Jephte's Daughter Book

Batsheva Ha-Levi lives a life of luxury in America: eighteen and beautiful, sheltered and innocent and brought up to be naive in her ultra-orthodox Jewish family. Her father, Abraham Ha-Levi, is the sole surviving descendent of a leader within Jewish Hassidic circles after the rest of his family met their death in Poland during World War II. Abraham Ha-Levi is a self-made businessman and very wealthy, but it is the legacy he was born to that weighs on him: he is the heir to a dynasty founded in 1780, and he made a promise to his mother before he escaped off the train that took her to her death, a promise that he can only fulfil by marrying off his daughter to the best scholar in the Hassidim.

Abraham Ha-Levi believes he has found that scholar, on his trip to Israel: Isaac Harshen. Considered to be brilliant, Isaac has lived a life as sheltered and ignorant as Batsheva, but unlike Abraham's daughter, Isaac is full of ambition and is seduced by the luxurious life that marrying into the Ha-Levi family will grant him; that and the fact that it puts him in the position of power and automatic respect, of being an important leader among the Hassidim, a man others will come to and ask advice of.

According to Jewish law, a woman can't be forced to marry against her will, but Batsheva is a kind-hearted girl and she loves her father, and she is ill-equipped to handle the emotional blackmail he subtly uses on her to get her to agree to marry a man she has doubts about. She leaves Los Angeles for a new life as a married Hassidic woman in Israel's ancient city of Jerusalem, full of dreams of continuing her studies at the university, of taking photographs and having children and running her own home. Of being a good wife, and of enjoying her handsome husband's attentions and love-making.

But no one teaches these Hassidic boys how to make love, or how to have a relationship with a woman, and Isaac is unable to read his new wife's body language, and has his own ideas about how his wife should behave, and dress, and what she is allowed to read and do. Soon the hopefulness they both felt about their marriage erodes into silence and misunderstandings and then contempt, before devolving into outright abuse and violence.

Batsheva endures a great deal at Isaac's hands, especially when it becomes clear her parents won't help her in any way if she leaves him - which has been made impossible by her father pressing his own vow to his mother onto his daughter. But when her only child, her son Akiva, reaches the age of three when he is taken from her and put into the same harsh Hassidic school that moulded Isaac when he was young, Batsheva baulks. Yet what can she do? Soon, in sheer desperation, she is driven to contemplate the worst thing she could possibly do, in an attempt to save herself and protect her son from her husband's ideas of what being Jewish means.

Jephte's Daughter, Naomi Ragen's first published novel, is a coming-of-age novel for the heroine, Batsheva, as she navigates her way through the very private life of Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. She faces many trials over the course of just a few years, and comes to better understand her own religion and her own principals, as well as how to stay true to both while staying true to herself.

The title refers to a passage in the Torah (Old Testament), which is quoted at the beginning of the book for context, and referred to often in the last half of the book:

And Jephte vowed a vow unto God, and he said: "If You will give the Ammonites completely into my hands then whatever comes forth from the door when I return in peace I shall sacrifice to God."
...And when Jephte neared home, behold his daughter, his only child, for he had no other son nor daughter, came out to greet him with dancing and with drums. And when he saw her, he ripped his clothes and said: "Alas, my daughter, you've undone me and now you are undone. For I have opened my mouth unto the Lord and cannot take it back." Judges, 11: 31-35

It is clear that Abraham Ha-Levi is Jephte, and Batsheva is Jephte's daughter, sacrificed for the sake of a vow her father made to another party and wholly unrelated from her. And once she agrees to marry the man her father has found for her - which to him is the fulfilment of his promise - she is left simply to endure whatever comes with that. There are many parts of this story that are hit you hard, because Regan is an astute observer of human nature and doesn't hold back. Batsheva is a sympathetic character, but she's also a bit frustrating because she's so weak-willed, and rather stupid - not because she's a stupid, weak person, but because she was raised that way, and has has a very basic, narrow education at Ultra-Orthodox schools where the teachers are all rabbis. She hasn't been taught to think, critically or otherwise; she's been raised to be a good girl and a good, obedient wife, loyal to family and her religion, unexposed to the normal American lifestyle and culture which is deemed unsuitable. She has a private tutor in English, a university student called Elizabeth who is also her only real friend, and through her Batsheva comes to read DH Lawrence and other "unsuitable" authors - but these don't help her stand up to her husband.

Isaac is not a sympathetic figure, though he is a pitiable one. He is a classic example of the damage that can be done on a child by the adults in its life, especially, in his case, his teachers who taught little more than submission via the cane. Isaac has grown into a narrow-minded man, and like all men who are weak willed themselves, he makes himself feel stronger by bullying and abusing his wife. And part of it is certain aspects of the Hassidic community, or way of thinking. Regan presents a very rich portrait of this ultra-orthodox Jewish community, in all its variances, and it is fascinating to see into this way of life and its laws - some of which do benefit women (women, for example, have the right to divorce their husbands if their husbands don't or can't satisfy them sexually - very different from the Catholic perspective!! Though it also seemed clear that the understanding that women had sexual needs made them inferior to the men, whose minds are more elevated). It was interesting to read that the Torah scholars, men like Isaac, are considered the apple of the community's eye, and that their wives are expected to support them - get jobs, do all the work - so that their husbands would be free to pursue their studies (and yet, the women aren't allowed to have the kind of education that would enable them to have decent jobs, just crappy jobs). And the women see this as a great ambition, to marry a Torah scholar and subjugate their lives to his so he can study.

Ragen presents a very balanced view of the Hassidim, though as you can tell the opportunity for abuse of various kinds is made more than clear. Batsheva, when faced with challenges, becomes more clear on her understanding of her religion and her own faith, rather than less. What she learns is the difference between mortal men's narrow-minded and self-serving interpretations of divine law, and God's word. When she starts reading the holy books for herself, she comes to understand how wilfully Isaac is interpreting it, twisting things to suit his own selfish purposes.

It takes Batsehva a long time and many mistakes to grow up and understand herself, what kind of woman she is (or wants to be) and what she stands for. This is what she was never given the chance or freedom to do before, in her sheltered upbringing: try things, mess up, pay the price, learn from it, mature, become a better person for it. When she gets that chance, it's rather painful the mistakes she makes, but it's also deeply satisfying (especially to this female reader).

She pushed back her chair abruptly. Her legs felt like rubber. "Will you excuse me for a moment." Without waiting for his murmured concern, she wound her way with as much dignity as she could through the softly humming room and felt the eyes of the men turn and linger as she passed. In the ladies' room, all green and white like a lovely spring garden, she heaved miserably. She touched her face with cold water and washed out her mouth many times. She spent a long time drying her lips and replacing the lipstick. She stared at herself in the mirror. The red lips. The white, shameful cleavage. The red dress that clung to her tiny waist, her slim hips.
Who are you? she wondered. No one I know, or like very much. A woman once again trying to pleas a ma, the way I tried to please my father, to please my husband. I don't know who I am yet, she thought. But surely, I am not the same as the people sitting here in this room enjoying this meal. Perhaps one day I shall be. But not now, not today. She went back to the table. She was tired of playing games. [p.294]

It is in England that she finally has a chance to grow up and discover who she is, and who she is not, and what it means to be a Jew, which in turn solidifies her own faith.

All my life, she thought, I have been sheltered by wealth and family and community from understanding who I am, what it means to be a Jew. Now, stripped of everything, vulnerable and alone, she experienced the raw pain of blind prejudice and unthinking cruelty that had been her people's lot for centuries. And these good, cultured people [in England] perpetuated it, instilling it in their children, giving it posterity through their complicity and - she glanced at the earl - their accepting silence. [p.304]

When Batsheva meets David, who is close to being ordained as a priest in the Catholic church, she meets a kindred soul, the kind of man she always wanted and dreamed of. But their differing religions present a kind of insurmountable wall. David has the well-meaning but condescending idea of converting Batsheva, without really considering her own faith to be worth keeping when he can offer her Jesus, but it is David who learns a lot from her and finds, in Judaism, the kind of belief that was always lacking in his own Catholicism.

Why had he dismissed the whole contribution of the Jews as insignificant and wrong? He had been taught, had he not, that Jesus said, "I come not to change the Law, but to strengthen and verify it." But it had never occurred to him, never seemed important to him, that jesus himself came of Jewish parents, and the Law he spoke of was this same law of the Jews. He realized with a deep shame that although he had loved Batsheva, he had belittled her beliefs, considering them in the same light in which an indulgent parent considers the unsophisticated thoughts of a favorite child: with love and pity and hope for the future. He had, in fact, not looked at them at all so much as the opposite. He had overlooked them, as if they were a kind of defect, which in his love he was bound to accept, like a deformed hand or foot.

This in general, he thought suddenly, was the way Christians looked at the Jews. Some hated them, hated their beliefs, while others were prepared to love them in spite of their beliefs. That seemed to him totally absurd, like hating or ignoring the crust of the earth that forms the whole foundation for one's firm existence on solid ground. It is simply this, he told himself: Without the Jews, there would have been no Christians. The idea that the Christians had taken over the role of the children of Israel, had usurped the position of the Chosen People because the Jews had sinned, not only seemed to him wrong, but positively galling and ungrateful. [pp.375-6]

I greatly enjoyed all the religious ruminating, the exploration of a faith and what it means to its people, what goes on in the hearts of some Jews and why, after centuries and centuries of persecution, they remain strong in that faith. It is not a lecturing or moralising story, it is a loving exploration into the hearts and minds of its characters, a patient, surprisingly tender exposé into the traditions of a community. According to the author's forward from 2001, the novel received a lot of criticism from that community and other Jews, who felt it to be an "unwelcome intrusion" into their private lives. I have to agree with Regan, that to "put any society off-limits to literary exploration, is to deny not only the society's worth as a source of powerful truths to others, but also to surrender to a self-serving censorship which denies society members the ability to view themselves honestly, and with a clearer perspective towards improvement." I love that quote, which is why I had to include it. Regan also notes that since the novel's publication in 1989, there has been a "growth of shelters for battered Orthodox Jewish women, guidelines for Orthodox Rabbis in handling domestic abuse, and outspoken Orthodox women's organizations". She ends with this pearl of wisdom: "The writer not only has the right, but the obligation to shine the light of inquiry on that world they know best, whatever the personal price."

As Ragen's first novel, written, she says, "in a rush" over the course of a year, it is as times a bit slow, a bit cumbersome with an over-abundance of adjectives and minor details, but the writing still reads fairly smoothly and with a strength and conviction. The characters felt very real to me, their lives very realistic, which upped the ante, so to speak, on the emotional scale. It is a novel that gives great insight into this very private community, as well as into the religion itself, but most importantly it is a novel of the human heart, and resilience, perseverance, passion, love and loyalty. It is about the weight of promises and the tragedy of genocide, the consequences of a narrow, restrictive education and a sheltered upbringing, and the right each of us has to be happy and to follow our dreams. It sheds light on a secretive, hidden world, a world where women have no voice and few real rights. The writing may be flawed, but the storytelling is strong.