Beinoni by Mari Lowe (2025)

Summary: Ezra Safran, age 12, is supposed to fight the manifestation of evil in the world when he turns 13. Unfortunately, evil is manifesting in the world and it's not even his bar mitzvah yet. And is fighting the manifestation of evil and vanquishing it really the right thing to do? A mid-grade book.

Longer summary:

Every 70 years, a cave opens and a gurya dinura (lion cub of fire, however it can be of any monster or animal) comes out. It must be killed or forced back into the cave by the Nivchar, who is a boy who just turned 13 or a girl who just turned 12, during the first three hours of the morning of their birthday. If they do not, the gurya grows up (remember, gurya is a young lion) and once it's mature, it's fully in its power and starts to sow havoc in the world. A new Nivchar is born either 1) 12 or 13 years before the cave is set to open again, if the gurya is defeated, or 2) fairly soon after the gurya defeats the Nivchar. In other words, if the Nivchar fails, the gurya cannot be defeated for 12 or 13 years, and evil is loose in the world.

A Nivchar is identified via birthmark and can be from anywhere, so while it's notionally run by the Sanhedrin (who seems to do nothing else other than run this show, they are not otherwise Sanhedrin-ing), there are organizations all over the globe that work to preserve the Beinoni time between the time the last gurya was defeated and the new one comes out.

The book begins in the Beinoni time.

It has been 83 years since the last time the cave opened.

There is a student in Ezra's class named Aryeh.

Aryeh's bar mitzvah is about ten months before Ezra's.

You can see where this is going.

It really doesn't seem to occur to Ezra to realize that while he thinks they're in the Beinoni time, it's been 83 years. This is supposed to be a 70 year cycle. But then that detail comes out later on in the book that, no, things don't necessarily go to shit immediately, it only happens as the gurya grows up and becomes an adult. Ezra has known this all along and in theory can do math. But since it's the Beinoni time, he doesn't.

Except then, the night of Aryeh's bar mitzvah, the Beinoni time starts to break apart. Wars break out, plagues, etc. But there's also "good things", like suddenly new vaccinations and improvements to car technology -- I, unfortunately, know how long those things take in development so I can't even buy in for a second that this is the result of non-Beinoni time driving innovation, I just cannot, I cannot, I can't.

Also, Ezra, overnight, developed ADHD. It has gone from a rare thing to fairly common. The old existing med doesn't work on Ezra, but the new med that just came out works great on him. Yay?

So Ezra is trying to figure out why the Beinoni time has started breaking, he's having problems in school and at home from suddenly waking up with ADHD, he's making friends with the disruptive kids, including Aryeh, his father (the Rosh Sanhedrin) isn't listening to him about the Beinoni being broken, and there's also this shadowy group called Nura who are doing... something. Something magic. Something with blood magic that seems like it's trying to destroy the secret ancient village called Chorvos HaGoral where the cave is (the whole ancient village/facility moves around, which is why in the book, it's in upstate New York.)

And naturally, the previous Nivchar, named Leah, is still around. Because, hey, she only turned 12... 13 years ago. The previous Nivchars have all signed a cave wall and so Ezra knows the last one was Leah, but had assumed she was elderly. Not that she's running Nura, trying to take down Chorvos HaGoral because she feels the Sanhedrin ruined her life by raising her since she was very young all to take down a fiery monster... only for her to get to the cave on the night she becomes bas mitzvah and she discovered that her gurya was a baby boy. And she walked away from the cave.

Thus leaving the baby boy to be raised by a member of the Sanhedrin, the way Leah was, and the way Ezra is (I was kind of expecting a reveal that his father isn't his biodad, but that's not the case, Ezra was just born to a member of the Sanhedrin who then later became Rosh Sanhedrin). Aryeh's adopted dad then dies like a year before the book starts, and he gets fostered with another Sanhedrin family, but he doesn't get along with the kids, including the oldest daughter Mariam, who used to be good friends with Ezra, but they drifted apart. She is instrumental to the plot and knows more about Chorvos HaGoral than anyone. Leah was her babysitter until Leah finished college, and Ezra knew her.

Obviously the entire Sanhedrin, and probably all those other secret organizations, all knew the entire time that Aryeh was the gurya that Ezra will either have to force back into the cave or kill on his 13th birthday.

No one bothered to tell Ezra this, because this is a book. Instead, he has a personal trainer who has been training him to fight people, yes, but mostly training him to fight fiery monsters. It's possible the personal trainer himself doesn't know, but everyone in charge does. They have not, at any point, spent his entire life preparing him for the fact that his gurya is a kid only slightly older than he is, discussed the moral implications, or done anything that would be reasonable or responsible to do if this were not a book.

Aryeh also knows, by the way. He also doesn't bother to tell Ezra, even as they become close friends. They do a school project together to make a model succah that people like, and at the event where they show them off and be judged, Ezra's father, the Rosh Sanhedrin, has a talk with Aryeh along the lines of "hey, just stop being friends with him, it'll make it easier for him later." And so Aryeh does. So Ezra also has to deal with Aryeh no longer being his friend, and literally no one bothering to tell him things.

This didn't really bother me as much as it may sound; I am aware of the tropes and expectations of the genre in which I am reading. And the bit about Aryeh = lion = gurya is really well done; I actually didn't see that one coming. Possibly this would have been more obvious to someone who doesn't treat Aryeh as a perfectly normal name (especially in a book directed at a wider audience; this is why both this book and the time loop book have a main character named Ezra: it's pronounceable -- I'm actually struggling, a few days after reading Beinoni, to remember any kid characters in this book with non-pronounceable names. I think one of the adults is a Yechiel? Not sure.), and so who might have googled the name a few chapters in to find out what it means, but for me, the only narrative surprise is that the Sanhedrin got a baby boy who is a magical lion evil animal, and decided to name him Aryeh but didn't go far enough to name him Aryeh Leib. At least, we're not told he's an Aryeh Leib. Perhaps that is something we should assume, or maybe that would be going too far.

Ezra also starts getting prophetic visions. His father doesn't believe him about those, either.

Ezra, Mariam, Aryeh, and Ezra's friend Binyamin stop Nura from doing some kind of magic to destroy Chorvos HaGoral. Leah claims that she wants to preserve the Beinoni but also that she doesn't want the Sanhedrin running things and ruining kids's lives by raising them with this destiny over them and the pressure. Not entirely sure how well her actions align with her statements but that's not really important.

And then comes Ezra's 13th birthday family/friends party on Wednesday, before his bar mitzvah celebration on shabbos -- I am just going to parenthetical here in case I forget to mention, but this book is excellent about letting you know what time of year it is, we even know Ezra's bar mitzvah parsha, it provides minor details, so we know the day of the week that Ezra turns 13. This is commitment to the calendar and I approve.

And then Ezra fights Aryeh at the cave, and Aryeh gets away with many mini-guryas that actually are all animals and monsters this time, and they attack the family/friends party, and they fight, and Aryeh goes back to the cave, and then Ezra gets him into the cave and goes in with him together... and then decides that free will means free will, and that the Beinoni time doesn't really give people free will (the book takes this as read, I disagree that the book doesn't prove this), and so he should let people have the opportunity to choose to be their best selves or their worst selves, and he takes Aryeh out of the cave, and then it's three hours after he turns 13.

The Beinoni time is broken.

At least, until the next baby is born, to fight Aryeh. We end the book with Aryeh living with the Safrans, and Leah having been removed from Chorvos HaGoral before it has magically moved on to its next location, to await the next Nivchar. And in 12 or 13 years, Aryeh will be pulled to the cave to fight that person.

The end.

Oh, and obviously the preface of the book briefly quotes Yoma 69b with an ellipses, just so we know exactly what we're getting into.

Okay. So. You know how there are some books where people say they want to fight the author?

I don't want to fight the author. I want to have a long meal with the author and then sit around the table eating snacks and talk about this book and the choices being made. Because some choices were made.

Because I know, and Mari Lowe knows, what this book is about and why this happened. Mari Lowe says in the afterward she came up with the idea while doing Nach Yomi. The plot bunny of the book is right there in the quote in the prologue. It's clearly meant to be a riff on the story in Yoma that's quoted shortly at the beginning of the book: the rabbis remove the yetzer hara and discover that's a bad thing overall.

But what if-- what if they hadn't decided that? What if, every generation, someone has to fight the gurya dinura (aka why they're even using an Aramaic term in this book in the first place) and if they defeat it, there's no evil in the world for seventy years, and if they don't defeat it, they have to wait for another person to be born and come of age and defeat it, and during those years, there's evil in the world?

And since it's midgrade and this is Judaism and so obviously that gives the perfect opportunity for this to be a bat mitzvah or bar mitzvah kids. (Including non-Jews. The book is very clear that the chosen one of each generation can be, and has been, from anywhere.)

So. I get it. I fully understand and I appreciate how this book came to be. I know this is a mashal about the yetzer hara. Mari Lowe knows this is a mashal about the yetzer hara.

But this book fails because it's not actually about the yetzer hara. It's about the forces of evil in the world.

And since the end of the story in Yoma is that they have to release the yetzer hara back into the world for the world to continue, then yes, at the end of this book, they also release the gurya dinura to be evil in the world.

And the moral choices of this are so bad.

So the first question you have is, huh, so what's the worldbuilding here. The answer is do not think too much about the worldbuilding. I mean it. Do not.

The Holocaust happens. The Black Death happens. The Spanish Inquisition happens during a Beinoni time, so while there is still some tension, there is no persecution or expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

And see. Here's the problem. The end of the book where they let the gurya dinura be free essentially makes the case that it was Bad. That the Spanish Inquisition. Didn't happen. That is the moral stance being made here.

That is not a philosophy that I think the author shares! That is not a philosophy defended by the book! But that is the moral stance that the book is presenting.

The book also does a cowardly thing by having Ezra's (and Leah's) gurya dinura be a kid. That is such a cop-out. It does drive the moral question of the book: hey, is it okay to shove a 13 year old into a magical cave in order to prevent great acts of evil. Except Ezra only finds out about Aryeh too late to do too much soul-searching. There are bits and pieces here and there about if Beinoni is good, but even Leah, who has lived for 13 years with the question of, hey, what should you do with Aryeh, claims to want Beinoni preserved. It comes up various points that Beinoni is holding people back from achieving true greatness, but this is a world that has electric cars and telephones and also enough minor details in the background to make it clear that a lot of world history was different.

So maybe Binyomin wasn't the star of the class, but I really don't buy that it was Beinoni holding him back, and frankly I think Aryeh has a vested interest in making it seem like Beinoni is bad.

And because Ezra hadn't known, he hadn't had an opportunity to really absorb the moral quandary, but he's very aware of all the terrible things that have been happening in the world since Aryeh turned 13... and on the other side, he weighs it with "but people are doing charity now! And there's new vaccines!" and none of that would be necessary if it weren't for Aryeh in the first place, and also, see above: I know how long development cycles are. They did not magically come into existence when Aryeh turned 13; I can accept many worldbuilding decisions, I cannot accept any hint of "oh yeah new awesome electric car stuff was developed in under a month".

Also, I'm not really even going to touch that Ezra wakes up with ADHD. Because Aryeh being 13 means that ADHD stops being rare and mild, so I suppose we're supposed to believe that Ezra had ADHD before, it was just mild, but that's not really born out from the text; Ezra repeats many times before Aryeh's bar mitzvah that he's good in school. Aryeh -- again, vested interest -- makes the claim that Ezra was never held back by the Beinoni time, everyone else was, thus making Ezra look good in school, but again, I don't buy that.

And Ezra would never have been susceptible to the argument of not defeating the gurya if it wasn't Aryeh. But a midgrade book isn't going to be a moral pondering over the value of the yetzer hara in the world.

But it just feels like such a cop-out.

Because you cannot need the gurya to be mature and doing evil actively in order to have creativity and innovation in the world when the technology in the world is the exact same as the technology in the real world in the time the book was written.

And the question of "is it better to allow people to choose to be good rather than having them always be good" doesn't even work in the worldbuilding.

And yes at the end of the book, it does leave open the question on if Ezra did the right thing; it reminded me a little of The Golem Of Brooklyn in that sense. It's not a pat moral answer, that yes the protagonist did the right thing.

And Ezra is feeling responsible for all the bad things in the world. Because he is. And Aryeh is, but Aryeh doesn't seem to have any control over it at all; it's not like convincing Aryeh to cut it out would do anything at all.

So, did I like this book?

I don't know. I really don't know.

When I started this book, I felt so very seen. Like, nakedly seen. This was precisely the kind of book I would have written when I was ten.

You can't write this kind of book! You can't publish this kind of book! They don't have this kind of thing in the public library!

It's 2025. Yes, they do. Thank you, Mari Lowe. Signed, my inner ten year old.

I wanted to like this book so much.

For this book and it's choices to make any sense, it needs to be clear that in the quote from Yoma at the beginning, what it means by manifestation of evil is the yetzer hara. But that's not this book. This is not a book about the yetzer hara. This is a book about deciding if you're going to bind evil or not and live with the consequences and force everyone to live with it too.

And the book takes the philosophy that the gemara story ends with: binding the yetzer hara does more harm than good. Because it has to.

However. The execution of that in this book does not make that case very well, and the main problem is. That it's talking about the manifestation of evil, and plagues, and wars, and disease, and poverty and starvation and many many bad things. Evil as a separate concept from the people who do it -- except when it tries to tie it back to people having free will to make decisions and decide to do good or evil -- except that viruses do not have a choice between good and evil, actually, and neither does cancer.

And so for this book to work, you have to accept that by evil we mean yetzer hara.

But the yetzer hara isn't a bad thing! That's the entire point!

But none of the things that Aryeh unleashes on the world are good things.

But saving Aryeh and dooming millions of people to die is the right choice. Or is it? At least the book leaves it open ended.

Truly did not like the whole "Jews control whether evil is active in the world or not", no matter how the author tried to paper it over by having Nivchars from all over, and many other organizations in the world helping out, the whole thing is a Jewish story and is run and organized by Jews and it's based on Jewish religious principles and fully grounded in Judaism and yet and yet and yet.

But this is the -- I can't find a good term. But the problem with making books that other people will read, rather than a self-indulgent thing you pass around to your friends, or post to a locked community, where you know the people who will read it; instead, when you publish, you are aware that your audience is unknowable and you have to make writing and plot choices that reflect that, and in many situations, there are no actual good choices because of the context of the world in which it is published.

Because parts of this book are absolutely what I would have written when I was ten, and yes, down to the DO NOT THINK ABOUT THE WORLDBUILDING aspects of it.

But I didn't publish any of those books. I didn't even write those books.

If you write a Jewish story with Jewish characters -- but are publishing it widely so it has to have goyim in it too -- then you can't bend over backwards to appease the wider readers or you lose entirely what even makes it readable to the audience who are the same as the main characters. You go too far in that direction and you end up with the kind of book that works for nobody: the wider audience doesn't want read it, and the audience who should be the core one won't touch it because it feels icky. (Yes, I'm still mad about Yoyo Gold, but that's not even this, because that author isn't frum and doesn't respect or understand frumkeit, he just thinks he can write a frum book for outsiders and who cares that the book is wrong on every single level).

Maybe it's the question on if the book flinches. This book flinches, but not in a bad way, or an infuriating way. This book flinches in a genre-appropriate way.

So. Moving on. What did this book do well? Basically everything else.

This book is grounded in Judaism in a remarkable way. You know what time of year it is, always. You know what they're learning in school. You understand why Mariam and Ezra aren't friends anymore, they're just awkward together, and it's not a "oh, it's because they want to date". They don't want to date! But they can't be friends because it's awkward.

Ezra's the baby of the family; he has several older sisters, two of them are married, he has niblings, and he's 13.

Leah's last name is Pardes, and when it comes up, the author goes (not a precise quote) "the four who entered the orchard. one died, one went mad, one lost his faith, and one survived. which one is leah" and that's so good and such a good way to pose it and A+++ excellent name choice.

There's all these things that are so well done!

I would have liked this book if Ezra, at the end, had to fight and defeat a monster, and then defeated it, but that wouldn't be this book that's based in Yoma. And I would have liked it if he had discussed it with people, or thought hard on the morality of the Beinoni, and had actual proof that it was holding people back from greatness (what exactly is greatness? Is it just doing well in school?) and so decided, hey, let's see what happens if we don't defeat the gurya -- but, I must stress, the Holocaust happened, Ezra fucking knows what happens when the gurya defeats the nivchar.

So, is it just that this mashal doesn't work? Because yeah, it just doesn't work.

But as a book for a midgrade audience, to get them to talk about if Ezra made the right choice, then it does what it should do. This is a book that seems created for people to have opinions about it, which is good. It's certainly the most thought-provoking of the Jewish midgrade books I've read to date. It's well-written, it's executed well, it makes ADHD a sign that evil is abound in the world.

And the foreshadowing is good. Ezra seemingly can't do basic math, but it is good foreshadowing, you definitely are meant as the reader to go "uh... what do you mean Beinoni is broken and it's been 83 years and you're about to turn 13, are you sure" and realize that the gurya actually wasn't defeated last time.

And just absolutely lol that his name is Aryeh. That's clever and good, and you don't even have to think too much about the fact that that meant a member of the Sanhedrin actually decided to choose that name for him.

But it's also a mashal of the yetzer hara without being allowed or able to admit it's about the yetzer hara, and that's just a major failure of the book. But you couldn't write it another way and still have it be this kind of book.

Would it have been a stronger book if Aryeh had been raised as Ezra's brother? Would it have been stronger if Ezra had known all along? I don't know, but it wouldn't have been this book, and those books would probably have been too boring or too complicated or too messy to fit into the requirements here.

That this book exists at all is something that it's still a bit hard for me to understand. They let you publish this stuff!

So. I guess my rating is: shrug emoji.

It decided to be a book I didn't like, but it did it very well, and I don't even really mind that it did that, because I understand.

But please don't think about the worldbuilding.

And would have been fantastic if the Sanhedrin actually did Sanhedrin-y things. You have a world where the Sanhedrin still exists! It's not even "the Sanhedrin still exists and you wasted the plot on this" because the plot's not wasted, it's just... the Sanhedrin still exists and we do not explore the ramifications or even the details of that. Beause the worldbuilding isn't load-bearing.

"What icon to use-- lol, use the gam ze ya'avor one. That's thematically appropriate for this book. lolololol."

EDIT: I've come to the conclusion that what this book needed was an antisemitic sensitivity reader, someone who could turn to the author and say "see! Even the Jews agree that Jews are responsible for all evil in the world!" And then perhaps the author would have made some edits.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm not sure if I want to read this book or stay safely 10 feet away from this book at all times.

I have never considered before that a book might be better if it was published by Artscroll and had to deal with the content restrictions of being published by Artscroll, but honestly this might have improved this book. On the other hand, there would be no girls in this book in that case.

My thoughts exactly, thank you for saying it first.

It's definitely a book that makes choices! And probably could be used as a case study in regards to adapting other stories, or plotting, or commiting to an idea. Because as soon as it decided it would adapt the gemara story, it locked itself in to an ending. And then it had to work backwards. But it also had to work as a midgrade book. It's ambitious in that it does seem like it was meant to spark the kids to think about if it was the right choice or not, and this book is definitely better than the lady or the tiger. But how many of the choices it made, which forced it into a framework, are a necessity for being published in midgrade? I don't know. Would a midgrade book accept "no, Aryeh really does need to be shut up in stasis in a cave and to turn back into whatever fire creature he'll be in 70 years, for the sake of the entire world"? Someone on goodreads compared it to Percy Jackson, wihch I've only read bits and pieces of here and there. What kind of vanquishing of other teens happens in those books?

Beinoni by Mari Lowe (2025)

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