Every now and then a char­ac­ter steps clear out of the pages of a book and march­es right into your life. Jonathan Rosen’s Deb­o­rah Green is one of those. I want­ed to sit around her Shab­bat table, singing late into the night. I want­ed to take a long walk with her and dis­cuss the mean­ing of life. I want­ed to dance at her wed­ding. And every now and then, I want­ed to take her by the shoul­ders and shake some sense into her stub­born mind. Most­ly, I want­ed to be her friend and con­fi­dante. An ear­ly scene has Deb­o­rah stop­ping on a New York City street to tie the shoelaces of an obvi­ous­ly dis­abled, elder­ly stranger. I have known peo­ple who have done things like that right before my eyes. I have sin­cere­ly wished to be like them. I have always felt for­tu­nate when one of them want­ed to be my friend.

Deb­o­rah is a Reform rab­bi with a tra­di­tion­al soul and a sin­cere thirst for incor­po­rat­ing a touch of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty into the mun­dane occur­rences of dai­ly life. She does it with a light hand and a touch­ing integri­ty. When she meets Lev, more skep­ti­cal than she, more gun-shy about embrac­ing life, she reach­es out to share her vision of how life ought to be approached. He isn’t an easy sell. With a depressed and ill father, a schiz­o­phrenic best friend and a for­mer girl­friend he knows he has dis­ap­point­ed, Lev knows that there are no easy answers. But Lev means heart and his turns out to be reach­able after all. He dis­cov­ers that utter­ing a bless­ing now and then makes him feel blessed, too. It gives him a strength he had not antic­i­pat­ed. It enables him to meet life’s chal­lenges with grace and for­ti­tude and with a renewed ener­gy for tack­ling the obsta­cles in his path. As with the best lit­er­ary char­ac­ters, we watch Lev evolve and grow.

The book is not all touchy-feely emo­tion, though. The fast pace of New York City life adds a brac­ing dose of fresh air. And sev­er­al scenes have a unique humor of their very own. Of note is one episode in which Lev, through a com­e­dy of errors, is misiden­ti­fied as a rab­bi and, in order to avoid dis­tress­ing a bereaved fam­i­ly, he finds him­self per­form­ing a funer­al with not the faintest notion of how such things are done. And he pulls it off, well almost, any­way. If you like your humor slight­ly dark, this scene is a gem.

Rosen has pre­vi­ous­ly demon­strat­ed in both fic­tion and non-fic­tion that he knows just what to do with the writ­ten word. His writ­ing seems effort­less and his prose flows mer­ri­ly along in per­fect ser­vice to his char­ac­ters’ cel­e­bra­tions and sor­rows. Joy Comes in the Morn­ing is a joy to read any time of day.