Rule of Three
A conversation with Esther Kurtz
Three women. Three sets of rules. Can they nail the right choices despite the rules they’d love to break?
Abby needs to make friends to win a dare, but struggles to ‘get out there’ while holding on to her true self.
Shifra think she has it all together, until it all comes crashing when she’s faced with newlywed life and running a business.
Chana’s suddenly been thrust into the public eye as a shul rebbetzin. She’s never had trouble embracing life’s challenges, so why is become a role model for the women in the shul, despite their disapproval, such an obstacle for her?
Esther spoke to me about how the book’s lovable and authentic characters came to be, the personal nature of struggles, what “being yourself” really means, how being brave does not necessitate stepping out of your comfort zone… and much more.
YF: How did you pick the title, Rule of Three?
Three stories, three strong women, rule of three, that was just kind of the obvious conclusion.
YF: It’s obviously a very different perspective, reading them all together as opposed to just three separate stories. All of a sudden you see these three powerful women, three personalities that all complement each other, it solidifies into one.
When I originally wrote it as a serial, I had no intention of writing the second serial. And when I wrote the second serial, I had no intention of writing a third serial. They're all completely separate. After I finished writing the first one, it was like, so obviously Shifra’s about to have her Shana Rishona, what was going to happen? What was it going to be like? Because she has such an interesting situation.
YF: So that leads me to my next question. I was seeing some really strong consistencies in the themes, across each of the stories. Did you plan for that?
Not at all. What it comes down to really is that each story is a reflection of me, different facets of my personality, People who know me, they read them, they're like, oh my gosh, are you just writing about yourself? Are you Abby? And I'm like, that's insulting. Cause I'm not that bad. I'm Abby on my worst day, I feel like she's a bit much. But I also have a bit of Shifra in me, this kind of need to present well and be ambitious and a go-getter. So I think a lot of it is me talking to myself and work. Writing is very therapeutic, you have to work through your own issues, even if it is fiction.
YF: I think there are different parts of everybody because I'm not you, and I totally felt that way where each one was like, oh, I have that part in me, maybe just because the characters were so authentic, and every person has those parts.
I think it's of that a lot of us. I find what's lacking a lot in frum fiction is authentic characters, well‑rounded characters that aren't necessarily good people. You don't look at any of my characters and think – well maybe, Chana’s a good person. Chana is inherently a good person, but like Shifra, and Abby are very obviously gray characters. Like they're not sitting over their tehillim all day. I was really grateful for Mishpacha for allowing me to go there with characterization because you don't often find that in frum fiction. I think that's what resonates with people. Not even necessarily that they are these characters, but that there's just more authenticity within these characters.
YF: Chana, too, is inherently good, but there's a certain multi-facetedness of her, where all of a sudden you see the struggle behind that facade and it gives it so much more dimension.
Right, like she’s a tzadeikes, but a little floofy, she has a little bit too much personality. She doesn’t want to be the Rebbetzin, she doesn't want to behave
YF: At the end of Chana’s story, she started talking about the choices thing, which was totally unexpected for me, I did not see it going in that direction. I thought it would be going more towards something like Abby, where she's discovering that she doesn't have to be the person that she always thought she could be and she could stretch herself a bit. And then all of a sudden you bring in this whole other dimension. Could you tell me about that?
Chana’s story came from a question about a line in Abby‘s story where Chana’s like “it’s a good thing I’m not a Rebbetzin because I couldn’t hack that”. So the next question, and this is where a lot of stories come from – “what if…” What if she was a Rebbetzin?
So it had a situation where she became a rebbetzin. I originally conceived the story where you have a character who is second-guessing everything that she does. And my original thought was that Chana, who's always been so comfortable with herself, who's always been welcomed in the world, she's always been so effervescent… she starts to doubt herself and she's never had this moment. She's never had to doubt herself and it's a new thing.
And then as I was starting to write it, I'm a few chapters in, I was kinda struggling to really access her decision‑making and where she was coming in and where she was going. I realized that in some ways I didn't understand her because she's way too extroverted for me. She's way too happy. She's way too nice. She's a little bit too scattered brain for me. She's just not me at all. And then I realized, I could access her through my mother. My mother is incredibly extroverted, and everyone loves my mother. So I was like, okay, fine, I will channel my mother.
But I still wasn't able to understand how her reaction would be, how would she feel if she was in this situation. So I was trying to think, is there anyone who was in a similar circumstance who might be able to guide me? I ended up calling Yaffa Palti, a Rebbetzin. She lives in Florida now, but when she first got married, she lived in Israel. And then they moved to Mexico so he can be the Rav there. She doesn’t speak Spanish. And she was saying how difficult it was, she was like depressed, and it was so hard, and how she came to embrace it. She has some sort of similar trajectory, but she also has a really, really amazing personality that I thought could mirror Chana. So I ended up talking to her for a while, and I ended up realizing that the way I was planning to plot the story, where Chana would feel insecure and doubting herself for the first time - would have never happened. Because Chana is too old. She has too many positive experiences of being in new places and being in a new situation. She knows she can make friends that even though some situation is bad now, she would never fall into that despair.
I was talking to Yaffa, I asked her, how did you feel when you moved to Mexico, you couldn’t speak the language, you had no friends, what did you do? And she spoke about how snobby some of the people were, or whatever. And I was like, did you ever feel insecure about yourself? She's like, ‘No! It was like, what's wrong with them? I know I'm fine!’.
And I thought, oh, you’re right. Chana would never doubt herself. She's too fine with herself to doubt herself. It's like, what's the problem with the world.
So I end up realizing, what is really the core problem? She’s doing everything, but just kind of doing it by rote. So whatever happens, happens, whatever it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. She's not taking a sense of ownership because she didn't choose it, she just kind of fell into it.
I think we often do in life. We don't take ownership of our choices. Then they kind of end up being, chop-plop. We finally realized that when she introduced herself as rebbetzin and she's like, I will be it, I will do it.
YF: Fascinating – because initially, she doesn't even realize that this is her struggle. It’s a gradual process where she comes to realize, ‘Hey, I think this is my problem’.
Right, because if you think of Chana as a person, she's not very introspective. When I wrote a character like Abby, there was a lot of thought, there was a lot of just Abby, literally, you see a lot of her thoughts. With Chana, I had to take a lot of the things that she would think and find ways for her to say it because she doesn't think, she talks. There’s some people who live in their head more, and she doesn't live in her head. She lives in the world.
YF: Abby’s trying to be true to herself. And then she realizes that she has to get past that. It's 2021, the line of the day is “be your authentic self, you don't have to fake anything”. You’re going a little bit against the current trend.
There’s a very big difference between being true to your authentic self, and just being a mentch, just being a decent person. We're all selfish creatures. We're always looking out for ourselves, you know?
Being your authentic self - I don't think that that really applies to the selfish part of us.
When I think of being authentic to myself, I think that's being authentic to my curiosities, to my wonders, to my interests, to my relationships, to my boundaries.
That's totally separate from my middos. Middos and being authentic are two totally different things. You can be honest without being nasty. You can tell the truth without hurting someone's feelings. That's not authentic.
I think people confuse the concept all the time and I don't think it’s related to the idea of stretching for someone else or even stretching for yourself. When you're so authentic, then there's no room for you to grow because “this is me”. I think we all have some growing up to do always.
YF: Do you feel like Abby grew during the story?
She grew too, to an extent where she realized that she was always too comfortable with herself. Too comfortable with being this mediocre ‘person’ person. She has these moments where she realizes that her embracing her snarky or introversion is actually not helping her and not helping her with other people. So she can be an introvert when it works for her, but also realizing that
sometimes you need to step out of your comfort zone because it's better for yourself and it's better for other people as well.
YF: Stepping out of your comfort zone – we see it with Shifra - the confrontation of, ‘Hey, I'm really not a flexible person’.
It's funny because I think Shifra would think of herself as someone who does step out of her comfort zone in terms of like, ‘Hey, I'm going to go try to open up my own agency’. That's something that everyone would call to be brave, but it's not brave for her.
YF: It’s brave, but it's not stepping out of her comfort zone. She's comfortable with that kind of brave.
But at the same time, she can fool herself into thinking it's brave. She naturally is a go-getter. Her starting her own business is something that's totally within her personality range. But most people don't think that they're going to start a business, most people look at other people who start businesses and think they're crazy. So even though it looks other people call it bravery because it's bravery to them. But for Shifra’s personality is not bravery, but because other people call a brave, she calls herself brave.
She actually needs to really be brave in other areas of her life where other people might think like, what's the big deal.
YF: It goes back to the struggles that it seems on the surface of who they are is not really the struggles they're having and it's not really what's going on and there's so much past it.
A lot of what I like to explore in my writing is kind of like, if you look at the problems, are any of them major problems, like really major problems? You have typical non‑urgent problems and at the same time, because you have each individual character, everyone responds to things so differently. I love psychology. I love reading about psychology, social psychology, all that kind of stuff. And what I always find so fascinating is two people respond to the same stimuli differently.
YF: I remember hearing how previous generations had so many physical struggles, just survival, and our generation has so many internal struggles in terms of character. I'm seeing a common denominator. Some of the things that Abby went through, if Chana would have gone through it would be nothing – because the real struggle wasn't the thing she went through. The struggle was herself - just being.
I look at it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the olden days, you're busy worrying about food and shelter and literal safety. You can't start thinking about the love and belonging and my relationship with my mother‑in‑law and you literally just don't have the headspace for that. We are b”H not struggling with that. So we have the luxury to be indulgent of our own emotional needs. That goes back to the same idea about people reacting differently to the same stimuli and you don't have to have a huge drama to have a story because it's really all about the character.
I'm not the strongest plot writer, what I do is character. Because people are interesting.
I very much come from a character: who is this person and what are they going through and what do they need to get done and what's going on in their life that they need to resolve? And we'll let me throw struggles at them that will put them to the test and whatever ends up, whatever themes end up coming out, so be it.
I think a lot of times we look at frum fiction, we confuse themes with morals. We feel like stories have to have morals, they have to be right and they have to be unambiguous. It depends on how you define literature and what you define the purpose of literature. You know, if you think it's only supposed to teach you lessons, then no, you're not gonna want to read my stories. I write to entertain. And if you learn something that's wonderful too, but I'm here primarily to entertain. I get offended by the idea of writers seeking to inspire.
YF: Do you think there's an in‑between, thought-provoking?
So my story, you can read on several levels. You can read it like a series, just fly through it, fun read.
If you want to sit there and think about the characters - yeah. I put a lot of thought into it. There's a lot to explore to unpack if you're looking for it. But you don't have to go there if you don't want to, you don't have to.
You want to be able to read the story just as a story. And if you want to take something from it, you can take something from it. But if the message is ever explicit, then like it just turns the reader off. So you need to primarily write to entertain and it's almost like, you know, mothers will hide vegetables in their food to give their kids more vegetables. That's how I view it. You can't have vegetables out in the open. No, one's gonna eat them. You’ve got to hide them.
YF: What are you working on next? Are you doing another novel?
That is a very good question. I have this NaNoWriMo story that I completed, I wrote this story and I really, really like it. I need to go back and finish developing the characters, you know, cause you write everything super super fast. It comes from a course on social psychology that I took and the concept of the Abilene paradox. It's a group dynamics theory where basically everyone in a group is going to act in one way while the individuals in the group all want to act in a different way. Why? Because you assume that everyone wants the same thing, and you end up going against your own self‑interests
I think it kind of applies a lot shidduchim where there's this assumption of what a, you know, what a typical classic Bais Yaakov girl is supposed to want and want to do and what a typical classic yeshiva boy’s supposed to want and do, and what happens when they don't want that. But they feel like they are supposed to have that and they don't even question it. And when they. They start to question it, what happens? It’s a really fascinating story.
Esther mentioned that some of the things I brought up had not been her intention at all when writing the book. I admitted that I might be looking at the story deeper than she did.
I really believe in the transactional theory of reading in that when you come to a book, you bring yourself and your experience. And that's how you're going to view and understand and interpret the story.
YF: I love that idea. It's not necessarily what the author wanted to give you. It's what you're taking out of it.