Shabbat Sermon: Off Script with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

I am not proud of it, but one day while on a recent long flight, to make the time pass, I found myself reading a rom com, total beach reading. There were so many other worthier things I could have read. I could have read an analysis of the impasse on judicial reform in Israel. Or I could have done daf yomi, the study of a daily page of Talmud. Or with Passover coming up, I could have studied the Haggadah to get ready for the seders. But no, I read a rom com, light and breezy. I know it would be wrong to evade taking responsibility for this choice. I did it. I own it. I would never want to blame anyone else. I would never want to blame my wife Shira, for example. Even though Shira read it first and seemed to be thoroughly engaged while reading it. Even though Shira downloaded it on our family Kindle. Even though when I asked Shira for a recommendation, she pointed me to this book. Still reading the rom com is on me.

The novel features a woman named Nora who writes love stories produced on The Romance Channel. All of her stories follow a script. In fact, so much so, that she challenges one of the characters to offer her some random facts, from which she will fashion one of her scripted stories. She says to this other character:

Give me a gender, a location, and a career.

Okay…female, Chicago, real estate developer.

Okay, easy. Stephanie, a young urban real estate developer, takes a trip to rural

Illinois to look into buying a dairy farm and turning it into a corporate retreat center.

The young handsome owner of the farm doesn’t want to sell, and they butt heads. But

as she spends more time on the farm, she sees how important it is to the community, and

they fall in love….One day she gets a call that she needs to shut down the farm immediately

or lose her job. She leaves for Chicago. He is heartbroken.

Oh, no.

Oh, yes. But wait…one day he’s plugging along, and who comes back? Stephanie!

Yes!

She’s gone back to Chicago and has realized big city living isn’t for her. She’s going

to stay out in the sticks, and oh, P.S., she has a brilliant idea for how to save the farm.

The end.

Nora generates story after story that follows the script, each gets produced as a movie on The Romance Channel, and so it goes until her own husband, and the father of their two young children, walks out on her, leaving her a single mother. The writer of scripts is now living a life off script. Thus the title of this rom com is Nora Goes Off Script.

Why do I mention this just now? Because the theme of this rom com connects directly with both our Torah reading—and our lives.