Narrowing in on faces as interesting, integral and revealing, setting everything in cinematographer Boaz Yaacov’s amber filter, David Volach directs a reflective and moving My Father, My Lord/Hofshat Kaits from his own script. Best Narrative Feature at Tribeca last year, the sure-handed début is told as a deceptively low-key series of mostly childhood moments without any insistence that we are seeing through a child’s eyes, in this case those of Menahem Eidelman, played by Ilan Grif.

Screened at seventy-four minutes, it may be pared from an elsewhere reliably listed 125; whatever the case, it is honed to a gem, a miniature that has not an ounce of fat among its vignettes of laconic dialogue, to the occasional string or piano solo, so that a glance or few words carry optimal weight. The uncluttered plot evolves to a cul-de-sac dénouement, a tragic one, and thus is too truncated to be a fashionable coming-of-age film. Young Menahem observes quietly, questions inwardly, obeys silently, the same as doting mother Esther (Sharon Hacohen Bar), who, if she might once step inside sacred precincts to bring her son fruit and new beach gear, nonetheless toes the line set for women in ultra-Orthodox Jewry.

An opening frame is subtly interwoven, not noticeable as such until after a body that is flashback returns full circle seconds before an unforgiving wordless rain of prayer books from the women’s balcony section. Resembling the Hasidim glimpsed in Western cities -- long black overcoats and brimmed hats, fringed prayer shawls under vests, beards and earlocks -- a broken rabbi ascends the altar before his congregation, gazes at a plaque marking an empty seat in the first pew, and is unable to go on.

He is scholarly Reb Abraham Eidelman (Assi Ayan) of Jerusalem’s Haredic community. He cannot manage to question a lifetime’s texts and tenets in which he seeks the answer to unspeakable grief, nor can he find in them or in himself the words to solace his wife. He is loving beneath an unbending exterior that has suppressed emotion in favor of certainty in the letter of the Law of the Lord.

That certitude proves inadequate for real life, and so by extension is any belief system “lacking in mental and human authenticity” in binding actions to some exterior “unholy trinity of Authority, Discipline and Meaning.” Israeli Volach knows whereof he speaks: born into and raised in that same Haredic sect, he took many difficult early adult years to leave it behind for Tel Aviv film studies as a secular Jew.

Abraham’s confidence in man’s interpretation of God’s Word is underlined in references to Abraham and Isaac, in the repetition of a Pentateuch commandment to chase away the mother bird from the nestlings, and in specific exposition to a Talmud class at which his son is present, of General versus Personal Providence, the latter of which is Yahweh’s concern with the Righteous to the exclusion of the animal and plant kingdoms and the inanimate.

The tabula rasa not hardened yet by social and religious mores, Menahem glances at picture book Deeds of Our Sages, falls into untroubled sleep during boring waits or doctrine, and gathers what impressions are available in a restricted existence. Small fish are a wonder surviving in fresh water bubbling to join the killing saline Dead Sea, a dog’s eyes mist over when ambulance paramedics drive the beast from its deathly ill owner’s gurney, blind helpless chicks presage death after father shoos away the mother from a yeshiva window; “idol-worshipper” natives are attractive on a collection card he trades for with a classmate. The young but trained boy hesitates mildly against dogma that denies souls to lower animals, forbids any token of the ungodly, dictates what is best for the son. Perhaps older, after the five-year wait for his grown-up’s tallis and bar mitzvah (son of the Law), the boy-become-man will question, perhaps like Volach to rebel and leave; but that would be another story.

The original Hebrew title translates as “Summer Vacation,” which will prove ironic as sadness and separation underlie the anticipated holiday outing to a Dead Sea with its buried Cities of the Plain. Menahemm is a boy after all, with his age’s interests and disinterests, from which father Abraham is so far removed by discipline that, at the climactic moment for the little family of man, other worshippers are hard-pressed to tear him from prayer.

And so, unswerving devotion to ethos acts like blinkers, blinding adherents to life as body and soul, man and his belief in God, nature and spirit. Unlike Job, Abraham and Esther receive no answer out of the whirlwind.

(Released by Kino International; not rated by MPAA.)