While in theory the Torah demanded that each Jew imitate a just and compassionate Creator, forgiving each other before each Day of Judgment so that they themselves could hope to earn forgiveness, in practice, the more pious Jews were, the more they adhered to stringency upon stringency, the less likely that was to occur. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, sometimes known as haredim—literally “the fearful ones”—referring to their terror of transgression, paradoxically never forgave or forgot even the slightest deviation from social rules etched in the reinforced concrete of community boundaries. And now with her father’s marriage to a baalas teshuva, he had taken a jackhammer to those boundaries, smashing through them.

While Shaindele hoped that time would eventually dissipate the heavy fog of communal disapproval hanging above their heads as people shifted their idle minds to some other scandal, she had no illusions it might benefit her or her older brothers the way it would her siblings—six-year-old Chasya and two-year-old Mordechai Shalom. Unless her Bubbee’s long and distinguished rabbinical lineage could be mustered to mount a successful defense, the matchmakers would be scraping the bottom of the barrel for all three of them, the place where all the ugly, stupid, poor, handicapped singles with bad reputations sank, mingling with the divorced and widowed, as well as the aging never-marrieds.

Her brothers would probably have an easier time, she thought, being well-respected Torah scholars and, most of all, men. Men always had the upper hand, especially when they could bring scholarship to the table. After all, weren’t some of the most celebrated heroes of the Talmud former thieves, thugs, and ignoramuses whose brilliance in the study halls compensated for all their former sins?

As for herself, a girl and no scholar, it would be quite another story. She couldn’t help her fear. At nearly seventeen, the question of her shidduch was pounding fiercely against the shores of her consciousness like huge breakers on some forsaken island, ravaging her serenity and reshaping the coastline of her thoughts.

But this was not the time to think about that, she berated herself, taking a deep breath as the sound of the flutist’s first plaintive notes broke through the chatter, replacing it with the hopeful, almost heartbreaking Jewish wedding song: “And so will be heard in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, the sound of happiness and the sound of joy, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.”