Over the years, that envy morphed into something I can only call pity. I observed not the Haredi children but their older sisters and harried young mothers, often hidden behind a two-seat stroller. Under the unsparing Israeli sun, they wore scrimlike tights, wool sweaters, and heavy-looking wigs. They looked exhausted.
Reared on certain freedoms, I found it impossible to view non-freedom with anything less than casual judgment. A wish for validation creeps in, too. The stranger, the more stifling, the world depicted, the more the contours of ours no longer chafe. A voyeuristic urge takes over when it comes to isolated, self-sufficient societies. We purport to want to learn about parallel ways of living when, really, a stronger impulse is to figure out how different they are from our own.
The series, which first aired in Israel on the satellite-broadcasting channel Yes, in , introduces us to the Shtisel family exactly a year after the matriarch of the family has died. He takes a job as a substitute teacher at a school where his father teaches and falls in love with Elisheva, an older, widowed mother of one of his students. Shulem, the father, is a man of creature comforts who always seems to be eating.
When the series opens, he transfers his mother to a nursing home where, for the first time in her life, she owns a television. It is also a little old-fashioned, not only because of its subject matter but because of its situational structure. Things happen and cease to happen to the characters within a single episode: an illness, a robbery. He is practical, unsentimental.
What Akiva thinks is changing is never made clear. And yet, for twelve episodes a season, your mores are imbued with those onscreen. You find yourself cheering on consanguinity, mazal-tov-ing the teenagers. This is one of the pleasures of watching the show, and a reminder of why contemporary takes on marriage plots are hard to pull off: the stakes never seem reliably high when all you have to do is swipe right.
