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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, "