Flight (2012 film) is astonishingly good & worth watching in the weeks before the Jewish High Holy Days

Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, Bruce Greenwood and John Goodman turn in superb performances in one of the best ever cinematic explorations of T'shuvah and addiction

Denzel Washington as Capt. Whip Whitaker

It’s been more than a decade since Robert Zemeckis’ Flight hit theaters, and I’ve wanted to write about it for a long time. I just dearly love this movie on multiple levels, not least of which is as a rabbi interested in the Jewish concept of t’shuvah.

A quick word about T'shuvah

T’shuvah is often translated as “repentance,” and it’s one of the key terms of the High Holy Days, an autumn series of holidays organized around themes of personal moral self-evaluation, the seeking of forgiveness, and the making of amends. Many rabbis have spoken about how the English word “repentance” only captures a piece of what t’shuvah really means in Hebrew. It more literally means “the act of returning,” or of turning from patterns of wrongdoing to patterns of righteousness. Judaism sees t’shuvah as an ongoing process and challenge that we face in seeking to become better human beings.

But crucially, while Judaism encourages each person to do the work of t’shuvah