianity) are so powerful in what they have to teach, but the mode of carrying that message needs to be updated and media can play a vital role in that. This film is my first attempt.”
Lebovitz hopes his screenings foster true interfaith dialogue.
“I showed the film in a church in Orlando,” he said, “and an older woman stood up and said that every Sunday she prayed for the Jewish people and the state of Israel. She said that I was the first rabbi to walk through the church doors. We live in America as neighbors, but we tend to keep to ourselves. ‘Interfaith dialogue’ is often (lip service) that comes down to a pancake breakfast once or twice a year in a hotel far away from a house of worship.”
The “Roadmap Genesis” roadshow is a grassroots endeavor, and he invites viewers to spread the word.
“What unites us is so much more than what divides us,” he said. “At the end of every screening, I ask people to buy a DVD copy, but not to keep. I ask them to send it to somebody in a different community. Word-of-mouth is the only way this sustains itself.”
Liebenson is a freelance reporter