Jewish actress Marlee Matlin won her first Academy Award, for Best Actress, at just 21 years old. It was a well-deserved and historic win, being the first Academy Award for a deaf actor, for her role in “Children of a Lesser God,” an emotional rollercoaster of a movie. But eight years earlier, she was involved in another incredible tear-jerker, perhaps her first one on stage: when she held her bat mitzvah at Congregation Bene Shalom, the Hebrew Association of the Deaf and Hearing in Skokie, Illinois.
On a recent live episode of Being Jewish, the podcast hosted by Jonah Platt, Matlin joined “Once Upon a Time” star Ginnifer Goodwin and “The Writer” author and voice of Olaf from “Frozen” Josh Gad to chat about their Jewish backgrounds and how they think about being Jewish at this moment in time. Matlin, who made Oscar history again in 2022 when her film “CODA” became the first majority deaf feature to win Best Picture, recalled how “very proud to be bat mitzvah-ed” she was that day. Her temple, which welcomes both deaf and hearing members, often held bat mitzvahs for deaf children like her, who would use ASL for the English part of the service and would learn to read and speak Hebrew phonetically to read their Torah portion.
On the morning of her big day, Matlin recalls feeling excited and ready (and thrilled about the prospect of getting that bat mitzvah money, she joked). She stood on the bimah, the Torah before her, and started reciting. But when she looked up, she noticed something special: “Everybody at shul was crying.”
“Why are they crying?” she thought to herself and then she, too, started to weep. The entire congregation was in tears at that point and when Matlin looked down, she was devastated to discover that her “tears had stained the parchment of the Torah” and so she started crying even more.
She recalls saying to the rabbi, “I ruined the Torah with my tears.”
Yet when she tried to apologize to him later, he stopped her. “Your tears,” he told Matlin, “are a mitzvah.” A reminder, he continued, of “the tears of those who were persecuted, the history of the Jews.” And yet so unlike those tears, hers were “tears of joy.”
It’s such a beautiful, empowering message for a teen starting their Jewish life as an adult, a reminder of the way we are all part of the Jewish story, in our joy and our grief, and that there is never shame in our tears, especially on such a momentous occasion. In a 2015 interview with JTA, Matlin spoke about her experience attending that synagogue, whose founding rabbi, Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer, was hearing, but would sign his sermons. “It gave me a community to belong to,” she said. “We’d go to temple Friday nights and I’d learn about my religion and learn about my faith. I always looked forward to the community.”
The experience, she said, also “gave me the drive, it gave me the foundation to believe in myself, despite what other people say.”
In that same conversation, Matlin told a hilarious story about finding her brothers’ weed while searching for Hanukkah gifts, and also talked about her interfaith marriage. She married her Catholic husband, Kevin Grandalski, in an interfaith ceremony performed by a rabbi and a priest in Henry Winkler’s backyard (yes, the two are pretty close! Love this Jewish duo!). She and her husband couldn’t agree about baptisms and bat/bar mitzvahs, but did agree on celebrating all the Jewish holidays and all the Christian holidays with their four children (Matlin also became a grandmother last year, mazel!). She also talked about playing a deaf Jewish lesbian in “The L Word” and of her desire to do a Hanukkah movie for Hallmark. (C’mon, Hallmark, cast Marlee Matlin in next year’s Hanukkah romance! This is your chance!)
“I love celebrating Hanukkah because it’s eight days of gifts,” Matlin joked on Being Jewish. “I loved my childhood growing up with Jewish traditions in Morton Grove, Illinois, and the times that I spent in temple, on Friday, sometimes on Saturdays, often on Sundays, the way my parents truly exposed every aspect of the Jewish holidays to me. It just brings great joy and great memories… it just moves me, cherishing our religion, as simple as that, our Judaism, and never forgetting our ancestors.”
Someone please hire Marlee Matlin to play a deaf rabbi in something, because I would certainly go to her synagogue.
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