SHTISEL Season 3: The Last Shot

 Ruchami Dies

Clearly the Israeli TV series Shtisel has surpassed the medium’s normal insights and quality. But the ambiguous last shot of Season 3 opens a deeper possibility. This drama plunges us into classical tragedy. 

Comfy viewers and the sponsors don’t like that. “Calm of mind, all passion spent” doesn’t sell much. So for their peace the writers suggest Ruchami survives her delivery. 

But for the attentive viewer, Ruchami dies. By not making her death undeniably explicit, the writers permit viewers to read her alive. But the three seasons of evidence firmly lead to her death. 

The last scene opens on an ominous long shot through curtains to hospital staff and family around Ruchami’s bed. When the family celebrates little Hannahleh’s arrival the shot is jarringly bright. Ruchami looks too hearty. The unreal “feel” is confirmed when she smiles at us. In real life we don’t smile and wink at someone in a different-reality audience out there. Her breaking the Fourth Wall shatters the realism. The last shot is not Ruchami’s “real life.”

Confirming that break, the music connects the hospital scene to the preceding, where the dead Shtisels visit the living. There is no music in the “realistic” start to that scene, the three men talking. The music starts on the I.B. Singer quotation and continues over the Ruchami scene. The music gives Ruchami the “reality” of the visiting dead.

The Singer quote simply confirms what the writers have established from the outset: the dead stay with us, watching, helping, even visiting for a chat. Ruchami’s posthumous visit follows those by mothers Malka, Dvora and Libbi. Here motherhood doesn’t end at death. Dvora hands Akiva some challah. 

Where most stories start by defining the physical setting this drama’s very first scene was Akiva’s dream of Dvora in the deli deep-freeze. The first episode of Season 3 has a wholly realistic vision of dead Libbi’s visit.  

The miracle of Ruchami’s blessed afterlife — which requires her death —gives this drama an emotional climax rare, if not unprecedented, on TV. As Giti’s “little Ruchami” replaces her mother, Ruchami’s death is a triumph. In both her pregnancies the doctors insist on terminating the baby to save the mother’s life, as the Torah requires. They overrule her the first time. At the baby’s burial, Ruchami rejects Hanina’s comforting with “I’m in that box.” This is her Death-in-Life.

The second time she forgoes surrogacy out of respect for Hanina’s religious concern. Accepting the odds against her survival, she prepares to die. She tapes “letters to my beloved little girl I will never give birth to.”  When she sleeps through Hanina’s playing her tapes she seems to be speaking from the dead. She promises her unborn daughter she will always be with her, watching her, if but from “another room.” That starts with the last shot. This is her Life-in-Death.

To deny this death is to diminish her heroism and tragedic dignity. Also — to ignore the entire drama’s faith in our alternative levels of spiritual existence.

But as the Facebook chatlines demonstrate, viewers prefer the cliche happy ending. That depends on a miracle, which an earlier scene warns us off. When Lippe begs God to take his life to save Ruchami’s he stumbles into a celestial glow. His miracle has been granted? Nope, it’s the headlights of the obstructed truck. So much for miracles. Lippe doesn’t get to sacrifice himself for his daughter; Ruchami does. Why? As the Bible continually reports, sacrifices have to be perfect. Also male, but Ruchami is a modern heroine. 

So resistant are viewers to this deepening that the Shtisel Official chatline on Facebook refused to run my proposed alternative reading . The director expelled me when I challenged her claim to have “from the writers” the assurance that Ruchami is alive! She didn’t. 

My Ruchami ending has another advantage. Call it my Lekovid Covid Clause. The drama was written, produced and aired during the pandemic. A crucial issue is the refusal of the orthodox of several faiths to accept the restrictions imposed by secular authorities for the public good. There have been protests, riots, closures — and many deaths and much more suffering as a result. That even beyond the offending communities. In this climate, basing a happy ending on prayer, on divine intervention, on the expectation of a miracle — is sadly dangerous. Giving Ruchami the heroic death she undertook is the most responsible as well as the happiest ending.   

I've written episode-by-episode analyses of the themes and structure of SHTISEL. The first two seasons are covered in READING SHTISEL. AFTER SHTISEL studies Season 3 and also the writers' intervening TV drama, AUTONOMIES. Both are available at lulu.com.