Shtisel

The Israeli TV program Shtisel, about an ultra-orthodox, Haredi family, is soap opera, but with a hair fetish.  It's all about beards, peyot, and sheitals; one female character cries the whole night through because her wig slipped and an inch of her own natural hair was visible -- to men. Sometimes it's taxing to be empathetic to the Shtisel clan.

But even fanatics are people, and the business of the program is the same as the business of all soap operas -- getting married, staying married, and healing frayed marriages.

Shitsel sustained our interest through 24 episodes because the characters are recognizable human beings and their problems were familiar and real. What is different and foreign about the Shtisels and their Haredi compatriots is their triumphalism -- they are correct and everyone else is wrong -- and the many ways in the silly rules of doctrinaire religion constrict the characters' choices and inflict upon them unnecessary misery. Shulem, the family patriarch, enjoys funny radio shows, but he stops doing so because it's wrong. Zvi Arye is a splendid singer, but he can't join a musical group because joy in music might lead him in a secular direction. Uncle Nuchem loves classical music, especially Mahler, but he destroys his tape of the Tragic Symphony because it is worldly and therefore endangers his piety. The lead character, attractive young Akiva, is a gifted painter, but his father and his uncle and his fiancee pressure him to chuck his talents and become respectable, and pious, and a travel agent. Will he give up on his genius?  Perhaps Season 3, if it ever gets made, will tell us. I have nothing against travel agents, but Akiva's painting touches his soul. The writers of Shtisel are right to see art as a danger to orthodoxy. It's a solvent. Put religion up against art, and religion might dissolve. Which would be a very proper outcome, in my opinion.

Here's my favorite line from a week of watching:  "When you see a Jew with a dog, either he's not a Jew or the dog is not a dog."

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

"Here's my favorite line from a week of watching: 'When you see a Jew with a dog, either he's not a Jew or the dog is not a dog.' "

Adopting a dog and becoming an atheist coincided in my life. There is nothing quite like being friends with a black-and-tan coonhound, a bluetick coonhound, a redtick coonhound, an American foxhound, an English foxhound (and a chihuahua beast that imagines it is a dog). At least five of these dogs are dogs.