They Can’t Get Started

Shtisel a Netflix series (2 seasons of 12 episodes) by Along Zingman.  With Doval’e Glickman, Michael Alom, Neta Riskin, Shira Haas, Zohar Shtrauss.  *****

Like everyone else during the pandemic, my wife and I have been searching for streaming series that hold our attention.[1]  We’ve been through any number of suggestions—some of which seemed rather desperate—with varying degrees of success.  But I have to say that, so far, the one that held my attention the best, and drew my affection, is a simple story about an Orthodox family in Israel named Shtisel.  (Try pronouncing that, by the way.  My wife and I have been arguing about it since we began watching.)

I’m interested in all kinds of religious life.  I actually have a strong interest in Judaism (the religion of Jesus, after all) and spent some time this spring reading the fascinating and rather bizarre work of Chaim Potok.  I’m also interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and have found the series Fauda thrilling.  But ultimately—I hate to sound dull—I’m interested in daily life.  There are no bombs or terrorists in Shtisel, just people carrying on and trying to lead an ordinary life, a religious life[2].  What is that, is the question.  And how do we do it?  How well can we do it?

I have a mild caveat about series in general.  It used to be that people told their stories in the course of a movie, ninety minutes or two hours.  Occasionally a movie broke those bounds, but it better be good, a towering colossus like Ben Hur[3].  But as staying at home and watching on your own big screen has become more popular, people have been creating series, especially ones that are bingeworthy (a concept that sounds like drinking the whole case of beer in one night.  Why would you want to do that, when you could stretch it out over a week?)  So sometimes, it seems, people tell the story more slowly.  They interrupt it with scenes that aren’t necessary.  They’re essentially telling the same story again and again, but saying it’s new.  Fauda does that.  I don’t think these series are better because they’re long.  I think they’re worse.

I don’t feel that way about Shtisel.  It is repetitive because everyday life is that way; we all have tendencies that keep coming back.  We’re not in the movie Groundhog Day, but it sometimes seems as if we might as well be.  We change, and then again we don’t change a whole hell of a lot.

According to the IMDb website, the Shtisels are a haredi[4] family, a term I was not familiar with but which seems accurate.  I’ll be oversimplifying, but my impression from the series is that in this group: 1.) The main purpose of a man’s life is to study the Talmud.  Men may do other things, but if they do they’re missing out on their highest purpose.  It’s perfectly fine to study the Talmud all your life and not do much else. 2.) The purpose of women is to serve their husbands in this endeavor.  They create a home life and support the man and have children.  The more children the better.  3.) Male children are preparing to study the Torah.  Female children are preparing to become wives.  To vary from these plans is to be less than Orthodox.

My impression at the beginning of the series was that the focus was Akiva, a Shtisel who had done some studying and was living a reasonably correct life but had not found a wife.  He would go through the matchmaking process, meet with a woman once or twice (or more) in some formal stifling situation to see if they were a good match.  The matchmaker had decided they were, but they were looking for personal chemistry.  But Akiva, a good-looking man who seemed somehow a little young, the word puer comes to mind, couldn’t decide on anyone.  He might like a woman but also like another one better.  He’d get engaged then suddenly break things off, a terrible offense in this society.  He was trying to live the right way, but was having trouble.

Part of the problem was that he had artistic talent.  He was constantly sketching and eventually began to paint.  In another culture, he might have become serious, like Asher Lev[5], but in his own situation he grew more and more frustrated.  He seemed to fall in love with an older woman who had been widowed twice—suggesting he might have a mother complex—but even with her he couldn’t pull the trigger.  He may have been the kind of artist who wants always to be in love with some unreachable woman.  He doesn’t fit the paradigm of his culture.

But it turns out the series is not just about this young man, but about his whole family.  His father, the recently widowed Shulem, seems at first a comic figure; he visits various older woman who are unattached for one reason or another, but all he does is eat.  There was a string of early episodes, in fact, in which he seemed to eat every time he appeared.  He has two other children as well, one son who seems perfectly suited to this way of life, loves to sit around studying, and a daughter, Giti Weiss (Neta Riskin) who is so well adapted that she already has a husband and five children.  Her husband is heading off to Europe to work for a time, and then he does the unthinkable: shaves his beard and sidelocks and runs off with a shiksa.  This is so shameful that Giti cannot even admit it.  For months she conceals this fact from everyone she knows.

I should not fail to mention her oldest daughter Ruchami, played by Shira Haas, who went on to play the young bride in Unorthodox.  She is an unusual character physically, petite in the extreme; she’s supposed to be sixteen but looks about fourteen, yet her face has a maturity that is way beyond that: she’s sixteen going on 45.  She has to step up and take care of her younger siblings while her father is away, and if anything is more outraged than her mother.  She considers her father a criminal, even after he returns.  And she falls in love, at first from afar, with a young man who is devout on steroids: eating coffee beans straight to keep himself awake, studying with his feet in a bucket of icewater.  That attachment eventually causes a problem for Giti, who thinks Ruchami is too young to be finding a man.  Actually, she’s the most orthodox one in the family.

At the other end of the spectrum is Shulem’s mother, played by two different actresses in the two seasons.  She’s in a nursing home, where she has, of all things, a television where she can watch soap operas.  She’s spent her whole life in a world that is entirely different from the soap people, and is astounded at, and delighted by, their adventures.  Eventually her devout grandson comes to destroy her TV, it seems to be doing her so much damage.  But perhaps she’s on to something.

What does this all say about religion, and the religious life?  I obviously know little about Judaism, much less Orthodox Judaism, but I have some impressions.  It defines religious life very narrowly, in a way that will leave many people out, non-scholarly men, for instance, or scholarly women.  It prizes the intellect over the emotions: the most orthodox person is the one who can remember the most, or argue the best in favor of his opinion.  (Hire one of these men as a lawyer.)  The praying that people do often seems rote, as if going through the motions.  And the religion seems to consider women inferior creatures, not capable of the highest insights.

Many religions share these characteristics.  Ultimately Shtisel is about people leading their lives, within the situation where they’ve landed.  The thing I love about it most is the way they’re all so vulnerable, and fallible.  No religion can stamp that out.

And I have to say that, after two seasons and 24 episodes, I thought the ending of the series, especially the final scene, was perfect.  Perfect.

[1] We don’t need many.  We both prefer to read, and do that five or six evenings a week.  But in the old days Friday nights were for watching a movie at home, and Saturday afternoons for going to a movie, or an opera broadcast.  So we’ve been looking to replace them with virtual things.

[2] By religious, I don’t necessarily mean following some specific religion.  I just mean living as if life matters, as if there’s more to it than just watching TV and staying drunk.  Thoreau was a religious man.  Whitman.

[3] That was a joke.  James Jones once said he wished he could put a little note in the margin of his novels: This is supposed to be funny.

[4] a member of any of various Orthodox Jewish sects characterized by strict adherence to the traditional form of Jewish law and rejection of modern secular culture, many of whom do not recognize the modern state of Israel as a spiritual authority.

[5] My Name Is Asher Lev, a novel by Chaim Potok.