The Rabbi

By Allison Kaplan

A young man says to the rabbi, "Rabbi, I married the wrong girl."

"How long have you been married?" the rabbi asks.

"Two and a half months," the young man says. "When I met her, I couldn't catch my breath. Now, I¹m breathing fine."

"That's the way love is designed," the rabbi explains. "If you can't catch your breath two and a half months after you are together, you have asthma."

The story makes for a great ice breaker, which is just the effect it has when Rabbi Akiva Tatz, a popular Jerusalem-based yeshiva teacher and author, tells it to a diverse Jewish crowd packed into a suburban Chicago banquet hall on a recent Wednesday night.

I was invited to Rabbi Tatz's talk, "Inspiration and Disappointment - Marriage, Childraising and Other Potential Crises" by the sponsor, Chicago Community Kollel's Rabbi Zev Kahn. Because I am newly engaged, Rabbi Kahn thought I might find the lecture insightful.

Actually, I found myself thinking more about an ex-boyfriend than my fiancé. Thinking that if I had sought Rabbi Tatz's advice way back during those terrible times, I might still be stuck in that dead-end relationship.

Rabbi Tatz believes every relationship -- every life event, for that matter -- has two phases. The first is inspiration and discovery, when everything is bliss. The second is reality and hard work, when everything is blah.

True love is finding meaning, strength, and personal discovery in the blah.

Rabbi Tatz says the problem with my generation -- you knew we had to have a problem -- is we take the bliss and run, because the work is no fun.

I wish the good rabbi could have been a fly on the wall of the studio apartment where my ex-boyfriend and I did some of our finest work. We disagreed, we misunderstood, we screamed. Then we¹d make up, talk about our plans and dreams, hold hands until the next eruption.

Based on Rabbi Tatz's teachings, the constant fighting with that ex should not have made me doubt our relationship. What matters is not being meant for each other, but what you make of each other.

We made each other miserable. Yet that very intellectual and physical attraction Rabbi Tatz describes as the seed to every lasting relationship caused us to hold on for two and a half years. Finally, we did the mature thing and split. It was not an escape; after so much time, you develop a level of comfort that in many ways makes the break-up more difficult than being together. But being alone is healthier, and sometimes more gratifying, than trying to force a wrong fit.

I asked Rabbi Tatz, "If the hard part of a relationship is the most meaningful part, how do you differentiate when the hard stuff is just bad stuff and you should get out?" He looked at me like the twentysomething I am, and said my question would require a deep discussion of Jewish relationships for which he did not have time.

So I asked Rabbi Kahn, the sponsor, who said he thinks young people today are "burning themselves out at an earlier age."

"People come into a relationship having already been through broken relationships," Kahn said. "It's a disadvantage. They're not coming in with a freshness and an attitude that this person is the only one for me."

No, we're coming in with the feeling that this is the right person for me.

Rabbi Kahn, who grew up Reform and became Orthodox, but teaches mostly non-Orthodox adults, does not see much benefit in dating around. I respectfully disagree.

I do think both rabbis hit the nail on the head when they said relationships, ultimately, teach us about ourselves. The lessons learned from bad relationships helped me recognize the one I should not let slip away.

Rabbi Tatz says commitment today is very superficial. Divorce statistics, we all know, back him up.

It's true; for a long time I thought the perfect relationship would be one with no fighting, no problems, no annoyances. I grew out of that. Rather than rushing into marriage during the high points of phase one, my fiancé and I decided to navigate our way into phase two to make sure we were right for each other and able to stay afloat through the rough spots.

We are old enough to know unequivocally that we want to be together, without always looking over our shoulders. We've been over there. It stinks. Now we're at a point where it feels like making all the necessary compromises for each other will not be compromising ourselves. I wouldn't have been ready to say that a few years ago.

I like Rabbi Tatz's advice: take inspiration from the work of the journey.

But in a good relationship, not everything should be so arduous.

I believe -- as a woman who has spent three years getting to know the man she intends to marry, and getting to understand herself with that man -- it is possible to blend phases one and two into a rewarding phase three.

As long as I am prepared to deal with the times in our relationship when taking in oxygen is as uneventful as a movie with no conflict, I look forward to persistent shortness of breath.

Send comments to Allison at Singlstyle@aol.com