Sex and the Holy City

By YAEL GOLDSTEIN

Seven Blessings
By Ruchama King
258 pages. St. Martin's. $23.95.

The light, knowing sexiness of Ruchama King’s Seven Blessings is probably the last thing that the average reader would expect the ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Jerusalem to yield. But, then again, if King can be believed, there’s very little that the private lives of the ultra-Orthodox can’t yield, if pushed deftly enough: a kerchiefed mother of six, for instance, advising her single friend to “buy some bikini underwear”; an ancient Hassidic woman frolicking with her scholarly husband in the shower; a “pack of slinky sex kittens” lurking beneath the dark and dourly modest clothes on the streets of Meah She’arim. Perhaps this is only King’s version of ultra-Orthodoxy, but whatever it is, it’s fun, breezy, and it carries along with it a homey wisdom that’s a refreshing alternative to all things "Sex and the City"–related. Halfway through the amusing chronicle of bad dates and missed signals that makes up the book’s core I came to think of Seven Blessings as “Sex and the City” for the family values set.

At the center of the many interlocking tales of love that make up this delightful book lies Beth, a fiercely independent-minded, fiercely lost and lonely, American Orthodox Jew supplanted to Israel. She flounders with her career and with her faith, but her overriding concern is her love life. At 39 she has yet to be touched by a man other than her father, and her prospects for righting this wrong are dwindling in inverse proportion to her spreading hips. (We see her eating french fries and cholent bean stew a lot.) Lucky for Beth, there happen to be two master matchmakers who consider her singleness a personal challenge, and who make it their business to be as pushy and needling as they need to be in order to marry her off. As she struggles against their drastic dictates and her own defensive instincts, she comes to understand a great deal about not only what she wants in a husband, but what she wants in a life.

Looking for love alongside Beth are Akiva, a sweet and spiritual man with a debilitating twitch that he sees as a blessing, and Binyamin, a hunky painter and recent returnee to the fold, whose desire for absolute physical perfection in a woman gets him blacklisted by all of Jerusalem’s matchmakers. Even the matchmakers themselves have romantic woes. Tsippe, a holocaust survivor married to a man whose life she saved in the camps, yearns for passion and romance from her husband instead of the “sweetly quiet” life they share. Meanwhile, Judy, a beautiful former rebbetzin, whose husband is now an exterminator, feels that something has disappeared from her marriage along with her husband’s role as Torah scholar. For all of these reaching souls, the romantic search is part and parcel of their search for the right connection to God, a fact which keeps their obsessions with marriage from becoming entirely cloying to the reader.

In the end, Seven Blessings is as much a book about faith as it is a book about matchmaking: faith in God, in a certain set of writings and precepts handed down by one’s ancestors, in oneself, and, of course, in love. As Tsippe says to a worried Beth, fretting over how to spot her intended, “If he’s not for you? Believe me, you know right away. And if he is for you? You can marry him, you can have children with him, you can spend your life with him, and still, you never know.”