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Carpet...
at East Side Prices
West Side
12/17
2004
52
915330
New novel examines faith and doubt through
a rabbi questioning her conviction and a cynic
questioning his skepticism.
SANDEE BRAWARSKY
Special to the Jewish News
27925 Orchard Lake Road, north of 12 Mile • Farmington Hills
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A Love Triangle
With God
20750 Hoover Road (3 miles south of 1-696)
Open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
and by appointment.
Call Mickey at 586-756-2400.
tom te
Flooring
Warehouse
We set the floor on prices.
oy Comes in the Morning by
Jonathan Rosen (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux; $25) is, among other
things, a modern love story.
Deborah Green, a Reform rabbi
who's beginning to question her cer-
tainties, meets Lev Friedman, a science
writer putting aside his skepticism.
They encounter one another at New
York's Roosevelt Hospital, where she is
visiting his father, Henry Friedman,
after a botched suicide attempt. Their
first date is at a funeral of one of her
congregants, where she's officiating.
It's a novel with humor and a good
share of darkness as well as light,
ht the
contrast alluded to in the Psalm from
which the title is drawn, "Weeping
may endure for a night. But joy comes
in the morning."
There's a wedding that's called off
and another that begins, faith that's
lost and then recovered, pain and heal-
ing; there's death — as the first line of
the book suggests, "Someone was
dying" — and in the last line there's
song.
Joy Comes in the Morning is also the
name of an unfinished memoir that
Henry, an emigre who lost most of his
family to the Nazis, has set aside, and
it's a line that Rabbi Green might
share with the hospital patients she
visits.
In an interview, Rosen points out
that the book is dedicated in memory
of his late father and in honor of his
two young daughters. "The poles of
the dedication," he says, are the poles
of weeping and joy. It's almost as if
certain themes are in the genetic mate-
rial of the novel, the way that every
cell contains the whole genome."
Although Amy Sohn's new novel,
My Old Man, stars a female rabbinical
student (who ultimately drops out),
Deborah Green might be the first
woman rabbi to play a major role in a
novel.
An assistant rabbi at a large
Manhattan Reform congregation, she's
spiritual and sensual, beautiful and
complicated; the senior rabbi suggests
that her skirts may be too short for the
rabbinate. She sings in a voice that's
often complimented for its angelic
qualities, and she tries to spread good-
ness in the world.
Early on, she finds in her hospital
visits "an air of truthfulness and,
strange to say, vitality, that she could
not account for. She sometimes felt
the way she imagined a solder might
feel who discovers to his astonishment
that he likes war."
Deborah is a Reform Jew who
chooses to observe a great deal.
"Something in the tradition tran-
scended the individual and became a
living embodiment of God for her,
even if the pieces were all man made,"
Rosen writes. But it was not her only
conduit to religious life. Always, out-
side the system, she felt God lurking,
gleaming around the patches of law
and tradition and improvisation she
had half inherited and half stitched
together.
In the novel's first scene, she dons
her grandfather's tallit over a pair of
shorts and begins her daily prayers.
She loves the praise parts of prayer.
"To praise God made her feel
whole," Rosen writes. Lines of text
make their way into her thoughts and
speech.
For journalist Lev, Deborah's faith
was consoling; "being around her gave
him a strange sense of getting closer to
Judaism without being annihilated by
it." He sees her faith in contrast to the
dry rigidity of his yeshivah days.
Rosen's characters take their Judaism
seriously. They are very much alive in
religion and its questions.
Scenes unfold at weddings she per-
forms as well as at funerals, hospitals
and nursing homes, in the Friedman
apartment and at Deborah's, at her
synagogue and in Central Park, where
Lev likes to go bird watching. When
Deborah feels that her faith is eroding,
"