The menstruation symbol
The title story's main symbol comes as the crisis of the story. The Hasidic man is asking permission from a Rabbi to hire a prostitute to help him attain the "Relief" that he cannot get from his wife because of her ongoing menstruation. This makes her ceremonially unclean, raising a symbolic question about victimhood and justice. Who is the victim here? Is it really the husband who doesn't get to have sex? How is the victim not the woman who is being chronically disenfranchised for a health problem that is against her will? Of course the menstruation is something she suffers, but the husband doesn't have the empathy to notice.
The patriarchal conspiracy
Obviously, if the religious rules prohibiting a man from sleeping with his wife while on her period are adhered to strictly, then the Rabbi should also uphold the obvious Jewish laws pertaining to prostitution. But instead, the Rabbi and the man strike up a kind of deal. Their conspiracy allows the man to prioritize his own sexual desire above his commitment to his wife, so that the patriarchal conspiracy symbolizes the disenfranchisement of women. She is dehumanized because of her period, of all things.
Stalin's regime
One of the stories happens in Stalin's oppressive regime. The protagonist in "The Twenty-Seventh Man" is a writer who is only guilty of a clerical error, a typo in a publication. But for this, he gets the full weight of the law, and he acts as a martyr in this unfair oppression. The regime is under question in his martyrdom, so what does it symbolize? To him it symbolizes dehumanization, like the Hasidic woman's dehumanization. It represents the crisis of injustice.
Judaism and diversity
The stories are about Jews in For the Relief. But what kind of Judaism is presented? The answer is found in the motif of diversity. To these people, Judaism means different things at different times. For the Hasidic man, it represented strict obedience to rules for rules sake. That is a legalistic Judaism, and it isn't one that all the characters in the book share. When "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" discusses Protestant Christianity, an analog is found for a certain kind of Jewish enlightenment, showing that Judaism is as complex and diverse as any religion.
The narrative motif
Beyond Jewishness, the characters share something more important. They are experiencing life in a narrative mode. This is shown through motif of point of view. The question of these stories tends to be the characters interpreting their circumstances. The celebration of narrative and point of view reaches its symbolic peak when imprisoned men begin an exchange of artistic writing; the writer in "The Twenty-Seventh Man" reads his art and is applauded by an audience, but under such severe duress that the moment takes on transcendental, metaphysical qualities, as if reality itself were only narrative art.
