We spent our winter in Israel, where I taught Introduction to American Incarceration in English–the Council of Higher Education has decreed that Israeli law students should take a couple of classes in English, the number of which varies with their English proficiency–and got to catch up with some colleagues. After one of my classes, I had lunch with some lovely colleagues and we talked about a TV show that aired the previous year, called HaPlilistiot (“the criminal lawyers”). The show came up in a number of subsequent conversations, and since some of my students thought it was worth a look, I watched it.
The premise of the show is that the women gather at a big office space at the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv, where each of them has an office. The precise business structure of the enterprise is pretty thin; the geography does not make much sense (many of them work and live in the distant north and south of the country), and it’s clear that these are solo practitioners who have been gathered and plonked into the same space to manufacture drama. The pretext for the gathering is that their conversations, referrals, and collaborations should provide “female empowerment,” and they often meet in a big conference room, where one of them presents a case she is working on–usually with video footage–and the women discuss pertinent issues.
It quickly becomes clear that the cases themselves are not the point, and that this show is essentially what would result if a group from the Real Housewives Of… franchise had held jobs. We see seven wealthy women subtly (and not so subtly) needling each other about cars, vacations, and designer clothes. A further complication for me, as a viewer, is that the women, whose faces, hairstyles, and figures were manicured, filled, injected, and surgically altered to the point of looking like clones of each other, are so indistinguishable that the plot line is incredibly confusing to me (there are three or four of them I could not tell apart at all and still cannot, so I’m grateful whenever one’s name is actually spelled on the screen). The incessant consumerism, the name-dropping of famous figures from the Israeli underworld (not so much to evoke empathy as to glorify heinous crime and, by extension, the people who come close to touching those who perpetrate it), and the clichéd presentation of women making it big in a masculine world, walking fearless inside prisons and jails, goodnaturedly rebuffing men hitting on them, talking about their inability to date, maintain relationships, and/or raise children while working demanding schedules, fiercely jostling each other about brands and imitations, buying cars and enhancing breasts, are basically what you would expect from a reality show.
And yet, my conversations with folks clearly marked the show as a cultural Rorshach test: many academics were certain that the express purpose of the show was to ridicule the women for entertainment. Some of my students were not and found the show aspirational: all the women open up about their backgrounds, usually from poor and disenfranchised Mizrahi backgrounds in small towns, and revel in their financial success and in each other’s professional esteem. The women themselves gave interviews in which they were aware that they were going to be ridiculed and snubbed and undermined some of the premise of the show.
What I found interesting about the show was not so much in the area of criminal law, but rather in Jewish studies. Throughout the show, we see that many of the women come from religious and masorti backgrounds. One of them has two brothers who have become ultra-Orthodox; another is shown alongside her husband and four kids, with the man and boys wearing a kippah and tzitzit. Their visits to their hometowns (which they all say nourish them and give them strength) are not only a testament to how far they have come financially, but also to their daily straddling of two ideological and spiritual worlds. A repeated visual sees the door of a luxury car open and a slim leg, shod in an extravagantly tall and brittle stiletto heel, emerge; we see these stilettoed feet walk not only the polished office space and the parking lots of courts and prisons, but also the dusty streets of what used to be known as “development towns,” revisiting their childhood and youth. One woman is gently rebuked by her religious brothers for not being married and a mother. Another is shown to wait alone outside a synagogue in which her children join her estranged in-laws in bringing in a Torah scroll named after her deceased husband.
The women’s lives are filled with contradictions. They are trying to make their chops in courtroom halls where the old elites disrespect traditional beliefs, and in intimate conversations and interviews the women themselves dismiss some of these beliefs as “superstition” or “nonsense.” And yet, they are fascinated with these beliefs, participating in some of them, and it is never clear how much of this is a professional trick of the trade and how much is a “just in case” shred of belief. In one episode, the women discuss a mystical belief in the criminal world about a taxidermied hoopoe as an omen for success in a criminal trial. One of them says in an aside to the camera, “my clients are on a different level, they do not believe this hogwash.” In another vignette, one of the women, who is trying to conceive, keeps a jar of etrog jam in her office, a traditional fertility remedy. A friend spots the jar on the desk and an intimate conversation about pregnancy develops; the jam owner says that she “does not really believe in these things” but “it doesn’t hurt anyone.”
This duality between the world of practical Jewish mysticism and the world of professional success comes to a head in a scene depicting one of the women, Hen Me’iri, inviting her friends to her new apartment, where a hugely popular mystic, Lisa Dadon, guides them in the ritual of hafrashat challah (“separating the challah”). In the last few years, this mitzvah for women, essentially setting aside and consecrating a small chunk of the dough made for the plaited Shabbat bread, has seen an enormous rise in popularity, with Tiktok and Instagram influencers performing it, parties and shows for women with popular female religious leaders, and, of course, a line of products and merchandise. Dadon, a recent hozeret bitshuva (a secular woman turned Orthodox) who refers to herself as the “rabbanit,” hosts such parties worldwide, and the Internet is rife with testimonials of women who find the evening special, holy, and inspiriting. Here’s the scene (with Hebrew subtitles):
Hen says she was unaware of hafrashat challah, and is doing it as a ritual for pregnancy. Orr ben Sha’anan, another one of the women, says that she is very connected to religion and that a person creates white angels when they do mitzvot and dark angels when they commit religious violations. This theory comes from Dadon’s interpretation of the Zohar, who also explains that some of the angels are deformed and then proceeds to playing loud music on a speaker. The loud singing embarrasses the women. “No,” smiles Me’iri embarrassed, “can we do it without music? I’m uncomfortable.” “From whom?” Dadon asks. “From the neighbors,” Me’iri replies. “What, so they don’t know that you’re doing hafrashat challah?” confronts Dadon. “No, from the noise,” says Me’iri. On a one-on-one with the camera, she explains how much she paid for her apartment and admits that, the following day, she asked a neighbor to falsely take responsibility for the noise in the building’s WhatsApp group.
Then, Dadon offers Me’iri some whiskey. Me’iri declines: “I’m after fertilization with embryos, I’m not allowed.” “I allow you,” Dadon says. “No,” Me’iri says again. Dadon raises her hand above her head, so as to indicate that her spiritual permission to indulge is above the doctor’s orders. This makes Me’iri visibly uncomfortable and she later expresses her frustration: “it is very negligent to offer me something like this and say that religion is above medicine. She should leave medicine to people who understand it.” Dadon then covers Me’iri’s head and has her read a long blessing from a wooden board, physically raising Me’iri’s hand, with the dough ball in it, above her head. One of the women, Shani Iluz, says she “liked Hen with the head covering, it was very authentic,” while another, Shani Deri, says, “I don’t think Hen quite understood what she was doing there.” The girls all hugged and repeated, “Amen!” and Dadon led a guided journey: “Imagine that you are at the Wailing Wall and there is a man there, a multi-billionaire.” Me’iri summarizes in words that evince her deep ambivalence: “The ritual was a bit primitive in my eyes and I didn’t feel I belonged, even though it’s mine.”
In a later episode, a newly pregnant Me’iri (she will later, unfortunately, suffer a miscarriage, but will eventually become pregnant again and is now a mother of two) and her friends travel north at the invitation of one of the women, the religious Karin Legitivi, who hosts them at her rental villa and prepares a program. The women’s first stop is at a religious site, the grave of Rabbi Meir ba’al haNes. On the way there, they pass through a line of booths selling religious artifacts and purchase small pans to burn substances on at home (when Me’iri expresses doubts, another woman asks, “what, you’re not Moroccan?” “No, I’m not Moroccan, and y’all are stressing me out,” Me’iri replies). At the synagogues adjacent to the grave, the women are welcomed by HaRav Meir, who has run the site for thirty years: “It is very important for us, especially in these days, to welcome all the people of Israel.” The rabbi explains about the place’s special power in bringing about love and fertility (Me’iri, in a one-on-one, mocks his talk about “seed” by saying that she bought the seed and is doing IVF), and invites the women to recite three times, “Elha’ de-Meir, Aneni” (god of Meir, answer me). He blows the shofar. Iluz is upset with Me’iri’s reluctance to follow through. “We were at her home, she prayed for a fruit of her womb, she has a fruit of her womb, and now she denies the miracle?” Another woman, Shani Deri, confesses her own ambivalence. “It’s very hard for me to go back to these places,” she says. “Because I was there and I prayed and I read the books and the prayers, and I begged that my husband would live and it would pass.” Deri’s husband died of cancer. “And since then I haven’t been there, because something in my faith was cracked.” During the silent prayer, Na’ama Elhadad hands Deri a siddur, and Deri says, “I was immediately connected to what it says there about snitches, about bad gossip, and I decided with myself to be more forgiving, to accept the fact that there are heavenly accounts and I have nothing to do about it.” The women touch the grave. “To be before the Tzaddik, to spill your heart… it opens something,” says Ben Sha’anan. The women confide with each other by the grave, talking about their recent divorces and their wishes for something better; it is a tender communal moment.
The whole thing made me think about the classic controversy about Jewish mysticism. Gershom Sholem, whose book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is a classic, argues that it is impossible to study mysticism in the abstract, and tells a linear history of mystical themes in Jewish texts, dating from the biblical Ezekiel, through the Talmud, through the Merkavah and Hekhalot literature, through Sefer Yetzira, and toward the Zohar and later mystical texts. By contrast, Moshe Idel (especially in Kabbalah: New Perspectives) advocates a phenomenological approach, which accords folk magic and mystical techniques an important place in the study of mysticism. For Idel, it is impossible to understand mysticism solely from the words of elite texts; it is important to see how they operate in people’s actual lives (doing religion, rather than cognitively analyzing religious texts).
Idel’s perspective can inform our understanding of the women’s faith. At first glance, they are modernly and expertly dressed, coiffed, and beautified. Some of them profess disbelief in the Jewish folk rituals their families hew to. Others profess a connection to religion but appear to be living lives of deep contradiction (the clothing is a classic example). But even those who feel discomfort about the “primitiveness” of the rituals not only foster them, but actively fold them into their lives. Some of them find some of the rituals moving. Amidst the cacophony of handbags, Rolex watches, fancy cars, and lip fillers, they admit to some dissatisfaction; some of them tie it to a lack of strong family ties, and in some ways the participation in fertility rites is inexorably linked to their search for something real and meaningful. Their vehicle is tradition, and I’m sure some of their viewers can relate.
In that sense, the show is illustrative of the pull of mystical practical work for women who have made a huge class leap. “People will say I’m a nuveau riche,” says Shani Deri. This sort of financial success, which removes the lawyers from their backgrounds of poverty and tradition, is not likely to come without some form of psychic fissure. I think the rituals–despite, and perhaps because, of the deep dissonance between them and the shiny materialistic trappings of the women’s lives–are what provides a bridge across that fissure.