When Ritual Goes Too Far

Unorthodox, a four-part series by Maria Schrader.  With Shira Haas, Amit Rahav, Jeff Wilbusch.  Netflix *****

Unorthodox is an absolutely brilliant piece of work, and I can’t recommend it too highly.  Four episodes of roughly 50 minutes apiece, it shows a woman from an Orthodox community in Williamsburg Brooklyn fleeing her family and taking off for Berlin, where she has dual citizenship.  The book is based on a memoir, and apparently has a basis in truth.  But what is brilliant about the film—which lists four writers; I have no idea how they worked together—is the way it mixes up the chronology of the story, but we never get lost, or feel frustrated.  The young woman’s fleeing is intermixed with the things that compelled her to flee.  I wouldn’t have known to do such a thing, but it works beautifully.  It never seems random.  It’s all just perfect.

Esther Shapiro (Shira Haas) is a young bride in this cloistered and claustrophobic community.  She seems completely devoted to it; religious doubts aren’t a problem.  But her marriage is arranged (in a truly weird scene, she goes to a supermarket with her aunt, knowing that her potential mother in law is there to check her out, and she soon realizes who is watching her, but has to walk around and look at groceries as if she doesn’t notice at all) and it’s as if the eyes of the whole community are on her.  Everything is about having babies; the whole point is to create as many of the chosen people as possible.  But the ritualistic aspect of it all is maddening.  It works against the essential spontaneity of sexuality .

In Zen Buddhism—which I realize is a far cry from orthodox Judaism—we have a tradition of paying attention to everything we do, and doing things in a ritualistic way.  As I often say to newcomers: if you want to teach mindfulness, you can either just say, “Go off and pay attention to all your activities for the rest of your life,” or you can tell somebody how to do everything.  Eihei Dogen chose the latter, partly because he was in a closed monastic environment (where there was no sex, by the way, at least none that was allowed), and perhaps because he was dealing with uneducated men from the country who didn’t know how to do things like washing their bodies or taking care of their teeth.  He spelled it all out.  It’s still possible to read Dogen’s Pure Standards for the Zen Community, and those of you who are struggling with toilet paper issues during the pandemic might want to read his advice on wiping your butt.  Things could be worse.  Much worse.

But never had I encountered a religion’s  ritualistic routine for having sex.  Esther actually gets some helpful and frank counseling from other women (including a set of little dildoes that vary in size; apparently you can stop when you get to the size of your husband), but the ritualistic coupling these two are supposed to engage in, complete with special clothing and bedding, is so elaborate that the scenes, as painful as they are to watch, are also somehow comic.  Her husband Yanky (Amit Rahav) knows little about sex, no one has ever mentioned the word foreplay to him, and he hovers above her every night, waiting to be ready to enter her.

For a whole year, they’re unsuccessful at achieving penetration because Esther is too tense, a situation that obviously builds on itself.  Yanky reports each nightly failure back to her mother, who takes everything you’ve heard about a Jewish mother to a whole new level.  It’s as if—Esther actually says something to this effect—the whole family is in bed with them.  The wife doesn’t exist at all as a human being.  The only important thing is the coupling.  When they finally manage to consummate—Esther just bears the pain—Yanky has what seems to be the first orgasm of his life.  He should have taken a cue from his name and done a little yanking.  It might have eased the tension.

If we’d had to watch these events in chronological order, they might have been too much to take.  But even as we’re seeing these dreadfully painful Scenes from a Marriage, we’re also seeing Esther make her escape.  The people back in Williamsburg know where she’s headed—her birth mother, who also fled the community, is living in Berlin—and there’s plenty of suspense as Yanky and a friend go in search of her.  It’s as exciting as a spy thriller.

This is not a situation where anyone was really to blame.  Yanky can seem unfeeling at times, but he was under tremendous pressure from his family, and we don’t see him getting any sexual instruction at all.  There’s a sad scene where his friend forces him into a brothel in Berlin, and all he really wants to know is how to please a woman.  But the religion itself, with values that I basically agree with but with everything so prescribed that it takes the life out of the moment, is really to blame.  The Sabbath was made for man, as a prominent Jew pointed out, not man for the Sabbath.

The novels of Chaim Potok deal with orthodoxy in a somewhat more sympathetic way.  Those novels—and Unorthodox, apparently—are all vastly popular.  People seem fascinated by repressive religion.  But religion doesn’t have to be that way, not even, I would guess, Orthodox Judaism.  Religion is ultimately about liberation.  It’s when the rituals become fetishistic that things go awry.