Women rabbis may not seem like an anomaly nowadays here in America, where the Reform, Conservative and more liberal movements of Judaism are full of female leaders. But in France, a female rabbi is still quite an unusual sight, though one did make it to the cover of Elle magazine and is about to be the subject of a new TV show. Her name, if you haven’t heard it yet, is Delphine Horvilleur. And she’s the inspiration behind a very exciting new French TV show steaming soon on Max.
Horvilleur, at this point, may be one of France’s most prominent rabbis, so it’s interesting to think of her as only the third ordained female rabbi in the country (she was ordained at Hebrew Union College in New York, since women rabbis still can’t get ordained in France).
She officiated some of the country’s most high profile Jewish funerals, including that of French history-making politician Simone Veil, who helped make abortion legal in the country, and counseled France’s biggest Jewish comic, Gad Elmaleh, in his recent film “Stay With Us.” In 2020, she was on the cover of Elle, and in an interview with the magazine, spoke about how her daughter teaches her about feminism and about antisemitism in France.
The editorial director of the French Jewish quarterly review Tenou’a, she’s also written about her experiences in a book, “Living with Our Dead: On Loss and Consolation,” which has now become an inspiration for the new show “Reformed,” or in French, “Le Sens Des Choses,” premiering on Max this March 28. In the series, made up of eight 30-minute episodes, actress Elsa Guedj plays Lea, a character based on Horvilleur, as she counsels people through various Jewish lifecycle moments.
The synopsis of the show reads: “Lea, 28, is one of the few female rabbis in France: with frail shoulders and great responsibilities, she has to find answers in the labyrinth of small and big questions in people’s lives. But how can she be a guide to others when she herself is grappling with the fundamentals of love, family and the search for meaning?”
In the first trailer of “Reformed,” co-created by Noé Debré (“Parliament,” “Zorro,” “A Good Jewish Boy”) and Benjamin Charbit (“Zorro,” “Stay With Us”), we see brises, shivas, bar mitzvahs and Jewish weddings and Lea, sometimes wrapped in a tallis with a kippah on her head, trying to help people navigate them.
“All I want to do is help people,” Lea says in the trailer, “offer them some comfort.” It also features many people bewildered at the fact that she is a rabbi. One woman seems confused about what she should call Lea. “Rabbi-woman?” she wonders. “That’s too much like frogman,” Lea’s companion replies (I would watch a show about an undersea rabbi, to be fair).
“My sister has the art of understanding the meaning of things,” her brother muses. There are family arguments about atheism too, as any show about a Reform rabbi must have, and some skeptical Orthodox Jews who are confused about meeting a woman who is also a rabbi.
Yet what makes me the most excited for this show is the way it promises to show the intricacies and the beauty of Reform and liberal Judaism (Horvilleur is one of the leaders of the French Liberal Judaism movement). “People want answers and certainties, and those are the two things that I am completely lacking of,” Lea says through tears in the trailer.
“The world doesn’t need more rabbis full of certainties; those who are looking for something else are those who need you,” she is told. That is, after all, what so many people looking for Horvilleur’s counsel are after (the title of the rabbi’s post October 7 book, “How Isn’t It Going?” is also a nod to those impossible questions) and what so many of those in similar streams of Judaism are looking for. I’m excited to see this kind of deeply understanding portrayal of being a modern Jew.
Since this is the peak age of hot rabbi TV, with the second season of the Netflix show “Nobody Wants This” coming out later this year, it only makes sense that we get a show about France’s hottest female rabbi. But I’m so glad that this show appears to also be a diverting but reverent ode to Judaism itself.
