Jewish spirituality

Jewish spirituality in the novel is not a simple passage from unbelief to faith. It appears first as ritual kept within a largely secular household, then as a demanding inquiry into suffering and God, and finally as a practice inherited, reinterpreted, and chosen by the next generation. Chaim Lerner gives that inquiry its theological language; Hannah makes it a vocation; and Judah’s later wedding shows Jewish forms becoming part of his own life without erasing grief or doubt.

Ritual in a Secular Household

Chaim and Zehava are described as secular Jews, but their home is not untouched by religious practice. When Judah visits, Chaim leads the Havdalah ceremony marking the end of Shabbat. He lifts the kiddush cup and sings in a pleasing baritone while Judah holds the braided candle, careful not to drip wax on the Persian carpet. Zehava initially stands silent, but joins in with gusto when Chaim reaches the final stanza and the paean to Elijah. The scene complicates Judah’s assumption that she has lost whatever faith she once had: her participation is quiet until it becomes unmistakable.

Chaim’s relationship to ritual is personal rather than a straightforward statement of observance. After Judah tries to offer help, Chaim says that telling stories helps him, though it does not help Zehava as much, and invites him to take part in Havdalah. Storytelling and ceremony sit beside one another: neither removes the family’s pain, but both create a way to remain together around it. Later, at Zehava’s Shabbat table, Yoav leads the traditional Friday-night blessing in the absence of Chaim, who had been the man of the house. The family’s practice continues through a change in who performs it, even as Judah notices the tension and uncertainty in Yoav and Michal’s relationship.

Chaim’s Theology as Inquiry

Chaim’s spirituality is defined less by conventional piety than by argument. Explaining a passage from the Zohar, he presents the Hebrew word for who as a name of God: the question of who created the universe becomes both a statement about creation and an invitation to search. In his account, invoking God’s name means asking a question. Spirituality is inquiry, not the suppression of uncertainty.

That method matters because Chaim connects theology to grief. His explanation turns from creation to a biblical question about what can comfort those who have lost everything. Where the question might be read as a declaration that nothing can console the sufferer, his discussion insists on examining how religious language works at the edge of despair. The scene presents interpretation itself as a spiritual act: not an answer that makes suffering disappear, but a sustained effort to think and speak about it.

Zehava later calls Chaim a theologian, a thinker, and a teacher, rather than primarily a politician. She describes his last book as an attempt to rescue God by creating a theological framework adequate to the Holocaust. Although Chaim was secular, she argues that he understood God as central to Jewish consciousness and believed there could be no Judaism without God. His project therefore crosses the usual boundary between secular identity and religious thought. The novel’s account of his spirituality rests on that tension: he does not need to be conventionally religious to make theology his central work.

Hannah’s Inheritance

Hannah’s route into Jewish spirituality begins with a book. As she and Judah leave Israel, she shows him the volume Rabbi Kaplowitz gave her, Returning for the Answer: A Guide to Coming Home for the Young Jew. She says that he thought it might help with her spiritual life, though she is not sure what that phrase means. Her immediate reason for trying it is modest: she likes Rabbi Kaplowitz, and the book is something to read on the long flight. At that point, she distinguishes it from her earlier interest in suicide, but has not yet described a settled religious commitment.

Seven years later, the book has become her most important religious influence, and Hannah has applied to and been accepted by rabbinical school. When she gives her senior sermon, she urges her audience to consider Chaim’s theology of God with infinite love but limited power. This is not a rejection of Chaim’s difficult questions in favor of easy consolation; Hannah carries his central theological problem into a new setting and speaks about it as a rabbi. The movement from receiving a book on a flight to teaching Chaim’s theology in a sermon makes spiritual inheritance an active process: she takes up ideas, makes them her own, and gives them a public voice.

Judah’s Later Practice

Judah’s own relationship to religion remains harder to name. Years after leaving Israel, Michal tells him that Hannah has said he has become religious. He answers by pointing out that Hannah is the rabbi. Michal clarifies that she means Judah, leaving the distinction between his daughter’s profession and his own developing life unresolved rather than supplying a formal declaration of belief.

By Hanukkah 2023, however, Jewish objects and ceremonies fill the scene of Judah’s marriage to Liora. He is sixty-one, wearing a multicolored yarmulke and a white tallit that keeps slipping from his shoulders. He and Liora stand beneath a wedding canopy made with his late father’s wedding tallit, while Hannah, now a rabbi, reads their marriage contract. The ceremony includes veils, rings, wine, and words of love spoken by the couple. Judah’s participation is concrete and embodied, even if the narrative does not label it conversion or specify a change in formal observance.

Hannah explains the breaking of the glass as an invitation to sorrow within the moment of greatest joy, because the shards symbolize a broken world. Judah thinks of Mary, Michal, Yoav, Charlie, Israel, and Chaim before he breaks it. The ritual does not separate celebration from loss; it gives loss a place inside the celebration. In this final image, Jewish spirituality is neither a solution to grief nor a denial of it. It is a form through which memory, family, love, and sorrow can be held together.