When I was ten years old, in 2004, Ushpizin, directed by Gidi Dar, came out in theaters. It starred the actor Shuli Rand, who also wrote the script, and co-starred with his real-life wife at the time, Michal Bat-Sheva Rand. I don’t think my parents took me to see it in theaters, I was too young, but I must have caught it on television a year or so later. One scene stuck with me: Shuli Rand running through a forest, consumed with rage, asking God why He was testing him. I was completely entranced by his performance. I didn’t know much about films at the time, but I could tell this was a performance of a lifetime, that it was a vulnerable moment for the man himself as much as for the character, and I couldn’t believe I was being let in.

In broad strokes, the film Ushpizin follows Moshe and Malli, an ultra-Orthodox Haredi couple in Jerusalem who can’t afford the coming Sukkot holiday and are waiting, quite literally, for a miracle. Moshe has no money for a sukkah, let alone the feast a holiday like this calls for, and no help is coming from his yeshiva. When cash does appear under their door, slipped there anonymously, it feels like the direct answer to their prayers. They are ecstatic: Malli finally has what she needs to cook and prepare the holiday, and Moshe goes out to buy the “four species”, four plants that are a mitzva to have in your sukkah, and he finds a perfect etrog he can’t usually afford – one for a thousand shekels – and buys it. The two of them are relieved, and allow themselves to believe the hard part is over.

But it isn’t. The real test comes soon after, when two men from Moshe’s past show up uninvited with nowhere else to go. Before he became religious, Moshe ran with a rougher crowd, and these two, Eliyahu and Yosef, knew him then. They’re loud, crude, and completely out of place in the quiet, observant life he’s built. It would be easy, maybe even justifiable, for him to turn them away. But hosting guests during Sukkot is a mitzvah, and Moshe takes it seriously enough to let them stay, even as they eat his food, drink his wine, and threaten to undo everything he’s spent years constructing. The Ushpizin of the title are the sukkah’s holy guests, the ones you’re meant to welcome even when welcoming them is not easy, financially or emotionally. Moshe’s entire transformation is tested in real time by two troubled men who won’t leave his house.

To me, what makes the film powerful is also that it isn’t just fiction. Shuli Rand, who wrote it and plays Moshe, was once a celebrated stage actor in Tel Aviv before he returned to religious life and joined the Breslov community in Jerusalem, stepping away from acting for eight years. Moshe carries a version of that same before-and-after, a man who has rebuilt himself and is still not sure the old life is finished with him. Rand’s own wife (now divorced, but at the time of the film) plays Malli, since the rabbi who permitted the film insisted no outside actress be hired to appear opposite him. It is unbelievable, but she had never acted before. Watching them together, it’s hard to separate the performance from the two people actually sharing a life.

The film’s relationship with the Haredi world it depicts is its own story. It was made with the blessing of Rand’s rabbi, on the condition that it never screen in cinemas on Shabbat, and it used real residents of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods on screen. But Haredi audiences don’t go to movie theaters, so most of them never saw it that way at all. Instead, pirated copies spread through the community, and eventually so many people wanted to know how to pay for something they’d already watched for free that pashkvilim, the posted notices used for community announcements, went up in Haredi neighborhoods explaining where to send the money.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but what I can say is that this film touched so many audiences beyond the one it depicts, because it is deeply human. It shows how life carries frightening currents underneath it, ones that can threaten to pull you under even in a moment when you think you’ve struck some luck. Sometimes someone harms you without malice, by accident, but it will feel to you like the world is falling apart. And in that heart-wrenching moment, the way through is forgiveness. Watching this film again, twenty-something years later, I think about ואהבת לרעך כמוך, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), and how relevant it still is. How quick we are to blame, to feel as if everything is happening “to us” and not just happening because that’s the way life is. What this story leaves us with is that even in the toughest moments, we still have agency. We still have choice.