What If Churches Had Matchmakers?

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TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B>What if Churches Had Matchmakers?</B></div> <div> By Julia Duin  ---  January 05, 2001</div> <bR> <div> <B>How Jews Do It Right</B></div> <bR> <div> When it comes to singles, the Jewish community takes a common-sense approach almost unknown among Christians. Jews assume that everyone is to marry; it’s just a matter of finding the right person. This is why Jewish community centers frequently set up matchmaking and dating services like the one I encountered a decade ago in Houston. The Jewish community center there employed several women to assemble photos in scrapbooks and -- for a fee -- interview Jewish singles with the hopes of making a match. Such well-meaning efforts do not go over so well with Christians. A Christian group that tried starting up a similar service in northern Virginia a few years ago eventually went out of business for lack of interest.</div> <bR> <div> Christians seem to think that marriage will just "happen," but Jews have a better understanding of the need for some human intervention. They also have a pragmatic reason for their matchmaking efforts: Intermarriage rates among Jews approach 50 percent -- and mixed-faith couples have historically poor track records in holding to the faith of either partner. Kids from such marriages usually get a pastiche of both religions, if anything. Thus, unless Jews marry other Jews, the religion faces a pretty dire future.</div> <bR> <div> Jews know as well as anyone the difficulties of finding a mate, which is why their tradition allows for a matchmaker -- like the character Yente in Fiddler on the Roof -- to help things along.</div> <bR> <div> Would that churches had matchmakers! If you tell most pastors of your wish to marry, you will likely get a puzzled look and a suggestion that you trust God’s sovereignty in the matter. But the typical rabbi wants to help you pair up.</div> <bR> <div> <B>The Love Rabbi</B></div> <bR> <div> By far the most engaging advocate of the let’s-all-marry mentality is Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments (Doubleday 2000). The book, he jokes, is where The Rules meets the Torah. "People are not falling in love," he laments in an interview. "People are dating. They are not made of Velcro anymore; they are made of Teflon."</div> <bR> <div> I met Boteach in 1999 to interview him about his book Kosher Sex (Doubleday 1999) -- a popular hit that has already been translated into thirteen languages. The book advises couples to save their sexual fire for marriage. Rabbi Boteach takes a popular and non-preachy approach to explain what he calls God’s view of romance and dating -- and to push home the point that the Almighty is foremost a matchmaker. After all, pairing Adam with Eve was one of the first things God got around to after creating the world. The rabbi shares none of the Apostle Paul’s back-and-forth about the benefits of marriage; in fact, he says the Ten Commandments themselves are a sort of dating code.</div> <bR> <div> The rabbi turns to Deuteronomy 5 to sketch out how one’s love life can line up with God’s commands. My favorite is his read on the first commandment, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." He applies this in approved rabbinical fashion to men who love the sound of their own voices. Women, he adds, always complain that men talk and will not listen. Nor do the men bother asking women questions about themselves, even though the women are busy querying the men and hoping men will return the favor. "Man or woman," says the rabbi, "yours was not the voice that thundered forth from Sinai. So start falling in love with the sound of your date’s voice and let them be heard."</div> <bR> <div> He links up the third commandment, "Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain," with men’s tendency to boast. "So many men try to impress women with their accomplishments," he says. "But women say the most exciting thing about a guy is confidence and sense of humor." Then there’s number four, "Keep the Sabbath holy." Just as the Sabbath is a chance to take one day off, "Give your date the gift of time," he says, "which is yourself. Don't buy her a gold necklace. Show her you're the gift. That’s the whole essence of the Sabbath. Women are a great mystery to men. I believe the answer to that riddle is every woman wants to be the Sabbath bride. Women want to be around a man to whom she is first. He turns off his cell phone and cancels business trips to be with her. She is his Sabbath. When he’s around her, nothing else is urgent."</div> <bR> <div> As for the seventh commandment, "Do not commit adultery," the rabbi reads this to discourage giving "your sexuality to someone who does not deserve it." The rabbi believes people should delay sex until marriage, "but I'm a realist," he adds. "I feel at the very least, people should delay sex until they are emotionally intimate."</div> <bR> <div> <B>Personal Advice</B></div> <bR> <div> Boteach met his wife, Debbie, thirteen years ago when he was 21 and she was 19. After three months, he proposed marriage. Their introduction was arranged, as is often the case among Orthodox Jewish couples. "Orthodox couples do not date for recreation," says the rabbi, who now has six children. "They date for marriage. People say the modern dating scene stinks. Well, all dating stinks. How would you feel going through a ten-year job search? These long evaluations really scar you." And not having sex with your date "makes it more easy to evaluate someone for compatibility," he adds. "Sex muddles the mind. You're no longer honing in on the personality; you're honing in on the pleasures."</div> <bR> <div> Even psychologically, he says, it doesn't help to bring sexual intimacy into a dating situation because each relationship needs a little mystery. "Relationships are based on curiosity," so curiosity "must remain an integral part of a relationship. Don't open parts of yourself to someone who has not wooed you yet. Always keep parts of you to be explored. Men and women are so overexposed to each other. They lose their dignity in front of each other. There’s this fatigue."</div> <bR> <div> He and his wife were virgins when they married. The purity they brought to their union formed an unshakable basis for marriage. He told me, "The wedding night for a virgin bride and a virgin groom is so spectacular even though they are bad at sex. It is awkward and they don't know what the heck they are doing. The difference is, however, they are discovering it together for the very first time. And sexual innocence is the sexiest thing of all. Think about this: Why don't men want to marry prostitutes?"</div> <bR> <div> <B>So Where Are the Evangelicals?</B></div> <bR> <div> Rabbi Boteach sure says some common-sense things. But with the possible exception of Joshua Harris, I know of no comparable public personality in evangelical Christian circles who cares about what singles do or think or how they date.</div> <bR> <div> I remember attending a press conference in 1995 at Focus on the Family’s Colorado Springs headquarters where founder James Dobson gave several dozen journalists a rare chance to pelt him with questions for an hour. I was one of the first up to microphones. What, I asked, was he doing about single Christians? If he was so interested in keeping families together, could he expend some energy on helping people form families?</div> <bR> <div> Mr. Dobson gave me an utterly blank look. I got the sense that I was totally outside his universe. I remember him stumbling out an answer having to do with one of the Focus on the Family magazines reaching out to single parents. But I wasn't asking about single parents.</div> <bR> <div> Perhaps my question was poorly phrased, but Mr. Dobson’s aides at least got the drift of it, as a few of them pulled me aside afterwards to assure me that he really is concerned about singles. In the five years since then, however, I have seen little evidence of this concern -- and not only from Focus, but from many other family-centered ministries as well.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Marriage and the Single Liberal</B></div> <bR> <div> Jews are family-centered as well, but they are far more practically concerned about their singles than we Christians are. Not long ago, my newspaper ran an excerpt from the Web site jewishworldreview.com. A former ultra-liberal Jewish woman turned Orthodox Jewish wife and soon-to-be mother had a piece titled, "What’s a nice Cosmo girl like you doing with an Orthodox husband?" Andrea Kahn, once a Los Angeles Times reporter, a staffer for the National Organization for Women, and a member of American Atheists, said that at age 25 she had decided to take a class on Jewish philosophy and mysticism. For the next seven years, she wavered between her Reform Jewish upbringing and the Orthodox Jewish world that was beckoning to her.</div> <bR> <div> After a sojourn in Israel, she decided to move to New York and its far greater concentration of Orthodox Jews. Sure enough, she was soon introduced to her husband-to-be, with whom she entered into a "shiduch," a quasi-dating relationship whereby they were to decide as soon as possible if they were a match. Four months later, they got engaged. Ten weeks after that they were married. Before their wedding, she writes, the two "never touched, but got to know each other, unclouded by the bond of physical intimacy, which so often super-glues the wrong people together."</div> <bR> <div> Long-term singles are more than rare in Orthodox Judaism -- they are unheard of. One reason for this, Rabbi Boteach explains, is that Jews have a very pragmatic view of people’s need for sex -- along with an insistence that such passion must be restrained within marriage. In fact, he insists, Judaism, more than Christianity, dwells on the pleasures of sex -- Jewish law even says the wife should experience pleasure before her husband. Ancient rabbis gave explicit advice to married couples as to how they could be both holy and intimate. Thus Rabbi Boteach is not alone in his belief that sex is the holiest experience known to man. "The bedroom," he writes, "can be holier than a synagogue."</div> <bR> <div> Believing this, it’s no wonder that Jews marry off their offspring as soon as possible -- or at least help them to find mates. Christians would do well to learn from them.</div> <bR> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=21 BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <A HREF="id5.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="New Info">New Info</A>          <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Kathan Family Homepage">Home</A>            <A HREF="mailto:fridolin@kathan.co.nz" TARGET="_top" TITLE="mailto:fridolin@kathan.co.nz">Email</A></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>