"True to Me"

I was delighted to read this piece in Mishpacha Magazine by Avigail Stern, especially when it echoed my sentiments exactly. 

Stern describes her experience as an "older single," and when she finally reached her limit of "pretzel twisting." 

As a single, one is bombarded with "advice," and she was no different. She initially listened to it all, dutifully following their suggestions, until she realized that she was no longer dating as herself. 

She worked to rediscover what she needed, what she wanted, what her values were. She realized that hishtadlus doesn't mean doing everything and anything possible. 

She was discerning when it came to single events. She stopped sending out photos of herself, a step that she had disliked intensely (as did I, but my parents didn't let me). 

The experience of meeting her husband sounded so familiar: 

And at the end of our . . . first date, I walked back into my friend’s house shocked and confused. I liked him. And he liked me back. How did that happen? Wasn’t that weird? That’s not how this dating game usually plays out!

I’d been dating for 20 years. I knew how this was supposed to go. But apparently, the rules can change at any time, when Hashem wills it.

. . .  I knew I’d met someone unlike anyone I’d met before. I called my rebbetzin after that second date, just to make sure something wasn’t wrong with me. Is it normal to just like someone? To feel we connected so easily? To not have any doubts or worries about him as a person? Maybe I was missing something ominous that I just didn’t see?

She laughed and said this was a gift from Hashem called clarity. Barely four weeks later, still shocked but no longer confused, we drank a l’chayim. It had been the easiest, smoothest, calmest dating experience I ever had.

When I came home from my first date with Han, I remember walking through my door and thinking, "I like him!" Usually, it would be, "Well, he has this, this, and this going for him, but that, that, and that isn't really ok with me. People would say that it's not important. I guess I should go out again? But I don't want to . . ." 

Those "advisors" would have us think that choosing a spouse is merely a matter of tallying pros and cons. But it's more than that. I think of that scene in Fill the Void when they go to consult the rebbe, and he asks her what she feels about it. She briskly replies, "It's not a matter of feeling," but the rebbe begs to differ, that it is very much about feeling. 

It doesn't have to be about forcing yourself to become someone else. It doesn't have to be about ignoring your gut just because someone is good "on paper." It doesn't have to be analyzed to death. We meet the right people in our lives at the appointed times. 

Hindsight is 20/20, but I regret how nervous I was in those years, how I believed that "trying" meant being on active alert 24/7. It was exhausting, while the ending would be the same. I'm still a worrier, though. That hasn't changed. Work in progress.  

They Hate Us. Get Used To It.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a favorite of mine. That became even truer after reading her book review of the novel, "The Netenyahus." 

Yes, the book is a novel of Bibi's father, Bentzion, during his time as a professor in the US. The review begins in a typical fashion, about the actual book, and then Brodesser-Akner goes on a different track. It goes on a bit, but it is very, very worth it: 

. . . this was a great book for me to read during the weeks after it was assigned to me, as tensions between Israel and Gaza raged and there was nothing to say about the matter but to text a few people I’m in touch with when these things go on and share my distress and also my inability to share that distress wider. This was a good book to read while tensions escalated further, and friends reached out to me who were just “wondering” what my point of view was on it, in argument stance, and people I didn’t know tweeted at me to see where my support for an oppressed people was, and my peers — who know full well the constraints of my job’s policy on tweeting about politics — liked those tweets, as though being Jewish meant I had to answer for Israel or its government, which I did not elect.

This was a good book to read as I searched in my mind for other times that we cheer on terrorism except for when it’s happening to the Jews. This was a good book to read as the meme of asserting that the “questioning” of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitism morphed into something that was, by some parties, actually yes quite gleeful and strenuous anti-Semitism, until finally my sisters in Crown Heights began to beseech their male children to cover their yarmulkes with baseball caps and the world around me was heartbreakingly silent as Jews were cornered and threatened here in America for something going on very far away. This was a good book to read as my Jewish friends texted me that this would stop if we could just get Bibi out of power, and I wondered what they texted each other in 1935 as the streets in Europe overheated with pogrom energy and there was no Bibi and no Israel to blame.

Yes, this book was a good place to turn to swallow my opinions, which are fungible and not really worth knowing, while smart people I know shared the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as cherry-picked by an Instagram influencer or by a tweet thread that had similarly squishy origins. It was good to actually know the history of the Jews and the founding of Israel, and learn about the infighting of it even more intimately from this book, as the noise around me got louder and I began to sympathize with Benzion’s point of view not of everything, but of the fact that it must be that Jews were doomed to this particular torture: to remain polite and quiet as this goes on. I began to have Benzion Netanyahu’s old dogmatic thought that this kind of hatred had to be preordained by someone. A thing they didn’t prepare me for in my own cheder — or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear it — was that the unique sadness and terror of anti-Semitism for the Jews lies not just in its violence, but in the people around you pretending that the violence doesn’t even exist. . . 

I finished writing this as the rhetoric against Israel that had parlayed itself into violent attacks on Jews in the streets of America quieted down, and the online conversation on anti-Semitism chastened itself and receded into its safest places, a place we all agree upon, where a gentile author was bullied into removing an innocuous Anne Frank reference and we Jews all broke our necks nodding in defense of an author being able to make an innocuous Anne Frank reference — and there we American Jews were again, going out of our way to promise we won’t be any trouble if you just leave us alone. Yes, make jokes about that poor dead girl, just please don’t kill us!

In the house I grew up in, a family descended from survivors, we have a pragmatic approach to anti-semitism: It exists, and there is nothing we can do about it. My brothers had always been told, if out for the day in Manhattan, to wear a baseball cap and tuck their tzitzis into their pocket. Nothing new there.

Han, who is from a similar home, becomes upset when he reads obviously slanted news in favor of the oppressor, but I shrug. The world hates us, this I know, no matter how they try to couch that dislike into rejection on moral or warranted grounds. 

Do Not Do Unto Others

I was once reading a book review by TaraShea Nesbit about the Mayflower and this line jumped at me: 

If, for the first time in your life, somebody appears to be below you in the pecking order, make hay: Peck them all you will. You might never get the chance again.

I used to wonder how those who married "late" could easily turn around and airily call other singles "picky." Or how someone who was bullied could turn around and bully others. Or how someone who once walked into a room alone and felt isolated could turn around and ignore another who walks into a room alone.

 

I've tried to be careful myself. Han has a few single friends, and I've made a couple of attempts to set them up, to no avail. I tell Han to be sure to tell them that I won't be insulted, and that they should feel no pressure, because I certainly do not want to do to others what which was done to me. 

 

But sometimes I'm not so careful, because the situation is not comparable, and I succumb to my baser urges. I find myself saying something in an obvious attempt to assuage my insecurities, and after I cannot believe I have done that. 

 

The other morning, while getting dressed, my brain went into a pathetic feedback loop about, embarrassingly, my high school principal who really did not get me. I was on a smug, internal rant, until I accidentally stabbed myself in the eye with the mascara wand. Initially I was irritated, but then I realized I had it coming. Do I need to try to mentally change the balance 20 years after I saw the woman last? She's no more the same person than I am. 

 

To be self aware is so freakin' hard.