How is Chabad like a Denzel Washington action movie?

I wrote this around 2018, reflecting on the murders of Chabad shluchim in India in 2008. I became regularly involved with Chabad in Bedford, N.Y., in 2015 and continue to this day, albeit in a Massachusetts setting. I greatly value the movement’s focus taking actions to promote Judaism and social engagement. The terrorists continue to attack Chabad emissaries and synagogues, indicating the visibility of Chabad as a religious force that stands against the Jew-hating Amalekites. While the Jewish summer calendar doesn’t quite line up with the narrative I developed here, the meaning still applies, as does the comparison to the 2006 Denzel Washington movie Déjà Vu. The film captured that essential aspect of Judaism that is a constant conversation between this moment and all past moments of Jewish history. Or, as novelist William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

In November 2008, after Muslim terrorists killed the directors of the Chabad House in Mumbai, India and other Jews, I attended a memorial service for them at Chabad of Stamford, Connecticut. There, I had a remarkable spiritual experience.

During that mournful but forward-looking night, somebody compared Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg to Abraham and Sarah, the first Jews, who welcomed angels and guests into their household.

At that moment, something clicked in me that, in retrospect, showed me something essential about both Chabad and Jewish observance. Perhaps the speaker made this explicit point: Gavriel and Rivka weren’t just like Abraham and Sarah—they actually became Abraham and Sarah by embodying their values. Thus, 4,000 years of history telescoped into a single point and I clearly saw the Patriarch and Matriarch.

What happened so long ago, after Abraham heard the command “Lech Lecha” (get thee out) and left Ur of the Chaldees assumed an electrifying immediacy in my life. I felt a direct connection to my faith that I had rarely known before. A line ran from Abraham to the Holtzbergs to me. As we celebrate Jewish events, such as Passover and Shavuot, the same idea applies. We are actually there at Egypt and Sinai now with Jews past, present and future.

A decade ago, those emotions inspired me to rent a movie I had seen before and liked a lot: Déjà Vu with Denzel Washington as investigator Doug Carlin, unraveling a deadly explosion on a ferry in New Orleans.

Now, you might ask, “How are the Holtzbergs, Passover and Shavuot like a Denzel Washington action movie?” I’ll explain.

Carlin uncovers one of those typical secret government research projects, this one called “Snow White.” It enables people to peer into the past as it is happening for short periods of time. The more he hears about the project, the more Carlin wonders about the true nature of what he sees. He discovers that Snow White can function like a time machine. Some key dialogue:

Technician: “Basically we’re folding space in a higher dimension to create an instantaneous link between two distant points.”

Carlin: “Why can’t I see this bridge?”

“It’s not visible to the human eye. I mean, it’s real, though. It’s just as real and just as solid as a cell phone signal or a radio wave . . . In a sense we are always looking into the past.”

“You’re trying to tell me that at the other side of this bridge is the actual past?”

“Yes.”

“Wow.”

That dialogue captured my feeling about the memorial service and the Holtzbergs, and now Passover and Shavuot. A spiritual bridge opened between that November night and the life of the first Jews. Abraham and Sarah stopped being nice but distant myths. They instead became urgently real through the selfless behavior of the Holtzbergs, who showed me how Abraham and Sarah dared all for their faith. Time dropped away. So, like in the movie, I found myself on the bridge between now and then or, if you will, this “now” and another “now.”

“I am actually looking at Abraham and Sarah,” I thought. “This is the way it was and the way it is.”

While Déjà Vu had a strong Christian sensibility, it echoed Jewish teachings. At a funeral service after the bombing in the movie, a preacher mused on God’s will and the nature of time. He said, “Everything God has done will remain forever. There is nothing to add to it, nothing to take from it. God has done this so man can be in awe. Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before. God calls forth the past.” This reminded me of the second principle of the 13 Principles of Maimonides, which says:

I believe with complete faith that the Creator, blessed be His name, is One and Alone; that there is no oneness in any way like Him; and that He alone is our G-d —was, is and will be.

I can connect my response at the Stamford memorial with other Jewish moments. One of my favorite parts of the Passover seder comes with the statement, “In every single generation one is obligated to look upon himself as if he personally had gone forth out of Egypt.”

Those words always thrill me. The seder cracks open with impact at that moment, as I am at the Exodus, leaving bondage in Egypt for a new life. I stand with my fellow Jews at Sinai, part of a family that transcends time and place as surely as if we had our own “Snow White” machine.

And now, that very thought applies on this night of Shavuot.

Gavriel and Rivka, of blessed memory, will always be with us in our collective Jewish time machine, at Passover, at Shavuot. They showed me what can happen when the barriers of time vanish, when all Jews unite in Canaan, at Sinai, in Jerusalem and here in Bedford.