“A sock isn’t a woman,” Chanochi announces. “It can’t be an agunah.”

With Mount Meron

looming outside their window, Yoeli and Leiky are doing their best to put together a decent supper of leftovers.

Yoeli brushes olive oil and crushed garlic over the tail ends of the bread they ate with butter earlier. He toasts them in the little sandwich maker they brought with them. Leiky freshens up the leftover salad with some chopped onion and tosses it with a bit more seasoning.

“A gourmet dinner in an enchanting tzimmer in the Galil,” Yoeli says with a gentle smile. The kitchen leads out to a porch — quite a small porch, but as long as there’s room for a table and two chairs, alongside the brooms and the cupboard holding the cleaning products, they’re fine.

Leiky doesn’t laugh.

“Is something bothering you?” Not only does Yoeli speak melodiously, he’s also well attuned to other people’s melodies.

“Yes,” she says, pausing to gulp back some of the hurt. “I met someone on Rechov Yerushalayim today, and she was screaming at me.”

“Screaming?”

“Not exactly screaming. She was all nicey-nicey and concerned. About our wonderful niece Tovi. But underneath all that, she was really just telling me off. ‘People these days raise money without thinking,’ she said to me, all sugary sweet. ‘Why can’t your niece just do the procedure through Kupat Cholim? Sometimes people just decide they need surgery abroad when there’s no real reason to go halfway around the world. Dr. Soroka in Beit Hadar does ear operations, too.’ ”

Leiky sighed. “And of course this woman is an expert, because she researched it once for a friend. Oh, and they also do ear reconstruction at Assaf HaRofeh. And using tzedakah funds for a surgery that could have been done free, that’s a serious sh’eilah, she said sooo nicely. And did your brother- and sister-in-law realize how their daughter will feel, the psychological damage from being a charity case? And did they look into getting supplementary insurance before they jumped right into a fundraising campaign? And then she tells me that her cousin flew to America for surgery, and it was all covered by American insurance that he got a week before. You just need to know how to make the system work for you!”

Leiky is delicate and fragile as gold filigree and can’t even do a good imitation of the unnamed woman’s verbal onslaught. She tries, but she gives up.