Here’s something a little different, a Hebrew-language television series from Israel that was highly successful some years back. I first learned about this years ago when it was featured by The Economist and kept running into references to it here and there but as you can expect, trying to actually watch it before streaming became commonplace was difficult. But I never forgot about this and kept it on my watch list and so here we are.

This show is probably best described as a kind of Israeli version of the American show Friends. The main characters are five friends, three women and two men, who live in Jerusalem. All five are religious Zionists, hence the title of the show which refers to the crocheted skull caps worn by the men to mark their affiliation. Being that they are conservative, they aren’t actually all housemates but do often come together to observe the Sabbath as a group. They all work different jobs, one of the men Nati for example, is just starting as a doctor, while the other one, his housemate Amir, is a grammar teacher. The stories mainly revolve around their dating life as the pressure on them to get married increases as they are in their early 30s. As such they often bemoan the lack of suitable partners within their community, are torn by matters of faith and of course must deal with the usual jealousies, unrequited love and little deceptions that are part of any soap opera.

Don’t expect fantastic visuals out of this as it is a small, modestly budgeted show but the production team is at least competent and the actors are all good. The plots do fall back on the usual tropes of the genre but as my wife notes, the great thing about it is how fast the show moves so they don’t spend endless episodes agonizing over every single little lie or betrayal. Every problem that is raised is resolved in a single episode or the next one and since each episode is only about 30 minutes long, that is very fast indeed. While there is some humor, this still isn’t a sitcom. With the focus being on romantic problems and emotional drama. this feels solidly like a soap opera to me. You have stories like one of the main characters pining for another main character who is seemingly unaware; Hodaya, a Biblical History student, who has fallen in love with a man who is non-religious; Reut a successful executive who is both religious and a feminist, and so on.

These stories are by themselves unremarkable, as familiar and trite to us as old Hong Kong TVB shows. But the setting and the context in which they take place here make all the difference. The show is packed full of details about Jewish religious practices, such as how they’re not allowed to mix utensils used for meat and for dairy products or how strict the rules for observing the Sabbath are. It is also nuanced in that there are many degrees of religiousness. A non-religious boyfriend of one of the main characters finds their practices tediously complicated but there are others in their community who think they are too liberal. They also cover issues like the tension between the strict observance of the letter of religious law and the spirit in which they are meant. For example, one of the women wants to learn to recite the Torah but the male teacher says that it is forbidden for a man to hear a woman singing it so they compromise by singing it together so that he doesn’t hear her. Even the details of day to day life in Israel is fascinating to us as it is so militarized. There’s no violence shown here but it seems to be a constant fact of life in the background. A girl dates an army helicopter pilot, they hear a noise and dismiss it as an air raid siren. One of my favorite scenes is when two of them are hiking outside an outlying settlement, see two strangers in the distance and become scared that they may be Arabs, with the whole scene being played for laughs.

I can foresee that the show might become tiresome eventually if it keeps circling around the same themes forever. Already the one constancy is that the main characters keep dating new people and never have a romantic relationship that succeeds. I also keep hoping that the cast expands a bit to show the attitudes and perhaps lifestyles of the older generation. As it is, this show is only ever about the younger generation. Still we will keep watching at least up to the next season and I note that there are only three seasons in all. The culture here is so exotic to us that it makes the show fascinating and educational even when the stories are plain and ordinary.