Levirate Marriage and Muslim Modesty

Later today, “Loving Leah,” a story iof the Halakhic (Jewish legal) institution of Yibbum/Levirate Marriage will be broadcast on prime-time TV.

“And Mercedes Ruehl.” The words strike fear in my heart, especially when they appear in the opening credits of a CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. As a rule, Ruehl doesn’t merely dominate her screen time; she wrestles it into submission, word by word, glare by glare. Couple that with the fact that the cast of “Loving Leah”... also features Susie Essman and you’ve got a knockout punch. Essman is the Blagojevich-tongued comedian who puts Larry David in his place on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and her delivery can be the verbal equivalent of a machine gun. By mid-movie, when Ricki Lake shows up as a reform rabbi, “Loving Leah” is officially one of the more bizarre concoctions to emerge from the Hallmark factory.
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“Loving Leah” is primarily a cute love story between a mousy Hasidic woman in Brooklyn, Leah (Lauren Ambrose), and her urbane cardiologist brother-in-law in Washington, D.C., Jake (Adam Kaufman). That’s right, brother-in-law. Leah’s rabbi husband dies, and an obscure Jewish law requires her to marry his brother if she has not yet had children.
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But Leah and Jake are so different! This is crazy! But it might just work! The movie strains and struggles to get Leah and Jake living platonically in the same Georgetown apartment, so they can follow the conventions of the sham-marriage comedy to the nth degree. While Leah takes classes to prepare for the SATs, so she can go to college and come into her own, Jake halfheartedly continues a love affair with a fellow doctor (Christy Pusz). Leah grows more physically beautiful by the day, especially after she takes off her wig and lets her long red hair flow, and Jake becomes less narcissistic as he sees the beauty of her soul.

See the full review here.

Levirate marriage is not really such an obscure Jewish law, for it is clearly stated as a commandment in the Pentateuch. Normally, ethnic Ashkenazim have used the Halitzah ceremony to escape the requirement, but Jews of other ethnicities often fulfilled the obligation of marrying a widowed childless sister-in-law.

Levirate marriage has already been depicted as the subject of the Israeli film I Love You, Rosa (go to bottom, and read onto the next).

While I have not seen Loving Leah, the description in the review suggests it is yet another silly Hollywood effort at mining Judaism for rituals that can be depicted as cutsy and potentially titillating -- perhaps in a Jewish version of Big Love. This approach to Judaism constitutes a mocking of genuine religious faith. One correspondent wrote to me, "'Silly' would not be the word I would use -- it is yet more Ashkenazi ideas about how Judaism should be portrayed."

Obviously, Loving Leah reflects Hollywood Jewish (ethnic Ashkenazi) prejudices, and it is worthwhile to perform the thought experiment of an alternate reality in which levirate marriage is an Islamic practice.

Blog entries like Sweden: Controversial lawyer to set new headscarf precedent and its associated comments provide the key input to the experiment, for they show the demonization of Muslim religious practices that differ in no way from those of Orthodox Judaism and for which no one would ever dare criticize a Jewish woman for fear of accusations of anti-Semitism.

It is hard to avoid concluding that in the alternate reality where Islamic law (Sharia) was more similar to Jewish law (Halakhah) than it is in our reality

• an "Islamic" version of Levirate marriage in every way equivalent to Jewish Levirate marriage would be viewed as a barbaric degradation of women and
• the prime time version of Loving Lama would be a dark threatening tale of creeping Sharia and a cruel tragedy culminating in Lama's death.

[BTW, there is no need for Levirate marriage in Sharia because Sharia unlike Halakhah guarantees an inheritance for a childless widow.]
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