Jason began joining Leora at the Jewish student center, where she had always gone for Friday night dinners while he ate with his teammates, meeting her later for a movie. At first Leora was thrilled, stunned to find herself no longer an abandoned woman on Friday nights, no longer needing to hide the fact that she had a boyfriend, or to answer embarrassing questions about where he was if he wasn’t with her. But then Moyshie began meeting with Jason on Saturday afternoons, coaching him with the help of a translated Talmud. And not long after that, based on Moyshie’s coaching, Jason stopped watching rented movies with Leora on Friday nights.

That mattered. In Leora’s house in New Jersey, twenty houses away from Jason’s, her family had a special Friday night dinner every week in honor of the sabbath. They lit and recited blessings over candles, sang the prayers over wine and bread, and sat down together for hours at the table, singing songs in honor of the day and then reciting the Grace after Meals, all in Hebrew—exactly like in those old Jewish folktales, except with climate control and less cholesterol. And those evenings always gave Leora the same feeling she got from those folktales too. On Friday nights, the windows of Leora’s family’s house turned themselves inside out, so that when you tried to look out of them, you could see nothing but black mirrors of the candlelight in the room’s gentle dimness, as if nothing outside had ever existed, as if nothing were gradually changing as things normally did.

But another element of the specialness of Friday nights at Leora’s family’s house, the part that doesn’t appear in those old Jewish folktales, was the weekly rented movie. It isn’t easy to explain, because there’s no metaphor for it—no God creating the world and then sitting back to watch home videos, no Sabbath Queen riding down out of the sunset to deliver the latest Hollywood release. And the story one is supposed to read on the Jewish sabbath isn’t in any movie—it’s the weekly portion of the Torah, which Leora’s family went to synagogue to hear every Saturday morning. But since her family never went out on Friday nights, in honor of the sabbath, and since Leora’s brother refused to spend time reading anything that he didn’t absolutely have to read in order to graduate from high school (which meant, strictly speaking, no reading at all), and since Leora’s parents loved movies, and since that’s what people do on weekends in little glowing houses in little New Jersey towns, every Friday night after they had finished reciting the Grace after Meals, Leora’s family would get up from the table, clear away the dishes, go into the living room, and watch a rented movie.