The Most Important Ingredients

I returned home from Eretz Yisrael after seminary some twenty-odd years ago to a perfect storm. My family lived in a small out-of-the-way community where there were no jobs available and no suitable career-training programs. It didn’t help that I had never been a good student. My teachers didn’t think very highly of me and neither did my own parents.

I was the odd man out in my family because I was highly emotive and passionate while my parents and siblings were reserved and restrained. My father’s motto was “If someone spits on you tell yourself it’s raining.” This impassive attitude did not dovetail with my sensitive demonstrative nature and without any school or job to head out to each morning I found myself around my family all the time which was very difficult for me.

I had dreams of marrying a serious ben Torah but my parents did not think I was cut out for a kollel life. Besides my father was very cynical about and biased against people who were too frum or yeshivish. “The frummer a person becomes the less of a mensch he becomes ” he often declared. He and my mother were insistent that I date only boys who were already working.

Having nothing to do and feeling out of place in my own family I spent my days sitting and waiting for The Phone Call to come. I said Perek Shirah and Shir Hashirim every day and I did every other shidduch segulah in the book. I had to get married. It was the only way out.