Elsa Guedj as Léa Schmoll, a rabbi in France. Courtesy of HBO Max
By Mira Fox
May 8, 2025
Reformed, a French comedy that just arrived on Max, is ostensibly about a female rabbi, struggling for acceptance; it follows Léa, a character based on Delphine Horvilleur, France’s most famous female rabbi. (Horvilleur was even on the cover of Elle.)
But the heart of the show isn’t really gendered expectations or gaffes about how to address a woman rabbi (though there are plenty of those). It’s a story of Léa grappling with the question of how to live in the world as a Jew. After all, she has already bent the Orthodox rules by becoming a rabbi in the first place. How much further is she willing to go?
Each episode of Reformed takes on a different clash of modernity and Judaism that Léa, played empathetically by Elsa Guedj, must mediate. There’s an interfaith couple debating whether to circumcise their newborn son. (Unlike in the U.S., where circumcision is commonly performed on people of all religions, in France, it’s outside the norm.) A man comes to la rabbine wondering what to do with the fact that his deceased mother asked to be cremated, in violation of Jewish law. And, in the season’s most poignant episode, there’s a couple who is worried that their adult son has betrayed them — by becoming Orthodox, changing his name from Clément to Yehuda, and eschewing the French delicacies of ham and fine, non-kosher wine. (“He’s become a Jew!” the father exclaims, in horror; “So are we,” his wife reminds him.)
In each episode of Reformed, Léa finds the humanity in Jewish texts, bringing the bible into conversation with modern concerns. She quotes the midrash and the Talmud, but considers not only their legal requirements, but also their deep meaning. (In French, the show is called Les Sens de Choses, or “The meaning of things.”)
For the cremation question, she advises the man to bury his mother — not only because it’s Jewish law, but because Jewish ritual is about the living, not the dead, and he wants a grave he can visit to keep his mother alive in his thoughts. For the circumcision, Léa weaves a beautiful interpretation of the binding of Isaac, the biblical tale, which she says is a parable about how our children never, really, belong to us. “It’s not my place to tell you what to do,” she says. “I’m here to help you find meaning in what you decide.”
Reformed does a beautiful job of presenting the Jewish texts. But its real story is Léa’s struggles with her own internal clash of values. For each decision, she records voice notes for herself trying out different answers and changing her position each time: First, the strict interpretation, meting out Jewish law, then the one so lenient there’s no connection to Judaism at all. She asks herself daily: should Jewish law be read “through the lens of today’s world,” or should we read “today’s world through the lens of religious texts?”
It all comes to a head when she works with an Orthodox rabbi, Arié to help the wayward religious son reconcile with his parents. Both rabbis agree, at least, that family is essential, and Judaism shouldn’t come between them, but they differ on what that means: Léa argues that the son must loosen his kashrut out of respect for his parents — the fifth commandment — while Arié says it costs the parents nothing to buy kosher food and cutlery and everything for the boy to forsake his religion. (Eventually, they come to a compromise: “Vegan — that way everyone is punished.”)
But later, at a panel on religion in France, Arié argues that requiring religion to be “convenient” is a form of extremism. Léa disagrees, saying that bending the rules is essential to society; the moment goes viral, with her as the hero. Yet afterwards, she begins to second-guess herself.
In France, laïcité, or secularism, is up there with liberté, égalité and fraternité in the nation’s culture. Léa’s own father, a psychologist, hates that she has become une rabbine. When she argued that Orthodoxy is fanatic, of course she was applauded; the French proudly hate religiosity. But she doesn’t mean to endorse laïcité; in her own home, she fights for the stringencies of religion daily.
Reformed, at its heart, explores, with deep honesty, the contradictions of modern, liberal Judaism. How can it exist in happy harmony with the values of a liberal, modern world, yet keep its heart, without assimilating? Léa’s very existence as a rabbi is nontraditional; she will always be on the side of adapting Judaism to modern values. But, as Clément-now-Yehuda’s father says, “There’s a limit.”
He means there’s a limit to what he’s willing to do to accommodate his newly Orthodox son — he draws the line at drinking kosher wine. But Reformed asks where that line is for Judaism. In truly Jewish fashion, it doesn’t have an answer.
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