I recently saw Jesse Eisenberg’s newest movie, the Holocaust-themed A Real Pain. I’m Jewish and, after all, Jews think a lot about the Holocaust. Eisenberg plays David, a young Jewish man traveling to Poland with his first cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) on a guided group tour of Holocaust sites. They also have plans for the two of them to break off from the group and visit what once was their grandmother’s home.

Though A Real Pain manages to have some light moments (despite the subject matter), the title signals that we’re going to learn that Benji is a genuine pain in the neck to David and to the group. But he is also carrying his own personal pain and so is David—though in a more repressed way.

And very obviously, there is the pain of the Holocaust, the pain of the victims, and the pain of remembering them.

Right now, a lot of Jews are in a real lot of pain. Pain from the massive rise in antisemitism. Pain from feeling unsafe on college campuses. Pain from the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel.

A Real Pain is an offbeat film with both serious and comedic elements.  Be advised that it is not family-friendly. Beyond the weightiness of the Holocaust theme, David and Benji engage in almost continual four-letter word conversations, and they smuggle weed into Poland to smoke on hotel rooftops. But that is what people in pain sometimes do. Pain is processed in many ways.

I’m not sure quite how to process the film. But as a Jewish follower of Jesus, I’m reminded that pain does not have to be the final word. It’s awful while I experience it, but my experience is not the last act in the play. In the famous chapter of Isaiah 53, this biblical prophet says:

He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God,

  stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

  and by his wounds we are healed.

(Isaiah 53:3–5 NIV, emphasis added)

This passage depicts someone who is known as “the Servant of the Lord.” Different interpretations connect the Servant with different groups or individuals. Many understand the Servant to be the Messiah who comes to bring healing to us. How does he do this? By bearing our pain and our suffering. He himself, it says, was already familiar with suffering and pain. Yet he takes on even more and when he does that, he brings about healing.

In A Real Pain, there is a lot of healing to be done. David, Benji, and most of their fellow travelers carry a lot of baggage. Wouldn’t it be something, Isaiah seems to say, if our pain could be carried by someone else—and we could be healed?