The Patient tackles Orthodox vs Reform Judaism

Episode three of The Patient, the well-received psychological thriller series about a serial killer who kidnaps his therapist, involves a flashback to an Orthodox wedding.

Ezra, son of the protagonist therapist Alan Strauss and Reform cantor Beth Strauss, is marrying an Orthodox woman named Chava. Guitar in hand, Beth sings Dodi Li, a traditional Jewish wedding song, knowing that women are not allowed to sing in the presence of men in this Orthodox community. As she performs, some men get up to leave. Ezra and his bride stay but look uncomfortable.

The moment gets at the tension that Ezra’s transition out of the Reform lifestyle of his upbringing and into Orthodoxy has wrought within the Strauss family. But the scene was not originally written this way.

Although the show’s creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg are both Jewish, they weren’t aware of the Orthodox prohibition against women singing in front of men and had first written the moment as a nice memory of a mother singing at her son’s wedding. The show’s consultant, Rabbi Menachem Hecht, a teacher at a yeshivah high school in Los Angeles, informed the duo of the rule – which thrilled them because they said it made the scene more interesting and complicated. The final product got across the viewpoints of both denominations in a fair way, Rabbi Hecht said.

“There’s definitely a way to run that scene where it just makes Orthodox Jews look anti-women and bigoted,” Rabbi Hecht said. “The point wasn’t just to make them look bad. It was to show how there could be real tension here.”

The scene and the consultation behind it points to the level of Jewishness that Fields and Weisberg wove into the fabric of The Patient.

In another scene, Ezra, his sister and their families are having dinner at Alan and Beth’s house. Beth serves her daughter’s children ice cream as Ezra’s children look on, unable to partake, eating food they brought in Tupperware. The entire scene is less than a minute long, so the audience needs to understand quickly what is happening.

“We are not believers in exposition. We don’t want to spell it out … as long as they feel it, that’s what’s good,” Weisberg said.

In addition to the family divides, Judaism plays an important role in other aspects of the story. In one episode, Alan dreams of himself in the barracks of Auschwitz. In another, as Alan tries to teach Sam about empathy, so that he can start thinking of his victims as people and consider what their families need, he talks about Jewish rituals associated with death, including the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Fields and Weisberg recorded versions of the prayer for Carell, who had to recite it in its entirety in the show.

“I loved being able to assure him that he sounded great when he was saying it … it’s not like there’s the right way,” Weisberg said. “Every Jew is saying it differently and pronouncing all the words differently, so he sounded a lot like me and everybody else I knew.”

When the pair first reached out to Rabbi Hecht, he assumed that the main plot of the show revolved around Jewish themes.

“They put so much thought into it and so many resources into this Orthodox story, and I figured that was the show. And then when I finally saw the script I was like, ‘Wait, this isn’t the show at all, this is like a minute-and-a-half of the show across the whole season,'” the rabbi said. “I just thought this speaks to who these folks are who are putting this together, and the degree to which they’re approaching this with a sense of respect and with seriousness and with rigor.”

Fields said it was a product of how deep their Jewish identities run.

“It’s been really meaningful to be able to tell a story that we hope is relatable to everybody, that we hope ultimately is about everyone’s common humanity and common experience, but is expressed through particular character dynamics that are just deep inside us culturally,” he said. “One doesn’t often get the chance to do that, so it means a lot.” JTA

The Patient is streaming on Disney+