Shtisel Season 3: The Last Shot

Ruchami dies.

***

Granted, she appears to live. Writers Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky know better than to drop an inescapably sad ending on a TV drama. TV is supposed to make the viewer feel good, reassured, in that comfortable stupor the passive apparently prefer. As do the advertisers.

My contention that she died provoked surprising anger. My arguments on Facebook’s “Shtisel Discussion Group” were met with some interest, less acceptance and a general reflex of rejection. Of course everyone wants her to live. How dare I kill her off!

The harshest response came from the then-director of the Shtisel Official website. Refusing to run my argument, she published a statement that Ruchami and her baby are definitely alive — an odd claim to make for any fictional characters. Indeed the widespread sense that these fictional characters are real people proved many viewers to be engaged with Shtisel on the level Malka is with her soap opera. The site director claimed the authority of the producers and the actress who played Ruchami. They say she lives therefore she lives. 

Of course, they are not the creators of this drama — the writers are. The writers constructed every detail. When the site director stated she had that information “from the writers” I called her on that. Again, she did not run my statement but said she’d withdrawn that claim. Still, she left her readers with that “information.” I was expelled from the group.

Of course, I have it from the writers that Ruchami died. No, neither told me. Even if I had that “inside” info from them I would not be ruled by it. For analyzing a work of art is not like solving a math problem. There is no “right answer” in the back of a book. Or what someone (even I) tells you.

Not even if it’s from the artist. As D.H. Lawrence reminded us, “Trust the art, not the artist.” For once an artist releases a work its meaning is out there for all to explore, define and respond to. There may well be depths and connections of which the artist herself may be unaware. The life is in the work. Any reading will be only as strong as the evidence from it supports. When I say “I have it from the writers” i mean I have it from the writing. The work is what they intended.

What they intended was a possibly ambiguous closure to the now three-season drama. There was the initial effect: the family gathers happily around Ruchami’s hospital bed, celebrating the baby, and Ruchami smiles and winks — at us. We can infer that against massive odds — 1,000 to one — Ruchami survived the delivery. Possibly because of her prayers, Hanina’s prayers and most graphically, Lippe’s prayers. That’s a happy ending — standard for standard TV fare. But that reflex conclusion flies in the face of almost everything that has come before.

For Shtisel is far from standard TV fare. It moves beyond the conventional domestic drama and aspires to a modern version of Classical Tragedy. Instead of the assuring pleasures of a comedy it plumbs the emotional depths of — in Ruchami — a modern tragic hero. I’ll explain how I get there. But for now note that it was my claim that Shtisel is such a profound, complex work — arguably unique in contemporary television — that disqualified me from the website supposedly created to support it.

One more prefatory thought. If one narrative strategy has distinguished Shtisel from its rivals it’s the faith in the spiritual life beyond our mundane one. That’s what the Haredi constant blessings and rituals reaffirm. The drama gives the varieties of spiritual existence the same material reality as its characters’ “real life.” We get dreams, artistic visions, re-livings of the past, visits from the dead. Even a conflation of life with TV : climactically, at the end of Season Two, when Malka — in the coma caused by son Shulem’s banning of her TV — watches her hospital room “real life” on a TV set in Heaven with her dead husband. The medium that Orthodox Shulem bans on earth is acceptable up there.  

In the beginning…. First episode, first scene (I,1). Normally a story begins by establishing the physical setting. The first season opened with a dream, the deli deep freeze of Akiva’s dead mother Dvora. Season Two opened with Shulem’s dream of comatose mother Malka. Season Three opens with Akiva’s visit from dead Libbi. There is no clue that Libbi is dead until art dealer Kaufman’s introduction. All these levels of spirituality are treated with the same realistic tone. As a consequence, we  have to pause at every scene to consider which reality applies. 

And so to that last shot.

***

The last scene opens on an ominous long shot through curtains to hospital staff and family around Ruchami’s bed. The scene then turns bright as the family celebrates little Hannahleh’s arrival. But the shot feels perhaps a little too cheery, indeed jarringly bright. Ruchami in particular looks too hearty. The unreal “feel” is confirmed when she smiles and winks 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. This is not Ruchami’s “real life.”

Confirming that break, the music connects the hospital scenes to the preceding uniting of the dead Shtisels with the living. There is no music in the “realistic” start to the scene, the three men talking. The music comes on with the I.B. Singer quotation and continues over the Ruchami scene.

The Singer quote establishes what the earlier seasons’ spiritual scenes have already demonstrated,  since I,i — that the dead stay with us, watching, helping, even visiting for a chat. We carry them within us. The music gives Ruchami’s last shot the same reality as the visiting dead. She’s visiting from the dead — as indeed all the earlier mothers here have done. 

Curiously, almost everyone online loves the Singer quote and the visible reunion with the dead— but forget it by the next scene.        

Earlier scenes support this reading. After hints that Ruchami’s condition requires a surrogate birth, the Episode 7 flashbacks make the previous dangerous pregnancy seem current with the present one. In both, the doctors say Ruchami must terminate the birth because of the 1,000 to one odds against her survival. The Torah prioritizes the mother’s life over the child’s, but Ruchami demands to continue. 

On the first pregnancy the infant is delivered dead. At his burial, Ruchami rejects Hanina’s comforting with “I’m in that box.” This is her Death-in-Life.

In her second pregnancy she generously forgoes the surrogacy, despite the rabbi’s permission, out of respect for Hanina’s religious concern. She lies to him and to Giti, preserving the illusion of surrogacy, so she can risk her life. She already proved a dab hand at situational ethics when — just after promising Yos’ale she’ll never lie to him again — she lied about her anti-Lippe posters.

When Hanina consults the Torah he takes his lesson from the rhyming odds. If 999 declare someone guilty and one innocent, the judgment goes to the innocent. This is  questionable advice. Determining innocence is not as drastic as risking life. Oddly, he’s persuaded to — Ruchami’s — gamble when he sees the old rabbi who’d suffered a serious accident. His prayers worked insofar as he survived but he’s in a severely reduced state, unable to continue his passion for Torah study. That prompts Hanina to drop his plan to marshal Ruchami’s parents against her plan.   

For Ruchami the long odds don’t matter. Rather than bet against them she accepts them. She prepares to die. When she wrote her “letters to my beloved little girl I will never give birth to” (III,2) she described the piercing black hole she felt inside: “This hole inside me is shaped like you.” The absent daughter was already a presence, as Ruchami’s absence will be. The paradox harkens back to Ruchami’s first touching line in I,1. As Lippe leaves for his Argentinian post Giti is tellingly silent, but Ruchami says “I miss you already.” He’s already absent while present.  Ruchami as parent will be present though absent later. She promises her unborn daughter she will always be with her, watching her, if but from “another room.” As the last dinner scene reminds us, motherhood doesn’t end at death. We see Dvora handing Akiva some challah. She has escaped the freeze that launched the drama.

When Hanina plays those tapes Ruchami, asleep beside him, seems already to be speaking from the dead. In any other drama this supernaturalism in a family drama might seem incongruousl. But in Shtisel her faith in a helpful afterlife coheres with the drama’s dominant theme of spiritual coexistences. 

Ruchami is not placing her faith in a miracle. She’s risking her life aware of its cost. Indeed any likelihood of a miracle may be undercut by the scene where Lippe, running to the hospital, prays for her survival. He begs God to take him instead. As if to reward him, when he falls he’s bathed in a celestial light. Aah, we may infer, “She’s safe. He’s going to Heaven so we’ll have her here.” But alas, the lights are from the truck he has stalled. So much for miracles.

That smile and wink express Ruchami’s triumph and satisfaction. She succeeded by sacrificing herself, correcting the privilege forced on her for the previous failed birth. She gets to “redo” that unfortunate earlier scene (which in a lower key Shira Levy wishes for her first meeting with Yosa’le). Now, if our reflex acceptance of her survival seems a happy ending, surely this ending provides a more profound satisfaction. How much more heroic a mother’s sacrifice for her child when she willingly pays with her own life. Accepting that high price for her commitment makes her a Tragic Hero of our time.

At least, this makes Ruchami a more ideal abstraction of Motherhood than Akiva’s painting at the end of Season 2, which drew Shulem into a lunatic violation of his wife’s desires one more time. In the guise of defending her honour he spoils her favourite son’s best painting. Worse, to buy it he sells the burial spot she on her deathbed begged for, so they would be  together in eternity. Shulem’s reconciliation with Akiva — and his response to Nuchem owning that prized burial spot — are ignored in this season. Except, perhaps, for Shulem’s marital advice to Akiva: “I’ve forgotten about [Dvora] completely.”

According the drama’s climax to Ruchami provides a radical shift away from the Shulem-Akiva axis on which the first two seasons pivoted. They played out Akiva’s and Shulem’s different responses to Dvora’s death. The shift of focus to Ruchami advances the next generation, in which women assume more authority. Hence the development of Yosa’le’s romance. Akiva’s conclusion with Racheli functions as a model for Hannahleh’s motherless future. 

We have watched Ruchami grow up, stretching the allowable limits to a proper end. She “nurses” her infant brother, explores secular literature (Anna Karenina, Middlemarch), and even — taboo — pretends to be a man (like George Eliot) when she writes her brothers letters putatively from Lippe. On his return she takes active measures to undermine him, but eventually hears him out and accepts him.  Her courage, character and maturity culminate in her willing sacrifice.   

Finally, consider the overall structure of the drama. Season 1 opens with Akiva’s dream of dead mother Dvora, and ends with Malka’s (equally “unreal” or “even more real”) view from Heaven. Season 2 starts with Shulem’s dream of comatose Malka’s advice and climaxes with his attack on Dvora’s memory (in its own way unmoored from reality). The Libbi-Akiva ending scene is a soothing epilogue. Season 3 starts with the dead Libbi’s very realistic scenes with Akiva and their baby. To cohere with this structure Season 3 also ends on a spiritual reality. All three seasons start with a mother speaking from beyond life-consciousness. One and three end with a dead mother; the middle season finds Shulem mad for acting against the will, values, spirit of his dead wife, i.e., failing in her absence,

In my Shtisel Discussion Group on Facebook several proponents of her survival declared themselves in “the life camp.” My alternative is not “the death camp.” Within the cosmos of this drama I am in “the afterlife camp.” The writers have made that reality a pervasive force in the drama. What’s radical in Ruchami’s faith is that she actually believes — and embraces — the spiritual afterlife that earthbound believers only mouth. However ardently. 

Why an ambivalent ending? Throughout Shtisel the writers have preferred a circumspect presentation of an issue rather than forcing us into one perspective. For example, we get no hints on when Ruchami and Hanina consummate their marriage. Nor on the resumption of Giti’s marital rights upon Lippe’s return. We’re pretty certain the Rebbetzin committed suicide — with Malka’s anti-Torah help — but no further mention of it is made. That saves us from having to make a moral judgment. Indeed there is a clear argument that Malka killed herself — following the Eskimo model Shulem mistakenly abuses in I,1 — but it’s not stated unequivocally either. We can infer whichever position suits our morality. So too regarding Ruchami’s suicidal maternity. 

My Ruchami ending has another advantage. Call it my Lekovid Covid Clause. In honour of covid. The drama was written, produced and aired during the pandemic. A crucial issue is the refusal of the orthodox of many 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 have written two books analyzing the themes and structure of each episode of Shtisel. Reading Shtisel covers the first two seasons. After Shtisel examines Season 3 and also the more political Israeli TV series the writers presented in the interim, Autonomies. Both books  are available from lulu.com. This discussion is a more extensive version than in my book, where I also presumed Ruchami to have died in childbirth.