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A remarkable first novel: who deserves to be the New Rosh Yeshiva?

Article Excerpt
The Search Committee: A Novel, by Marc Angel. Jerusalem and New York: Urim Fiction, 2008. 155 pp. $19.95.

Rabbi Emeritus Marc Angel of Congregation Shearith Israel, who has written over twenty-five books on Sephardic intellectual traditions and Jewish philosophy, has written a remarkable first novel.

Angel's novel, The Search Committee, is at once modest and harrowing. Its design is charming in its simplicity. It is clear and short--its hundred and fifty pages are a quick absorbing read. But the book's very unpretentiousness makes it all the more unnerving; the novel is a shocker on its own quiet terms.

The conflict at the heart of the story is simple. Two Orthodox rabbis, Shimshon Grossman and David Mercado, are vying to become head of a leading New York yeshiva; and, over the course of a week, they and nine other Jews connected with the Torah academy present to a search committee their opinions on which candidate should be selected.

It turns out that even to have a search committee is bold, because the yeshiva was founded in 1938 by Grossman's grandfather, a renowned rabbi who fled Hitler Germany. It was led from 1945 to 1985 by Grossman's father. It's obvious that now Grossman should take up the reins, or so one might assume. Grossman's credentials are impeccable, his yichus (ancestry) in the Lithuanian Jewish intellectual world is unmatchable, and the Torah academy has flourished with the greatest success, not just growing exponentially from one hundred and twenty-five to six hundred students, but with an extensive shidduch system of marrying off its students to girls of wealthy families so that the young men can live a life assumed to...

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