Growing up as a semi-Orthodox Jew in the heart of the Jewish Catskills, I regarded ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic Jews as the enemy.

I worried my gentile friends would see these wildly bearded men in their long black coats, furry black hats, and curly peyes, or these women who hid their hair beneath shiny wigs or shmattes and wore long-sleeved shirts and black stockings even on the hottest day, who were rude to the Christians in our town, who tried to hide more expensive fruit under the cheaper fruit at the market, who drove ultra-slowly along our narrow country roads and threw stones at anyone who dared drive past their bungalow colonies on the Sabbath, and they would hold the sins of my ultra-observant co-religionists against normal Jews like me.

Yet even as I disdained these refugees from another era, I felt hurt they looked down on me. What was I, an idol worshipper? I attended Hebrew school every day. I kept kosher (except when I ate in restaurants). I prayed at our synagogue every weekend and on the holidays (even though I had little idea what the prayers I recited meant). Maybe I didn’t observe every one of the 613 commandments in the Torah (all right, I observed fewer than half a dozen), maybe I ran around in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, but did I deserve to be treated like a goy? I knew if I approached one of those bearded holy-men and asked him to share his wisdom, he would turn his black-coated back and walk away.

The older I got, the more I resented the ultra-Orthodox. They prohibited women from becoming rabbis and encouraged them to be little more than wives and mothers. As secular Jews stopped visiting the Catskills, the Hasidim bought our resorts, let the buildings fall to ruin, and didn’t pay taxes. In New York City, where I live now, they colonized entire neighborhoods and voted for candidates whose politics I abhor. When a religious Jew I know decided to leave his sect, his wife refused to allow him contact with any of his five children, which nearly killed him. The Haredi, as the ultra-Orthodox are known in Israel, are trying to turn my people’s homeland into a theocracy; when I visited Jerusalem, an angry mob surrounded my taxi, pulled me out, and terrorized the driver because he was an Arab and, as they shouted in their fractured English, they didn’t want “our women” being driven around by “their men.”

So the odds that I would enjoy a Netflix series about a family of ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews seemed nil. It seemed even less likely that I would watch the first few episodes of Shtisel and find myself telling everyone I knew, Jewish or not, they needed to watch the show. Or that I would join the Facebook group devoted to dissecting the minutiae of the characters’ lives and pore over the postings as rigorously as if I were studying the Talmud.

Why has a show about a family of Haredi Jews acquired such a fervent following, not only in Israel but the United States (a Brooklynized version of Shtisel might be in the works)? Is Shtisel little more than a reheated helping of Fiddler on the Roof-type schmaltz? A more literary version of Chaim Potok’s 1960’s middlebrow bestseller, The Chosen, or his later novel Asher Lev, about a Hassidic American Jew who wants to become an artist? How could the show’s creators ignore the political realities of contemporary Israel by focusing on a family of Haredi who live in the relatively open-minded neighborhood of Geula as opposed to the nutso extremists who sequester themselves behind the walls of Mea She’arim or the ultra-rightwing settlers in the West Bank who routinely engage in violence against their Palestinian neighbors? In other words, is Shtisel a guilty pleasure about whose enjoyment I should feel some guilt?

Perhaps I should. I am suspicious of the way the series so easily relieves secular Jews like me of our fear we are anti-Semites. With his melancholic green eyes and dreamy smile, Akiva Shtisel, the star of the show, is by far the handsomest Orthodox Jewish man I have ever seen. (The narrative arc involves Akiva’s struggle to find a bride—he calls off not one but three engagements—while figuring out what to do about his craving to draw and paint in a community that believes art to be frivolous, even sinful.) If I have a crush on Akiva Shtisel, how can I be a self-hating Jew who secretly believes observant Jewish men are undesirable? If I admire Akiva’s sister Giti for her resourcefulness, pride, and strength, might I also be lulled into overlooking the ways ultra-Orthodox Jewish women are complicit in their own oppression?

On the other hand, if a work of literature takes me inside a community I ordinarily couldn’t enter and breaks down or contradicts the stereotypes I have entertained my entire life, maybe I shouldn’t be so critical. I grew up believing most ultra-observant Jewish men don’t meet their brides until their wedding day and, when they consummate their marriage, make love through a hole in a sheet. Who knew that couples are allowed to meet on dates that seem less awkward than the dates at which I meet men to whom I have been introduced by OkCupid, or that each party to the match is permitted to veto the shidduch, or that husbands and wives generally do seem to love each other, even if they avoid public displays of affection and sleep in far more clothing than I do. How astonishing to see Akiva’s father, Shulem, speak to a secular woman on a train (even if his son does needs to chide him for being rude)! Maybe, if I hadn’t expected to be scorned, I might have started a conversation with one of those black-coated holy men and he might have answered.

Clearly, much of Shtisel’s popularity can be attributed to seeing how one’s grandparents or great-grandparents lived in the shtetl (albeit this time with cell phones), listening to characters speak not only Hebrew but Yiddish (a language that is largely disdained by secular Israelis and that most of the actors needed to learn to play their roles), and witnessing Jews practice a religion that consists of sanctifying the mundane—blessing every bite of food or sip of tea, thanking God for every new day, kissing every mezuzah at every threshold and every book from which one studies or prays. I gave up believing in God when I was thirteen. And yet, when Giti tells the secular Israeli boy for whom she babysits that no matter what his mother says, he should bless every glass of water he drinks, I found myself cheering. (My reaction to the show reminds me of the joke about the Jewish woman on a bus who sits next to a bearded man in a black coat and ferociously derides him for giving anti-Semites a reason to hate the Jews. When the poor man speaks up and identifies himself as an Amish farmer, the woman turns on a dime and gushes: “Oh, I just love the way you people preserve your traditions and live such pious, family-centered lives!”)

Is a sympathetic portrayal of a fundamentalist sect a sin? In focusing on a relatively moderate branch of the Haredi are the writers trying to avoid the oppression suffered daily by Arab-speaking Israelis and Palestinians? Certainly, the near absence of political unpleasantness allows American viewers to enjoy the show without hearing a chant in their heads that all things Israeli should be boycotted. But the Jews of Akiva’s neighborhood do try to stay out of politics. And the argument that any portrayal of a religious group is false if it doesn’t focus on its most extreme members is as specious as if a show were criticized for focusing on devout Arabs in the West Bank attempting to be good Muslims while earning a living and marrying off their kids rather than on Islamic radicals throwing rocks and building bombs. Few Haredi men are as worldly as Akiva Shtisel. Even fewer strive to become artists. But many works of literature gain their power from portraying those few members of a community who chafe at its restrictions or don’t quite fit. How many Mafia bosses see psychiatrists? How many chemistry teachers become meth manufacturers and distributors?

The show’s creators, I think, strike a perfect balance between the characters being admirable and being flawed. Akiva’s father, Shulem, in some ways resembles that beleaguered but loving patriarch Tevye, but he bears far more similarity to the vain, selfish, gluttonous, manipulative, and misguided dairyman created by Sholem Aleichem than to the jovial Broadway version portrayed by Zero Mostel. Shulem does everything in his power to discourage Akiva from becoming an artist. But he obviously loves his son. And his longing for his dead wife, Dvora, is so overpowering it moves him to trade his hope for lying beside her for eternity to obtain the money required to buy his son’s painting of an Orthodox Madonna that he is certain would have caused his dead wife terrific pain and shame.

Even more complex is the portrayal of Shulem’s brother, Nukhem, a crooked businessman with a nose so huge it might have been the proboscis appended to a medieval actor playing Shylock. Nukhem neglects his saintly mother, tries to prevent his daughter from marrying Akiva, and cheats his brother in ways only a sadistic mastermind could invent. By coincidence (or maybe not) Nukhem lives in Belgium, where, in real life, the residents of a town called Aalst recently marched down their streets wearing papier mache costumes of Jews who are dead ringers for his character (the marchers deny charges of anti-Semitism, but their giant-nosed Jews sported safety-deposit boxes dangling from their genitalia). The uncanny resemblance made me cringe. And yet, the series enabled me to see Nukhem not as a hideous stereotype of whom I should be ashamed, but as an imperfect human being whose kind exists in every religion, race, and nationality, no matter the shape of his nose.

Did I need a television show to convince me that ultra-Orthodox Jews love their spouses? That they laugh and have good times and read bedtime stories to their kids? That they help their wives endure labor, if only by singing psalms into a cell phone from another room? That I need to stop seeing every Jew through the eyes of an anti-Semite? Apparently, I did.

I no longer feel the need to apologize for taking pleasure in seeing Jewish life as it might have been lived if it hadn’t been nearly wiped out by the Holocaust, watching Jewish characters try lead meaningful lives as Jews rather than as wisecracking caricatures on a sitcom. I grew up hearing Yiddish all around me. But all those relatives who spoke Yiddish now are dead. How can I not relish hearing the language not as the punchline to a dirty joke but as a living mode of speech, capable of great nuance and affection? I wince when I recall the woman who stood up at a reading by Isaac Bashevis Singer and begged him, “Please, Mr. Singer, say something, anything, to us in Yiddish!” But it seems a legitimate function of literature to document the ways in which languages migrate, mix, and marry, as Spanish and English have mixed and married in the United States and as Yiddish, Hebrew, and Arabic continue to mingle and miscegenate in Israel.

The rewards of watching Shtisel extend much farther than the sentimental glow of Giti’s Sabbath candles. The series is extraordinarily well written and acted. The smallest details shimmer with significance. Not every event is commented upon or connected to the show’s main plot. Of course, this tends to frustrate some viewers. A high percentage of the posts on Facebook are from members who demand to know what happened to the parrot Lippe buys to cheer up Giti (do they really need someone to tell them that the minute Giti gets home from the sanitarium, she forces her husband to sell the bird?) or the stray dog that Shulem’s grandson brings home from his yeshiva and that Shulem, despite his distaste for the animal, promises to take care of, then allows to escape through an open door. Yet such moments go a long way toward sketching in and shading each character’s inner life; what better way to demonstrate how lonely Shulem is than to show him marveling at how much he misses a dog he loathed?

In an episode seemingly devoid of explanation, Akiva accompanies a friend on a visit to a woman we surmise gave the friend up for adoption or otherwise abandoned him. Afterward, the friend suffers a breakdown and Akiva, who is mourning the loss of his own mother, visits him in a mental hospital. In later episodes, the friend reappears at the restaurant where Akiva and his friends hang out, but we hear nothing more of his struggles. What has the episode accomplished? Nothing except to reinforce our understanding of the importance of mothers in a society in which women might not be allowed to attend yeshiva but seem to be the center of their families’ lives, without whom their husbands and sons couldn’t find or put on their socks.

Nor do the writers pass moral judgment. Should we root for sixteen-year-old Ruchami to be allowed to officially marry the young scholar with whom she eloped, even though we know Ruchami is smart and independent enough to secretly read Anna Karenina, and even though Hanina is so devoted to his studies he will burn his hand or freeze his feet to remain awake to study more? Although I can barely believe I am saying this, I ended up in favor of the marriage.

Above all, Shtisel is a moving exploration of the ways in which many of us, Jewish or not, weigh the demands and rewards of individuality against the obligations and joys of family life. At its most profound, the series is about two distinct and competing ways of achieving meaning and transcendence, the first through a religious sanctification of the mundane, the second through art. Shtisel speaks to a legitimate longing for the comfort and security of putting your family first. Of knowing the rules. Of knowing exactly what you need to do to be regarded with honor within your clan. The series gives its viewers a good idea as to why anyone would relinquish so much freedom in return for avoidng the terrors of thinking for yourself, of making it up as you go along, of setting outlandishly high expectations for your own achievements, your choice of mate, your children’s accomplishments, of wrestling with the demands of creativity, individuality, and self-invention.
In Shtisel, if a child looks sad, that child’s parents or grandparents offer comfort and advice, no matter how misguided. If a grandmother wants her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to throw her an anniversary party—never mind that her husband is dead—they happily pitch in and throw a party. Although Akiva’s friends occasionally waste their time playing video games and can’t entirely suppress their curiosity about smart phones and the internet, the inhabitants of Geula don’t waste their lives staring at computer screens. Are they better off staring at the tiny print in religious texts in which rabbis wrestle with questions such as whether a man should be allowed to pull his cart by yoking together a goat and a fish? The show’s viewers, like the students in Akiva’s class, are left to ponder such conundrums on their own, or in consultation with their fellow yeshivaniks on Facebook.

Shtisel doesn’t make easy claims about the morality of putting one’s pursuit of freedom or creativity above one’s obligations to one’s family or one’s community. At the start of the series, Akiva’s brother-in-law deserts his wife and five children, an act his daughter views as criminal. Are we rooting for Lippe to grow back his beard and return to the stifling responsibilities of supporting his family and studying at a yeshiva, even though he feels such a life might kill him? Is Akiva’s older brother Zvi Arye right in giving up his chance to become a singer with a Jewish band—a calling for which he seems to have even more talent than Akiva does for painting—because he might weaken his devotion to his studies and neglect his wife (who, ironically, seems so excited about her husband’s opportunity to sing with the band she summons him to her bed)? Does Akiva’s gift as a painter truly demand to be cultivated and shared with the world, or is that merely his excuse to get out of working a job that bores him and call off yet another engagement, postponing his obligations as an adult Jewish male to start a family? Why is Akiva so insistent on remaining an observant Jew even as he becomes an artist? That the series does such an honest job of showing what is to be lost or gained on either side of that equation makes it worthy of being considered art itself.