With audience awards at Jewish film festivals in Boston and Washington, D.C., “Praying With Lior” is primed to become the feel-good documentary of 2008. But director Ilana Trachtman’s heartwarming film is also intended as a catalyst for action.
Lior Liebling is a Philadelphia teenager with Down syndrome. Perpetually smiling and openhearted, Lior brightens every room he enters — especially the shul where he has davened loudly and fervently since he was a small boy. “Praying With Lior” follows the child and his family in the busy months leading up to his bar mitzvah.
Of course, nothing is simple with Lior, including the responses of those around him. Some members of the congregation think that Lior’s lack of inhibition and filters bring him closer to God and give his words more power. In fact, that was what fascinated Trachtman when she first encountered him at a prayer retreat in the Catskills in the fall of 2003.
“I was really struggling with prayer, and I always have — the whole concept of loving Judaism but having a hard time being a devotional person,” says Trachtman, an award-winning, 30-something Manhattan producer and director for HBO Family, PBS, Showtime and the Sundance Channel.
“I took classes on how to pray, and I tried meditation, and I can’t really do it. So the idea that somebody could do it well — however you want to judge success — who was also supposedly compromised intellectually is really fascinating to me.”
During her visit to San Francisco over the summer for the world premiere of “Praying With Lior” at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Trachtman laughingly describes her upbringing as “Reformadox,” and the wealthy synagogue her family belonged to as “High Church Reform.”
“I flirted with leaving it entirely, because there wasn’t enough for me to hold onto,” she recalls. She spent a semester in Israel instead, and another year and a half there after college doing volunteer work through a Peace Corps–inspired program called Otzma, in anticipation of making aliyah.
But she returned to the States, finding much of what she was looking for in the new Conservative movement. “I even flirted with becoming a rabbi,” Trachtman confides, “and then I discovered I hated services and I wasn’t really good at praying. [It] was very clear, I certainly couldn’t be a rabbi.”
Trachtman is a bright, vivacious woman who clearly wasn’t a spiritual dabbler but a seriously committed — and seriously frustrated — Jew when she met Lior.
“I don’t know that I felt like, ‘Oh my God, this kid is connected with God,’ but I did feel like, ‘This kid is experiencing focus. This kid is experiencing kavanah [intention]. This kid is experiencing concentration.’”
“Praying with Lior” provides ample opportunity to observe what Trachtman witnessed that day. “All of him, all his cells, was there in that moment, undistracted. ‘How many more pages to Aleinu?’ I was thinking. And that’s not how Lior lives in the world, and that’s certainly not how he lives when he prays.
“There was clearly an intelligence at work,” she continued, “spiritual or otherwise, even though my perception of somebody who is cognitively disabled is such that I didn’t think that was possible. “
Trachtman shot 200 hours of footage for her first independent production, becoming extraordinarily close to the Lieblings in the process. “I love this family more than I’ve ever loved any of my subjects or ever will allow myself to love anybody again,” she declares.
Lior is a special individual, but what Trachtman came away with was a new appreciation for community. Now when she prays, “I get a lot out of being there among everybody and feeling the connections between people and the potential of what’s possible. And I think a lot of that is from witnessing in such an intimate way the sustenance that Lior’s community gives him.”
“Praying With Lior” is a generally uplifting (and occasionally sobering) story, but Trachtman emphasizes that Lior’s synagogue is an exception in its acceptance and celebration of a child with a disability.
“When I started working on this [project], I had no disability background or interest, even,” Trachtman admits. “I am somebody who has marched for all different kinds of marginalized causes — immigrant rights, gay rights, women’s rights. Disability issues and disability rights were not on the radar at all.
“Part of why I was attracted to Lior is because I’d never seen it before. But the fact is, people with disabilities exist in the Jewish community. They just don’t exist in our synagogues.”
The filmmaker adds, “When I’ve done focus groups with parents of kids who have disabilities, the mothers weep — not so much for the sad parts of the movie, but because they don’t have community like that for their kids.”
Trachtman unabashedly intends “Praying With Lior” to be a form of outreach as well as an instigation for synagogues and the Jewish establishment to improve the ways they address people with disabilities.
“I don’t necessarily feel like the Jewish community is any worse than anywhere else in society,” Trachtman emphasizes. “It just happens to be the place I know the best, and the place that I hold to the highest standards because it’s mine. But I’ve come to believe, by having a community that includes everybody, then you have a truer community and a closer relationship to God.”
“Praying with Lior” is available on DVD ($24.95).