Shtisel: Synchronous Anachronicity Brings Our Own Times into Focus.

 Psychoanalysis of Shtisel.  Ultraorthodoxy, Misogyny and Xenophobia.  Institutional Mysogeny.  Multiculturalism  

My ex-graduate school roommate, who is Jewish, recently insisted that I watch Shtisel.  The Reluctant Wife and I got started on this Netflix series, but, frankly, it was like watching paint dry.  Very slow drying paint.  I complained to my roommate about this and he insisted again.  It will get better, he reassured us.  Gamely the Reluctant Wife and I plodded on. 

At this point you should know that not only is my ex-roommate Jewish, so is my wife.  I was raised in the Episcopal Church.  My wife belongs to a Humanistic Jewish Synagogue.  The stained glass windows there are of the Big Bang.  The values and precepts resonate deeply with my own.  But the traditions – the shared sense of history – is quite foreign to me. 

I am, as much as I might hate at certain times to admit it, as WASPY a male as they come.  When I was a child, Bagels were called an “ethnic” food in my home.  Though my mother spent a considerable part of her growing up period in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago, her social connections, and those of my father, were much more stongly their church than is the case in my generation. 

Shtisel is about an Ultraorthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem.  It includes the actress who played the primary protagonist from the Netflix series Unorthodox, but this time, instead of running away focusing on someone running away from the culture, these characters are staying very much inside the community.  Sometime while we were watching, the third and final season of the series dropped, and we were relieved to be able to see these characters, who did indeed grow on us (a lot) as the ex-roommate predicted, were nicely able to wrap things up.  

I grew up in a world that was not just racially segregated, but one that was ethnically and religiously segregated as well.  So, as a goy watching this series, I was very aware of the foreignness of what was being portrayed.  The two central characters, Shulem Shtisel (Dov Glickman), the rabbi and patriarch of the family, and his youngest and apparently most inept son Akiva Shtisel (Michael Aloni) live together in an apartment.  Shulem’s wife, Akiva’s mother, has died, though her ghost shows up now and then to keep things interesting.  Akiva is inept because he can neither hold a job nor can he land a wife. 

We watch Akiva engage in the painful courting ritual of the Ultraorthodox: getting a recommendation from a matchmaker, meeting in a hotel lobby, having stilted, awkward conversations, and then the conversations between the parents about whether the matchmaking process would move forward.

Akiva starts teaching at the school where his father is the headmaster.  This school is a full time Hebrew school – meaning that the curriculum revolves around religious teaching and includes other issues at best peripherally.  It becomes apparent that the functioning of the school and the community in general is focused on maintaining a rigid and “originalist” interpretation of the Bible and the traditional practice of Judaism.

Central to this practice is the role of the father as the head of the household and the final authority within the family.  We are witness, in this show, to an anachronism – but one that operates in the opposite direction of most anachronisms.  Instead of seeing modern words in an older setting, we are seeing ancient traditions being followed in a modern one.  We are travelling in time to a time not so long ago when women’s rights were not just limited but essentially non-existent.  Culture revolved around men and their practice of religious life and, to a lesser extent, the life of commerce, and women’s roles were subsidiary to and supportive of that.

Not surprisingly, then, when there is no one to restrain an authority figure, that figure becomes despotic.  Shulem being a widower heightens the isolation of the head of the family.  Despite Akiva’s clear veneration of his father and his wish to live up to his father’s demands, he can do no right and his father is openly demeaning of him – though also clearly fond of him.  

Meanwhile, Akiva, as such things must, becomes taken with a woman, Elisheva Rotstein (Ayelet Zurer), the mother of one of his students – and a woman who has been twice widowed.  In Shulem’s mind there could be no worse match for Akiva.  Not only does she not enter through the approved portal of the matchmaker, but she already has a child, she has been married twice and she works for a living!  Mein Gott in Himmel (Yiddish – a language many of these folks speak in addition to Hebrew - for My God in Heaven).  To complicate matters for Akiva, it wasn’t clear how attached to him she was to him (and her two ex-husbands, who liked to sit at the breakfast table and talk with her when they weren’t off somewhere in the afterlife, weren’t so sure she should marry again).

It was about here that a strange thing happened.  These people, so foreign and moribund to begin with, began to feel familiar and very much alive.  Shulem became both formidable, but also, weirdly, a person that I could empathize with.  He was trying to hold something together in a world that was hostile to it.  The stasis of the beginning of the series seemed less like a sign of an inherently uninteresting story but rather an introduction to a world where, on the surface, it looks like nothing ever changes.  What could be more boring?  But it turns out that, to maintain stasis requires a ton of energy.  You must be vigilant and crafty and politically and socially and psychologically adept.  And you have to wield your power, because you are, after all, also an old, uncertain, and, at least in brilliant moments of teaching, compassionate man, with grace and caring.  But inevitably your caring, driven by the anxiety that someone you love will do something that is embarrassing, or worse, comes out more sharply than you intend it – as criticism. You, as the head of the family, frequently feel more like a bull in a china shop than the caring person you would like to be, but you are caught because if you let up for an instant, who knows what fool thing will occur.

Just as I was learning to empathize with Shulem, Akiva grew from being an awkward and remote barnacle stuck to his father’s ship into a sweet, endearing, and sincere young man who was sensitively engaged with the kids he was teaching (though also needing help from his father about how to manage his authority) and someone who could see what he wanted and pursue it.  Elisheva, radiant and haunting, became a person of interest.  Clearly a doting mother, she was also a sensitive person – someone that it made sense for Akiva to gravitate towards.

Also, at this point, the second main plot emerged.  Shulem’s married daughter Giti Weiss  (Neta Riskin) is left by her husband, Lippe Weiss (Zohar Strauss).  Because he was working abroad at the time, no one in the community knew that he had taken up with a shiksa (a goyish woman) in another country, and Giti works to create the charade that he is still involved in the family, living overseas and sending money home.  Meanwhile she figures out how to go into a shady business as a means of maintaining the family integrity in his absence.

Another funny thing happened.  In those scenes where the characters interact outside the community - with modern Israel - I felt overwhelmed by the speed and the shiny colors and the noise of this garish world - the world that I live in!  It felt like the moments in a period piece movie like Tess of the Durbervilles where Tess walks out of a scene and into the production area of the movie and we are jolted into the future.  I want to return to the place that is depicted - a place that now feels (oddly) familiar - and comfortable and safe.

So now we have been presented with two families that are hemmed in by the rules and dictates of a social order that is apparently set in concrete, but in fact is lived in the context of both a larger world that is unpredictable and fluid, but even within this sanctuary we are dealing with humans and all of their vicissitudes.  We painfully follow Giti’s pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes in order to maintain the integrity of her family, not even being able to talk to her father about it.  The only person she can confide in is her daughter, Rucahmi (Shira Haas - who plays the protagonist in Unorthodox).  This, of course, complicates their relationship.  While Rucahmi shares the secret, she also is harshly critical of her mother.  We feel for Giti in her isolation, but also for Rucahmi in hers.  When Lippe comes back into orbit, the issues – and the power dynamics within the relationships that form this triangle – become more and more complex.

Simultaneously we see, as Ruth Bader Ginsberg helped the Supreme Court Justices see, that a society that represses women also represses men.  Shulem’s isolation and pain are evident.  Akiva’s difficulties with articulating who it is that he will become escalate in difficulty as the seasons progress.  Indeed, not to spoil things, but we even see that mental illness as something that is shameful interferes with the well-being of the community.  And I, despite having lived with a Jewish roommate, dated two Jewish women, and married one of them, am able to experience, across these three seasons, an attachment grow not just to the characters, but to their crazy traditions and rituals.  These seemingly bizarre aspects of their lives become familiar, comfortable and what was once alien and off-putting becomes a sticky piece of the complex attachment that I feel to these characters.

I don’t think that this process would have taken place if the three seasons of drama could somehow be condensed into a single movie.  The power of the new on demand and well-funded productions like these – especially those that originate in foreign countries like Call My Agent and Shtisel – is that they can allow for more than the development of a single strand of a character – they can flesh out the complications of characters interacting across time – not just in moments of crisis (even though the crises drive the later, more dramatic appeal of this series).  Shakespeare clearly strained at the constraints of only having two hours of time - not just with Hamlet, which can play at 4 hours when uncut, but in his historical plays that follow families across time.

And the power of the on demand dramas is that they, like movies, are asynchronous.  We can talk with our friends about the show – and, instead of our friends having to join the show mid-season and try to figure out who the characters are, they can start at the beginning, like going to a movie theater, and see the whole thing.  And because the serialized dramas can count on an audience to have watched every episode up to the present one, they don’t have to have each episode be self-contained, bringing the pieces together in the way that a sitcom does.  Instead they can have cliffhangers, as novels do at the end of each chapter to keep us reading/watching.  But more importantly, they can have loose ends that lie around for episodes at a time before being tied up, just the way that things are in life.

An added bonus is that these series are being produced in and by the countries that are represented.  It is clear when the series within the series portrays the difficulties in getting the ultraorthodox to act that the actors are portraying a culture that they don’t belong to.  But it is one they live next door to and share a very long tradition with.  It is a variant on their culture, if you will.  And even if those who are writing about and portraying this culture are not from it, they have essentially been assimilated into it.

And this is the case with the Jews that I have known (and married).  But here they have been assimilated into “my” culture – and me into at least aspects of theirs (Mein Gott in Himmel is a saying I picked up in New York when I lived there for a year, long before meeting my roommate or wife).  One of the things that drew me to my wife was the similarity in our families of origin.  Both of our fathers spent the middle parts of their careers as corporate salesmen working in technical fields.  Both of them tired of the corporate rat race and went into business for themselves – something that was difficult for each of them.  Both my wife and I were scholarship kids in college in part because our father’s businesses did anything but boom coming out of the blocks.

So I think that we connected over our similarities.  I don’t think this is unusual.  The longer we have known each other, the more we have discovered our differences.  I think, in this sense, all marriages are cross cultural.  Even if you grew up next door to your future spouse, at some point you are going to discover that your family had the toilet paper roll fall to the front and hers had it fall to the back…  The differences emerge.  When those differences are signs of a wider cultural difference, there is a little extra oomph to that difference.

In this film, working from the difference to the similarity – reversing the process of my courtship of the Reluctant Wife - led to an appreciation of, for lack of a better phrase, our shared humanity as I began to connect with Akiva and with Shulem.  This was a very good thing from the perspective of using the foreign as a means of connection – or a way through to seeing connection.  It is much easier, even in a marriage, to use the foreign as a means to disconnect.  Starting with the disconnection helps in appreciating the other.

Will watching Shtisel help me understand the misogyny and the radically conservative politics of the ultra-orthodox?  I think it can help me connect with ultra-orthodox folks as people, rather than as misogynists and tribalists.  I think it can help me better understand the costs of institutional misogyny and xenophobia.  Being able to connect as people and to wonder with them about the benefits and costs of both of these simultaneously is more likely to help us bridge the gap than simply being put off by those who are so different.

 

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