cover image Seventh Telling

Seventh Telling

Mitchell Chefitz. St. Martin's Press, $24.95 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-312-26645-5

The spiritual evolution of two menDa rabbinical scholar with a knack for business and a businessman with rabbinical leaningsDand their wives is presented as a series of parables in this ambitious attempt to capture Kabbalah study in fiction. In group storytelling sessions at their house in the hills outside San Francisco, Sidney and Stephanie Lee relate the inspirational history of their mentors, Moshe and Rivkah Katan. Taking turns, they trace Moshe's progress from his childhood as Michael Kayten, through MIT, Vietnam, Israel and suburbia to become a legendary kabbalist. As part of the story, they tell how Moshe deepened his ties to Sidney and Stephanie when Rivkah, having devoted her life to helping cancer patients, faced the dreaded disease herself. In her sessions, Stephanie also recalls her own parents, both Holocaust survivors: a father who disowned her for marrying Sidney, a mother who never answered but secretly saved her letters. As gradually becomes evident, the two couples have more in common than their spiritual missionDtheirs is a personal connection, too. A teacher at institutes and rabbinic conferences, Chefitz knows his subject well, blending reverence for religious traditions with acceptance of new variations. His storytelling shows a lecturer's patience for getting to the point, a rabbi's tolerance for human frailty and a scholar's sense of detail, but his literary abilities are less well developed, his stories too inexpertly bound together to add up to a novel. The book will be of most interest to the creatively devout, and particularly to women forging their own traditions within Judaism, as Chefitz pays special attention to their situation. Agent, Natasha Kern. (Jan.)