What relevance do ancient Jewish rituals have in our modern lives? And can the frameworks of our ancestors repair our relationships to each other? These are the questions that punctuate Jessica Brilliant Keener’s restrained and powerful new novel, Evening Begins the Day, which weaves two families’ lives together as they contend with the ways in which their relationships have frayed at the edges and now threaten to unravel entirely.
Reeling after the discovery of her husband’s emotional affair, Rachel Cohen decides to take a break from her marriage to process his betrayal. She rents a house next to Cynthia Meyer, a woman whose organization funds the environmental education curriculum Rachel designed. To Rachel, Cynthia looks like a woman who has her life together. But the truth soon becomes clear: Cynthia has a deeply troubled relationship with her daughter, Lauren, a senior in high school whose drug use and school skipping jeopardizes her ability to graduate.
These three women’s stories braid together and apart as the novel kicks forward. Rachel and Lauren both decide to engage in the ritual of counting the Omer, the forty-nine day period between Passover and Shavuot. Like with all days in the Hebrew calendar, each day of the Omer begins in the evening. Participants in the ritual name each day out loud as it begins. In Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, each of the seven weeks of the Omer is associated with an attribute — loving kindness, discipline, compassion, endurance, humility, bonding, and nobility. Throughout the Omer, Rachel and Lauren reflect on these attributes and use them to look more closely at the problems in their own lives. The Omer recounts the span of time from when the ancient Israelites moved from enslavement in Egypt, often called a spiritually narrow place, to the moment they received the Torah, or the deliverance of their spiritual liberation. The characters in Evening Begins the Day echo this journey; they each start out plagued by insecurity and self-doubt, but, through counting the Omer, they begin to find their way back toward themselves.
Everything comes to a head as the novel hurdles towards its conclusion, and in its final beats, Brilliant Keener demonstrates how her protagonists repair their lives. Even on the few occasions when Evening Begins the Day veers toward sentimentality, Brilliant Keener is clear-eyed about the heart beating at its center: that looking to the past is perhaps the best way of understanding our present.
Joshua Geller Schwartz is a marketing professional at a Jewish nonprofit and an obsessive Goodreads reviewer. He lives with his fiancé and his cat, Bubbeleh, in Brooklyn.
