If You Awaken Love Book

I enjoyed the book, though I never managed to warm up to the protagonist - Shlomzi - who really made all the mistakes a rather foolish person can make in love and in life. She obsessed over a person, and clung to himso firmly he probably barely had breathing room; if I were Yair, I'd run like hell.

She also completely misunderstands - and perhaps the writer is at fault here - the meaning of love, as it is supposed to be, and as Judaism really pushes for. Love that isn't some sort of ephemeral flame landing out of heaven, but something that grows in the ground. All those couples with their mystical, one-time-only and never-again loves, really bothered me a lot. Love is more prosaic than that, and more deeply rooted.

Shlomzi also really enjoys blaming God and the environment for her misfortunes, ditches everything and then tries to explain and excuse. All of her piety and emotional upheavals are built only skin-deep, because it really appears that, after a single disappointment, everything is dropped. They say, in the Pirkei Avot, that "love that is dependent upon a thing - when the thing is negated, so is the love". Shomzi's love for religion, country, even people, is totally dependent upon this one thing; her love for Yair. Once Yair is gone (and why didn't she just tell him she loves him, anyway? Or ask him?) her love is gone too. She only does these things to impress, but she failed to impress me.

Still I enjoyed reading a book that took the religious world from inside, rather than a sort of anthropological condescending research of an outsider who views secularisation as a sort of necessary act of self-determination and almost redemption. It was refreshing to read a book unafraid of a reference pool a little wider than two verses and a piece of Talmud. Besides, it also amused me and entertained me to see the familiar people and places Emuna Elon stuffed the book with: the rabbis, the settlements (is Tirza an allusion to Ofra or Beit El? Probably Ofra, considering the history and the Synagogue. Either way, hello, familiar haunts. I wave at you, there, in the book.) and the Jerusalem neighbourhoods. Very homey sort of book. Feels nice, like a well-worn sort of dress, which has its defects, but is comfortable and easy to slip into.