Our pro­tag­o­nist is writhing on the floor, anguished, beg­ging, bar­gain­ing, bar­ing her soul. She sobs. After years of strug­gling with infer­til­i­ty, she is preg­nant with twins — her heart’s only wish for so long — but her body is trau­ma­tized. She can­not focus, can­not recap­ture her sweet dreams about the babies she’ll have, can­not get past the ter­ri­ble pain and sick­ness. She alter­nate­ly wish­es she were dead and pleads for her life. In a wild moment of despair and bold­ness, she talks direct­ly to God. ​“Im keyn lamah zeh anochi,” she cries. ​“If so, why me?”

This woman is Rebec­ca, moth­er of us all. She is strug­gling to under­stand her place in the world, and instead of eas­ing her bur­den, God puts it in con­text. There will be great­ness, God tells her. But there will be war. From here on out, there will always be pain. 

I was think­ing about our ances­tors as I wrote the sto­ry of Rina Kirsch in my forth­com­ing nov­el, Olive Days. Was think­ing about how their love of — and strug­gles against — law, duty, rit­u­al, and tra­di­tion are not so dif­fer­ent from how we strug­gle now. 

My Rina is not up against a preg­nan­cy, at least not when we meet her. Rather, she is anguished because her devout hus­band asked her about — talked her into, exhort­ed her toward — a wife swap in their mod­ern Ortho­dox com­mu­ni­ty. Reel­ing after being trad­ed, she seeks to feel loved again, to feel val­ued and spe­cial. She seeks first in the arms of a very obser­vant rab­bi, and then in the embrace of an art pro­fes­sor from out­side the com­mu­ni­ty. Although the sto­ry of Rebec­ca — a sto­ry she knows inti­mate­ly — is relayed to her by her non-Jew­ish lover in a sur­pris­ing con­text, Rina spends far less time think­ing about the text and far more time expe­ri­enc­ing the bur­den of a five thou­sand – year tra­di­tion. Can she break free of a sti­fling mar­riage and still be the eshet chay­il she was raised to be? Can she hon­or the laws and tra­di­tions she holds dear even as she comes to believe that no god decreed them? Can she find a way to con­tin­ue to cher­ish the deep beau­ty and pur­pose of her com­mu­ni­ty, and to live a mean­ing­ful Jew­ish life? 

When I first moved to Pico-Robert­son, one of Los Angeles’s many vibrant Jew­ish enclaves, it wasn’t long before I heard a sto­ry about a sort of mod­ern Ortho­dox key par­ty. I took some­one to lunch, and then anoth­er per­son to cof­fee, and then anoth­er, lis­ten­ing to their sto­ries because that’s what writ­ers do. A key par­ty itself doesn’t make a nov­el, but a char­ac­ter idea lodged in my mind and stuck with me for many years. I would sit on the side­walk in front of Bibi’s Bak­ery, my favorite kosher shop on the block, munch­ing on sam­busaks, rock­ing my kids in a wag­on, and work­ing out the sto­ry. At first it was a love tri­an­gle, but over time it devel­oped into a romance between two unhap­py peo­ple try­ing to self-actu­al­ize, define their own iden­ti­ty, and lib­er­ate themselves. 

It took me a decade to write the book — I was rais­ing three kids, work­ing, putting food on the table — and in that time, a phe­nom­e­non was grow­ing in mod­ern cul­ture: the ascen­den­cy of polyamory. When I start­ed writ­ing the book, my friends were chat­ter­ing about swingers par­ties and com­plain­ing about mixed Greek (poly-) and Latin (-amory) root words. By Sep­tem­ber 2024, when my book will be pub­lished, most peo­ple will be famil­iar with the con­cept of open rela­tion­ships; out­lets like The New York­er are run­ning breath­less head­lines about how it became so popular. 

Back in 2012, my Rina would have nev­er guessed that her mis­er­able expe­ri­ence was in fact part of a trend. And that’s what makes her so inter­est­ing. As a human, I have no prob­lem with any­thing that con­sent­ing adults choose to do with their bod­ies or how they decide to give and receive love. As a writer, though, I couldn’t help but won­der if — at least for this one woman — a sin­gle night could set off an exis­ten­tial cri­sis, a tug-of-war between the laws (includ­ing laws of puri­ty) that gov­ern her life, and her desire to have agency over her own, well, desire. 

And while I wouldn’t dream of giv­ing away the end­ing, it won’t sur­prise you to know that, like our matri­archs, Rina finds unex­pect­ed bold­ness and strength radi­at­ing from with­in. And like Rebec­ca, she finds her­self in moments of despair, cry­ing out, Why me? She dis­cov­ers, sure as any truth she was raised to believe, that from here on out, there will always be pain.