An Unorthodox Match by Naomi Ragen, St. Martin’s Press © 2019, ISBN 9781250-161222; 322 pages plus acknowledgments and glossary; $27.99
I once had a rabbi who inveighed against religious hypocrisy with this saying: “Big beard, small Jew.”
What Rabbi Aaron Gold, z’l, meant was that some people are tempted to display how scrupulously they stick to ritual, but are unbending and uncaring when it comes to the more important rules of Judaism, as found in the Ten Commandments, such as not to murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, nor to covet your neighbor’s possessions.
Another important rule is to welcome the stranger, and therein lies the essence of the conflict that powers Naomi Ragen’s latest novel, An Unorthodox Match, is which a formerly secular Jew, who is trying to follow an observant life style, is rejected by the very same people who purportedly want her to follow their ways. It’s not that Leah (formerly Lola) doesn’t try – she, in fact, lives up to the ideals of the very observant. The problem is that they fear that she will backslide, and even if she doesn’t, what kind of a match would she make for someone born into a religious family?
Unaware of this prejudice at first, Leah volunteers in the afternoons to take care of the children of a widower, whose wife died tragically more than a year before. Before she engaged in this form of chesed (loving kindness), Yaakov’s home was in chaos. His 15-year-old daughter, still a school girl, tried to take care of her younger siblings, but raising them, plus doing the laundry and the house cleaning in addition to her studies was simply too much for her. Leah, who had established a web-based marketing business that enabled her to keep flexible hours, volunteered to help out without pay. Although the 15-year-old daughter resisted and resented her, the two younger children living at home immediately responded to their new mom. Two older sons lived at an Orthodox boarding school.
From the outset of this novel, we sense that Leah and the widower, Yaakov, could fill each other’s needs perfectly. He, being a pious man, could help her on her road to spirituality and religion-centered rules; while she, being a warm caring person overflowing with love, could help him raise his children and enable him to continue his Torah study. But those who knew the traditional community of Boro Park, Brooklyn, considered such a match impossible. She had no family heritage to merit a life with such a scholar. She had a tattoo on her wrist {not on her back as the advanced reading copy’s front cover depicts} – and tattoos are considered a desecration of the body, which is in God’s image. Plus, before Leah had decided to follow a life of observance, she had led what traditional Jews would consider a life of sin. She had worn revealing clothes, had sexual encounters with men outside of marriage, and had known little—if anything—about the Jewish religion into which she was born.
This is a splendid book, one for which I carved out more reading time than usual to see how it all turned out. What I particularly liked about it was that there were few wholly “bad” characters in the book – except for some gossiping school girls. Author Ragen deeply examines the points of view of Leah and Yaakov, Leah’s very secular mother, Yaakov’s mother-in-law, and Yaakov’s teenage daughter. She also introduces us to Leah’s roommates and friends, as well as to Yaakov’s study partner. All these characters reflect deeply on the paradoxes of traditional Jewish life, so that there is intelligent debate amid the tension.
I can’t remember a novel I enjoyed reading more—nor learned more from—than An Unorthodox Match. My heartfelt congratulations to author Naomi Ragen for mastering this subject. When this book makes its debut on September 24, the pity of it will be that because Ragen is an author from the secular world, some people who might benefit from its insights – those in highly observant Jewish communities – are unlikely to read it.
Republished from Republished from San Diego Jewish World