In Genesis 32, Jacob spends a night wrestling with an unknown figure, and as the morning breaks the man blesses him and re-names him Israel, which means one who wrestles with God. This moment is referred to obliquely in the first episode of the Netflix romantic comedy series Nobody Wants This, and it sets the stage for much of what follows.
The show stars Kristen Bell as Joanne, a strong-willed, smart, but shallow woman who is trying to make a name for herself with a podcast about sex and love that she co-hosts with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe). She meets Noah (Adam Brody) at a dinner party and she hits it off with him, until she learns that he is a rabbi. As he walks her to her car, she tells him, “I don’t believe in God.” She worries that this will offend him, but it doesn’t. Instead, he invites her to consider who God may be in a different way. He says, “Baked into the Jewish experience is wrestling with what God is or isn’t, and not knowing.”
This is not a show about God per se. It’s not even really a show about religion, though religion plays a huge part in it. This is a show about what it means to be a person with conviction, a person whose life means something. It is a love story and it is smartly written and very funny. At times it is cheesy, at times vulgar, but it never strays from the main theme.
For a show about a rabbi, God is mentioned surprisingly sparingly, but the places where He does show up are profound and provocative.
Later in the first episode, we see Noah preaching to his congregation. Joanne shows up just as he is reaching the most important part of his sermon. “We have all these chances to wake up and change the course of our lives,” he says. “Thinking about switching careers? Maybe that’s God pushing you. Hesitating about a big decision? That could be God telling you to think twice … But if you think God’s plan is supposed to feel like something specific and you haven’t felt it, and you wonder if we’re all in on some big secret that you weren’t in on, let me tell you, you’re in on it.”
As he says this last part, the camera focuses in on Joanne who smiles and exhales, as if his words have just lifted a weight from her shoulders.
Joanne struggles with the feeling that she isn’t good enough for Noah. In the third episode, she voices these concerns to her sister and her mother, played by Stephanie Faracy. “You have edge, dear,” her mother tells her. She pushes back, saying, “I’m not a bad person.” Her sister replies, “We’re not saying you’re a bad person, we’re just saying you’re a bad person relative to a man of God.”
This tension lives in the minds of many people. Our era is marked by anxiety. We have lost a sense of purpose for our lives which at one time would have been grounded in faith. In that absence, we find ourselves scrambling to find some justification for existing. Though our culture now has an antipathy for religion in general, there is still an inherent desire in our hearts for holiness, which Noah embodies. He effortlessly seems to exude goodness and kindness, and for Joanne, as for a lot of people, that is a tough standard to live up to. She worries that she’s not worthy.
Yet Noah doesn’t look at her as unworthy in the least. He takes his faith seriously and he exhibits many qualities of goodness – honesty, compassion, loyalty, a willingness to sacrifice – but he never looks down on Joanne. He sees the good in her that she often doesn’t see in herself, and his love for her makes her want to reach for more and strive to be better. Though the show never names it, there is an element of her desire for Noah that is clearly also a desire of her heart for God.
Noah may accept Joanne in her messiness and imperfection, but his family is not able to accept her because she is not Jewish. So she considers becoming Jewish. At a brunch with a couple of friends, she raises the subject, and one of her friends – played magnificently by D’Arcy Carden – says to her, “You should totally convert. It’s not like you stand for anything or have any strong beliefs.” She agrees, imagining that becoming Jewish is just another identity that she can take on. But as she discovers more about herself and about Noah, she realizes that there is much more at stake.
Judaism and Catholicism are very different from one another, and there is a lot that happens in this show that relates specifically to elements of American Jewish culture. Yet there is plenty that Catholics will be able to relate to, including the pressures of family life and the question of conversion for non-Catholics considering marriage to Catholics.
This show is not for everyone. It has strong language, a fair amount of sexual innuendo (though no nudity), and an approach to certain moral questions that runs counter to Catholic teaching. Nevertheless, it manages to explore in a fresh way the relationship between faith and virtue in a format that makes it digestible to the average person in our culture who would not normally consider religion.
The show highlights not only the benefits of faith, but our need for grace, and the fact that none of us are ever so far from God’s light that we cannot change and grow.
