Book Review
"Sotah"
5/5 stars
Naomi Ragen
"Required reading for geirim/Ba'alei teshuvah"
*******
This book takes 8 hours to read, and it could be probably finished over the course of a single Shabbat (which I did).

There is information in this book to be learned, but a couple of qualifications have to be made:

1. It was published 30 years ago, and things may have changed. (That is 1.5 generations in Haredi time.) 

On the one hand, people have been observing at least for several decades that it is not possible for them to have a sustained population that consists of people that will not work and don't know their multiplication tables up to 12.

On the other hand, that is just what is happening even this very day-- and the breaking point always be in the future.

2. It takes place mostly in Israel, and even though Haredim are noisome in the United States, I have heard that they are positively off the wall in Israel-- and these Israeli cases might be far outside of the range of possibilities Stateside. (Modesty patrols? Is this book set in Israel or Iran?)

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I think the audience of this book that can take the most out of it are the ones that I mentioned before, Ba'alei teshuvah and geirim. 

When people decide they want to convert, a lot of times they decide to go with a community that "looks" the most authentic and is furthest from their everyday experience. (Been there, done that.)

And part of this fallacy is idealizing blackhat/Haredi communities and mapping onto them a reality that exists nowhere except in your head. (Been there, done that.)

And almost always, this ends in tears--with some people leaving Judaism entirely and others moving into more (humane/Modern/"Open") versions of Orthodoxy. (Been there, done that.)

If such a person reads this book, they will find a very harsh, intolerant, judgmental community that is not made for outsiders. And it might save them a lot of tears in real time. (Wish I had done that.)

And if somebody still wants to move to one of those communities in spite of all that, they might likely be mentally ill. (Bernice Weiss, "Choosing To Be Chosen" has written about conversion, and more often than not people who convert are trying to sort out some trauma from earlier in life.)

The conceptual space is very familiar to me (after living here for years, but I don't think it will be familiar to the uninitiated): Men avoid work and study religious texts and women get pimped out to go to work and bear all of the children (all 15 of them) and manage the house. But, the most desired men are the ones who are scholars, and there is self-selection and self-organization based on family lineage and scholarship.

*******
I will let the book tell its story in some of its own quotes.

(p.148): "It was very hot, the kind of day that Haredi men dreaded. For, unlike most people, their wardrobe made no concession to changes in weather. The dress code, established in European villages 200 years ago, had been transplanted with almost ludicrous accuracy, ignoring geographic and climactic realities."

(p.141: "Were all of them so thick that you needed an industrial strength drill to bore a few ideas into their heads.....all day he learned. All day. And yet what did he know?"

(p. 92): "Two things are harder than parting the Red Sea- - finding a mate and earning a living. So being a matchmaker, which involved both, was a few hundred times more difficult."

(ibid): "While marriages did occasionally take place between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, they were considered intermarriages and usually mourned by both groups..... Or they were, very rarely, the result of a family of Mitnagdim losing its mind and consciously deciding to join some Hasidic sect or another. Rarely, however, did it happen that Hasidim became Mitnagdim. In Reb Garfinkel's experience, once a Hasid lost his faith in his Rebbe, he usually lost faith in Gd too and went over to the secularists altogether."

(p.90): "Although the bitter wars between the Hasidim and Mitnagdim had ended over 200 years ago, and each group had grudgingly accepted the other is faithful soldiers in Gd's increasingly beleaguered army against such real enemies as Conservative and especially the unconscionable and objectionable Reform Jews, no love was lost between them."

(p.48): "A man wasn't allowed to marry a woman with the same first name as his mother."

(p.93): "It was considered perfectly politic for the daughter of the rabbi of Gur to marry the son of the Rebbe of Belz, in the same way that the warring kings of France and England often mated their offspring."

(p.175): "In the name of purifying the community's morals, they [Modesty Police] were not above putting you in the hospital. Or worse. Haredim didn't believe in going to the Zionist police force, didn't want the secularists involved in their private lives."

(p.173): "He says that a married couple can do anything they want, except that the man shouldn't kiss 'that place'/"we're taught not to touch anything. A man should kiss his wife's face and that's it. Also, there's only one position that's acceptable, and the room has to be totally black. It's also preferable to wait until midnight, when you won't be distracted by voices in the street which might lead a man to think of other women."

(p. 96): "They were suspicious people, the type that hired private detectives to check on family trees 10 generations back.  The kind that wanted medical reports and would ask for the maximum financially."

Verdict: Worth the time.

Other books to read on this topic:

Fiction....

1. "Hush," Eishes Chayil
2. "A Seat At The Table," Joshua Halberstam

Non fiction.....

3. "Unorthodox," Deborah Feldman
4. "Brazen," Julia Haart 
5. "All Who Go Do Not Return," Shulem Deen

New Vocabulary:

inveigle
Shayna
ben Zikkunim
tenaim
tachlis
lukshen
menuval
tuchteral