Sex & Love

Do My Political Views Make Me a Matchmakers Nightmare?

Sitting in yeshiva, I don’t exactly meet very many women, so my data set is a bit limited. But from using Frumster, here’s what I’ve determined: Whenever I write to Modern Orthodox women, specifically ones whose profiles evince some basic … Read More

By / February 11, 2010

Sitting in yeshiva, I don’t exactly meet very many women, so my data set is a bit limited. But from using Frumster, here’s what I’ve determined:

Whenever I write to Modern Orthodox women, specifically ones whose profiles evince some basic compatibility with me in terms of both hashqafa (weltanschauung or ideology) and general intellectuality, the response I usually get is quite negative. That is, if I get a response at all, since about half of the women don’t even bother doing that. 

By contrast, when I write to the more yeshivishe or Beit Ya’akov-ish women, I almost always get a very warm response. I don’t know how many times the woman has said that if only my hashqafa were further to the right, that she’d be very willing to date me. In fact, several times, I’ve been told that even with my left-wing hashqafa, she’d love to be platonic friends, if only she were willing to have platonic friendships with the opposite sex. So were it not for my left-wing hashqafa, it would appear that the more right-wing young women would accept me just fine, if not enthusiastically so.

When I asked my rabbi where I ought to go to yeshiva after my three-year stint in Machon Meir (a yeshiva for baalei teshuva in Jerusalem), one of the places I mentioned was Machon Pardes, a non-denominational left-wing-but-traditional coeducational yeshiva. My rabbi responded that he could see why I’d think they were good for me, given their generally left-wing stance. Nevertheless, he said to me, what I needed was a place with the character of a traditional yeshiva (unlike Pardes) but with a left-wing hashqafa (similar to Pardes). In any case, I needed to leave Machon Meir; my rabbi told me that its limited degree of tolerance was due only to its baal teshuva character (with the newly religious, one must perforce tolerate some degree of insubordination), and that if I were to attend a frum-from-birth-type yeshiva with the exact same hashqafa as Machon Meir, such as Merkaz ha-Rav, I’d get eaten up alive for sure, my rabbi told me.

In other words: I’m hashqafically left-wing but behaviorally right-wing.

So it would seem that I need to find a young woman who has the personality of a yeshivishe person but the hashqafa of a left-wing MO. Maybe a Beit Ya’akov graduate who’s gone waaaay off the derekh?

Who am I? A shadkhan‘s nightmare.

  • psyherbs

    funny

  • Moldren

    Heh… funny… and sad.

  • veganesther

    Oh for the love of G-d, please get away from labels!  Aspergers is just a modern day label designed to justify a psychologists’ paycheck.

    While this label may be helpful in getting a student the extra help she needs to master a subject , self diagnosis of Aspergers is perhaps your ego’s unwillingness to let someone in to love you.

  • Mikewind Dale – Michael Makovi

    A friend of mine replied to this post of mine: "Are Haredi Girls More Open Minded When it Comes to Intellectuals?" (http://izgad.blogspot.com/2010/02/are-haredi-girls-more-open-minded-when.html)

    He says that he has the exact same problem as me, and that he too finds that notwithstanding his liberal positions, that nevertheless, conservative women appreciate him more than the more modern women you’d expect him to be compatible with.

    He himself is an intellectual and has Asperger’s, and he suspects that perhaps the less modern women are less likely to feel threatened by someone more learned than them. After all, these are the women looking for the Lakewood kollel learner. Furthermore, they are more likely to rate a man based on his kindness and his reliability, not his ability to sweep her off her feet or write her poetry, meaning that more conservative women will deal better with his Asperger’s Syndrome (which is on the autism spectrum and impedes interpersonal social relationships).

    He suspects that I too have Asperger’s, and that everything he’s said about himself, may apply to me as well. He writes about me in his "The Asperger Fiction Reader: Not a Contradiction in Terms" (http://izgad.blogspot.com/2010/02/asperger-fiction-reader-not.html).

  • Mikewind Dale – Michael Makovi

    My substantive positions are indeed quite liberal, in the sense of their being meikil and libertarian. I tend to follow opinions that are easier to follow, not because I find Judaism burdensome – G-d forbid! – but rather, because I truly believe that G-d intended for the Torah to be something we can easily keep. The purpose of the halakhah is to enrich our lives, not to give us onerous busywork. So while I strictly keep the Shulhan Arukh, I might keep some of the more lenient opinions therein. A good example: my article A New Hearing on Kol Ishah (http://www.jewishideas.org/articles/new-hearing-kol-ishah), which comes to a very liberal and lenient conclusion of when and where men may listen to women sing.

    Therefore, for example: I would be lenient on things like pat yisrael, halav yisrael, hair-covering, etc. I also support women’s ordination as rabbis, for example, since there is nothing in the halakhah forbidding this.

    I am also liberal on matters of rationalism and secular learning; I hold like the Spanish rabbis (Rambam especially) and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.

    But the way I hold these opinions is very conservative, not left-wing. About the early Spanish-Portuguese (Orthodox Sephardim) Jews of America, Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel writes ("Thoughts on Early American Jewry", Tradition 16:2, Fall 1976),


    One of the notable features of this Jewish group was its ability to adapt to the American mileu while maintaining a reverence for its own religious traditions. Western Sephardim in general were receptive to the cultural forces at work in their societies. They did not isolate themselves in spiritual and intellectual ghettos. Gershom Mendes Seixas (1746-1816), minister of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, was not only interested in science but was known to quote from the New Testament. The historian, Jacob Rader Marcus, goes so far as to compare Seixas to a founder of Reform Judaism, due to Seixas’ "insistence on, western dress, decorum, dignity, and an increasing use of the vernacular." (J. R. Marcus, Handsome Young Priest in the Black Cown(Cincinnati, 1970), pp. 43, 49. (Reprinted from H.U.C. Annual, Vol. 40.41, 1969-70).) Yet, all of these qualities were’ typical of Western[-European] Sephardic religious leaders long before Seixas was born. What Marcus considers to be Reform practices were normative orthodox qualities among Spanish and Portuguese Jews. This point must be stressed since so many students of Colonial Jewry err in this regard. The Western[-European], Sephardic approach to religion and life was neither Reform nor East European Orthodox; it was an independent tradition which must be considered on its own terms.

     For the Sephardim, strict traditional Orthodoxy with an open-mindedness towards secular learning and modern culture was no contradiction. As for myself, I believe I have some strange combination of left-wing Modern Orthodox hashqafot and right-wing yeshivishe sensibilities, behaviors, and characters. That is, if I were to list my intellectual and ideological positions, they’d come out very left-wing, but my basic personality and mannerisms and thought-processes are right-wing. I may hold left-wing positions, but my method of analyzing and executing them is right-wing. I hold positions that characterize the left-wing, but the method in which I hold them is right-wing. I’ve thus called myself a "liberal fundamentalist", and I’ve thought more than once that G-d should have had me be born in 19th century Neo-Orthodox Germany, or 16th-19th century Turkey, or some such – somewhere where the hashqafic opinions were more left-wing than the Ashkenazi ones, but where the same character of traditionalism and Orthodoxy and religious piety was present.

    For example: I support a theocratic-democracy in Israel; yes – theocratic and democratic! I’ve written on this much recently, but see my most recent post on the subject: "The Place of Religion in a Liberal Democracy" (http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com/2010/02/place-of-religion-in-liberal-democracy.html)

  • veganesther

    Perhaps you are purposefully saying things about your self that you know will be a turn -off to a potential mate. Think about the home you want to create. Do you want your wife to go to mikvah? Keep cholev and pas yisroel in the house? Do you want your wife to wear a sheital? do you want a wife to work so that you may study? 

    Or are you truly a left leaner? Meaning will you be happy with just o-u certified foods, your wife can either not cover her head or partially cover her hair. Will you be happy with a wife who wears slacks? and knows how to read torah? use of mikvah should not be a negotiable. what are you disclosing about yourself that a woman serious for a match would find objectionable?