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Russian Doll and Repairing the Past
Is it ever possible to do tikkun—an act of spiritual rectification—for the sins of previous generations?
That’s the religious question at the heart of the new season of Russian Doll, easily one of the best things on television and a show that has vaulted into my personal TV Hall of Fame.
Russian Doll is a wonder on many levels. It is one of those shows that makes you work; you can’t zone out our you’ll quickly lose track of the show’s jolting narrative momentum. The first season tackled cycles of death and rebirth while making observations about human compassion and empathy. The new 7-episode season uses the hoary vehicle of time-travel in a fresh and startling way to explore the fabric of reality, mental illness, and the questions of what gets passed from generation to generation and whether we can ever repair the past.
It's also worth pointing out that Russian Doll is entirely the work of women writers. At its heart is Natasha Lyonne, who stars as Nadia Vulvukov, a brilliant and damaged Jewish woman with a New Yawk drawl broader than the Bowery. Lyonne is the show’s lead actor, producer, writer, and occasional director; she co-created the show with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland. In addition to Lyonne, all the other leads in the series are also women: Nadia’s ultra-hipster friend Maxine, her surrogate mother Ruth, her schizophrenic mother Nora, and her grandmother Vera. The men in the show are present but incidental, like in Chapter One of the Book of Ruth.
Natasha Lyonne as Nadia in “Russian Doll”
Russian Doll is one of two great current shows that are exploring cosmic religious questions, both on Netflix. But while Midnight Mass, which I also loved, is thoroughly Catholic, Russian Doll’s spiritual vocabulary is unabashedly Jewish (from an intellectual and knowledgeable-but-secular frame of reference).
Frankly, it’s astounding that something this intelligent, unexpected, and challenging could even make its way onto TV. Perhaps this is one positive result of the overkill of streaming platforms that are available today; there is room amidst the cacophony for programs that are niche, high-quality, and philosophically reflective.
Anyhow, in Season Two, Nadia wanders between timelines that locate her on the cusp of her 40th birthday in 2022; meeting her pregnant, schizophrenic mother in 1982 New York; and incarnating as her own grandmother in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944. Ostensibly she’s searching to restore lost gold kruggerands that represent her family’s legacy that was initially stolen by the Nazis, and later lost by the soulful but deeply damaged Nora. But at the heart of her disjointed sojourn is the question—can we do tikkun for the sins of previous generations?
It strikes me that this is a very Jewish question. Before you say of course not; latter generations can’t be responsible for their elders’ failures, consider:
1. The tradition of saying the Kaddish for a dead relative for eleven months after their death. Kaddish isn’t simply a “memorial prayer” recited by a mourner. Rabbi Maurice Lamm called Kaddish “an epilogue to a human life as, historically, it served as an epilogue to Torah study… Kaddish confirms a parent’s life of goodness on one hand, or effects repentance for a parent’s life of sin on the other.”[1] A medieval midrash (Tanna De-bei Eliyahu Zuta, Chapter 17) asserts that when a child recites certain Jewish prayers, it redeems the soul of the dead or at least eases their suffering.
Why eleven months, rather than a full year? Because the Talmud also asserts that a full year is the duration of the punishment of the wicked in Gehinnom (hell). We presume that our parents and loved ones do not fall into that category; like every other human being, each of them is a complex mixture of righteousness and shortcomings. Therefore, Kaddish is recited for almost a year, but not quite.
2. “Dayenu” at the Seder: This year, I learned a tradition from the Haggadah commentary of Rabbi Nachman Cohen. Rabbi Cohen suggests a startling insight about the 15 stanzas of Dayenu: Each verse marks a moment in the Exodus story (the spitting of the Sea, being fed with manna, Shabbat, etc.) when the Israelites in the Torah kvetched and revolted. By singing “Dayenu,” we are essentially recalling this litany of revolt—and offering an act of repair for those mistakes.
3. There’s an old cycle of folk tales or ballads that transcends many cultures, including Judaism.[2] Essentially, a traveler encounters an unburied corpse somewhere on the road (in Hebrew, a מת מצוה / met mitzvah), and in an act of compassion, arranges or pays for the burial. Later in the journey, the sojourner experiences a life-threatening crisis, and is miraculously saved through the intervention of the soul of the dead person for whom he cared. Folklorists call this motif—wait for it—the Grateful Dead.[3]
Yes, each of these examples belongs to the realm of superstition, or at least non-rational dimensions of faith. Still, they point to bigger existential questions about life and death and the relationship between those two realms. After all, many of us have taken on the job of executing the estate of a loved one—which often includes taking responsibility for “unfinished business” that the dead couldn’t quite complete in their lifetime. This, our tradition asserts, is a Mitzvah and a holy task.
Psychotherapy, too, is predicated on the idea that simply saying “children can’t be responsible for the sins of their parents” is far easier said than done. A huge proportion of therapy is about disentangling one’s self from the dysfunctional patterns of previous generations.
“Easier said than done” can also be said of Nadia’s trippy tribulations through Russian Doll. Natasha Lyonne is playing with old yet continually relevant philosophical and religious themes. She’s doing it through a lens that is thoroughly New York, more than a little psychedelic, and infused with the ghosts of the Shoah. Russian Doll is also wickedly funny as it addresses, with subtlety and wit, some truly profound existential ideas.
[1] Rabbi Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (Jonathan David Publishers, 2000, p.152).
[2] See Howard Schwartz, Miriam’s Tambourine (Oxford University Press, 1986, pp.262-264 and citations on 379).
[3] Phil Lesh tells the story that in November 1965, Jerry Garcia picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary—band historian Dennis McNally claims it was a different dictionary—and, at random, came across the entry “grateful dead” describing this folkloric motif. (Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 2005, pp.61-62.)
