Considerations

Ninth in an ongo­ing series of essays

BANGALORE, India — While I was trav­el­ing to the Sil­i­con Val­ley of the East in Decem­ber 2006 with my Suf­folk Uni­ver­sity M.B.A. class in Boston to study busi­ness there for a week, I popped into a local tourist trap to look at some Indian trin­kets I had wanted to buy for my family.

As it turned out, the own­ers (above) were Indian Mus­lims from the dis­puted area of Kash­mir. And they could not have been nicer. Part of the rea­son, I’m sure, was the fact that, to them, I was a “rich” Amer­i­can want­ing to spend money. But the other half was the fact they were gen­uinely pleas­ant since India has a his­tory of tol­er­ance and civil­ity rooted both in thou­sands of years of cul­ture and also in British polite­ness from the colo­nial era. More­over, at least in terms of Hin­dus and Bud­dhists, poly­the­is­tic reli­gions tend to be more tol­er­ant than monothe­is­tic ones. (Still, I some­times found Indian peo­ple to be infu­ri­at­ingly polite — even for some­one with Amer­i­can back­ground who is also an Anglophile and Israeli.)

Between hag­gling on the prices — in ret­ro­spect, I was not very good since I had not yet moved to Israel and learned the art — we dis­cussed India and reli­gion over cof­fee. Their fam­ily, so I was told, made rugs and cloth­ing in Kash­mir and then sold the prod­ucts in Ban­ga­lore to West­ern­ers like me.

Dur­ing the trip, I usu­ally hid the fact that I was Jew­ish — even though we were there over Chanukah — since India has 161 mil­lion Mus­lims, a few of whom would later attack the Chabad house in India in 2008. I only lit a hanukkia (meno­rah) in my hotel room, though it was prob­a­bly against regulations.

(I did wear a kip­pah — a yarmulke — on the first night of the hol­i­day, which the class spent in a restau­rant, and I received only a few curi­ous looks in response. India has always had a small Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, but most moved to Israel in mod­ern times.)

But since I was com­fort­able with the shop own­ers, I even­tu­ally told them on a sec­ond visit that I was Jew­ish because I was fas­ci­nated dur­ing our dis­cus­sion of reli­gion in India. (You can take the jour­nal­ist out of a news­pa­per, but you can never take the jour­nal­ist out of him.) The chief owner, the man, seemed merely bemused — prob­a­bly because he had likely never met a Jew before. (I also told an Egypt­ian doc­tor on a boat cruise on the Nile River that I was Amer­i­can, Jew­ish, and Israeli when I had trav­eled to Cairo in July 2008, and she was extremely cor­dial about it. But she added that I should not tell too many peo­ple in Egypt about the last two parts.)

So, as I walked with the owner to process my order after final­iz­ing the pur­chase, we sat at a desk in a back room. (Many places in India, of course, do not have the same rapid-technology in regards to credit-card pro­cess­ing.) Out of polite­ness and small-talk, I told him that both he and his wife had been extremely nice.

The owner responded, “She’s not my wife; she is my sis­ter.” I apol­o­gized for mak­ing an incor­rect assump­tion. And then he said some­thing — in all seri­ous­ness — that made me dumb­struck, espe­cially since he knew that I was Jew­ish: “You know, she is not mar­ried.” (I was 26 at the time, and I think she was roughly the same age.)

Sev­eral of my friends from Boston joined the U.S. Peace Corps after col­lege, and I later heard sto­ries of local men in remote coun­tries offer­ing vast amounts of live­stock to the male vol­un­teers in exchange for mar­ry­ing their daugh­ters. But this was the first time I had ever encoun­tered any­thing per­son­ally. (A few years later, an Israeli girl offered me NIS 20,000 — roughly $5,000 — to marry her so she could obtain a Green Card. I declined.) I was shocked at the implicit offer and did not know how to respond. After a few sec­onds, I laughed ner­vously and changed the sub­ject. And that was that.

I had not thought about this story in a long time, but it came mind as I have been observ­ing how the dat­ing world dif­fers between the West (as well as sec­u­lar Israelis) and Ortho­dox Jews in gen­eral. In essence, it may come down to the head ver­sus the heart.

Mod­ern mar­riage — the view that two peo­ple love each other emo­tion­ally (and, if you believe, spir­i­tu­ally) and then decide to build a life and fam­ily together — is a rel­a­tively new con­cept that seems to have begun in medieval Europe. Prior to that time, women — at least those in the upper classes — were viewed as prop­erty that were a part of busi­ness nego­ti­a­tions, famil­ial alliances, and inter­na­tional politics.

In ancient Greece, women were essen­tially slaves that were viewed as infe­rior to men. (This is why Greece was not exactly the pro­to­type of a free democ­racy.) In fact, the high­est level of love was viewed at the time as only pos­si­bly exist­ing between two men — or even a man and a boy. (This is some­thing they do not teach in high school.) Women were sim­ply a bio­log­i­cal neces­sity with whom it was required to sire offspring.

In medieval Europe, daugh­ters of the upper class were essen­tially sold to cement alliances between coun­tries and increase the wealth of the fam­ily that “sold” the woman to her future hus­band. (If your daugh­ter was hot, she could be worth 1,000 acres of land!)

How­ever, women were under­stand­ably dis­sat­is­fied with these arrange­ments. As a result, the idea of roman­tic love orig­i­nated in the medieval West with suit­ors who attempted to woo wives while their hus­bands — whom they rarely loved — were away. When hus­bands were out fight­ing in the Cru­sades or charg­ing into bat­tles for months at a time, a trou­ba­dour would visit a cas­tle, sing under the win­dow, and hope­fully engage in liaisons dan­gereuses — under the threat of death if he was ever caught.

And this is where the mod­ern con­struct of mar­riage — mar­ry­ing for love — began. (Poor women — those in the Mid­dle Ages who, in the immor­tal words of Monty Python, “didn’t have sh-t all over them” — were more free to marry those whom they wanted because they had no chance to increase their family’s wealth unless they were excep­tion­ally beau­ti­ful. But the atti­tude of the upper class even­tu­ally fil­tered down the social lad­der over decades and cen­turies.) And as the fem­i­nist rev­o­lu­tion rightly eman­ci­pated women and made them com­pletely equal under the law — at least in West­ern coun­tries — in the last cen­tury, they were finally able to have their own say in whom they marry.

But today, tra­di­tional atti­tudes still remain in cer­tain com­mu­ni­ties and coun­tries. In places with endemic poverty — and espe­cially where women are still viewed as hav­ing lower sta­tus, if even unof­fi­cially — fam­ily mem­bers still want their daugh­ters, sis­ters, and nieces to marry some­one with money sim­ply because they want them to have a bet­ter life. And for all the head­lines pro­claim­ing India’s high-tech rev­o­lu­tion, the vast major­ity of peo­ple there are still destitute.

My M.B.A. class toured the facil­i­ties of com­pa­nies like Intel in India, and nearby there was a tent city full of impov­er­ished, unem­ployed peo­ple right next door to a glossy build­ing with shiny win­dows and full of suit-wearing busi­ness­men. The con­trast was strik­ing. I snapped the above pic­ture of a beg­gar after giv­ing her money, ask­ing if I could take a photo, and then thank­ing her with the tra­di­tional, Indian pose of clasp­ing hands with a slight bow from the waist. I was still in my journalist-mindset, and I thought that the doc­u­men­ta­tion of the poverty was worth any exploita­tion that she may have felt. I have her 500 rupees — a lot of money for India but worth $11 to me.

Look closely — she has no hands. Her attempt at a smile still haunts me. Most Amer­i­cans who con­sider them­selves poor are not really poor.

The female shop­keeper was not as poor — most likely, she and her brother were part of India’s mer­chant middle-class. But I am sure that she would have mar­ried me in a heart­beat if I had been inter­ested. It would have been a log­i­cal thing to do. In the­ory, we would have learned to love each other.

In a dif­fer­ent way, mar­riage in Ortho­dox Judaism is also viewed from a log­i­cal stand­point. Peo­ple con­sider poten­tial part­ners first from a ratio­nal stand­point — sim­i­lar­ity in reli­gious prac­tice, per­sonal goals, future plans, finan­cial secu­rity, the num­ber of desired chil­dren, and so on. (And as I wrote before, Ortho­dox Jews are offi­cially shomer negiah as well — no touch­ing before mar­riage, not even a hand­shake — even though it’s a not-so-secret real­ity that few adhere to the prac­tice.)

After they nar­row the field down to peo­ple who would work ratio­nally, most Ortho­dox Jews then see with which of those peo­ple they have a “con­nec­tion.” (Still, ultra-Orthodox Jews do not do the sec­ond part — they become engaged after two or three dates.) And then, usu­ally within six months or less, they agree to get mar­ried. This prac­tice con­trasts to that in the West­ern world — and sec­u­lar Israel — in which peo­ple first decide with whom they have a “con­nec­tion” and then try to make it work ratio­nally with that person.

From India to Israel to the United States, the dat­ing par­a­digm seems to con­sist of two, gen­eral approaches:

• first head, then heart (if even the heart)
• first heart, then head

I see ben­e­fits and draw­backs to each:

• Head before heart: Run­ning a house­hold is akin to run­ning a small busi­ness — every “man­ager” needs to be on the same page. Love and emo­tion can­not elim­i­nate con­flicts over con­crete issues like money, chil­dren, reli­gion, money, sex life, and jobs. The ini­tial rush of emo­tion always dis­si­pates over time and is (hope­fully) replaced by a deeper, more-meaningful feel­ing anyway.

• Heart before head: No one wants to end up in a love­less, sex­less mar­riage. Every­one wants the ener­getic con­nec­tion to last for­ever. Two peo­ple can be com­pat­i­ble in every log­i­cal way, but some­times the con­nec­tion just never appears — imag­ine a mar­riage in which both peo­ple move to the “friend zone” at best. It is impor­tant that such a feel­ing is present before even con­sid­er­ing marriage.

Rela­tions between men and women have always been com­pli­cated ever since we evolved into pri­mates, and it is a lux­ury and issue that some­one for­tu­nate and lucky enough to have my life — unlike, say, the des­ti­tute in India — can afford to have and ana­lyze. But the issue still exists.

As I reflect on the dat­ing lives of myself and my friends, it becomes evi­dent that men, of course, tend to be more log­i­cal while women are gen­er­ally more emo­tional. Men make value judg­ments on a woman’s attrac­tive­ness — after all, the def­i­n­i­tion of beauty is fairly uni­form across cul­tures — and eval­u­ate whether a woman is, to be blunt, crazy. Women, at least when they are younger, put more empha­sis on the inter­per­sonal chem­istry. (Dates have told my male friends that they just do not “feel” any­thing — but this is a state­ment that a man would rarely say.) Females, how­ever, do begin to assign greater empha­sis on ratio­nal issues like money and secu­rity when they begin look­ing for mar­riage rather than a so-called hook-up.

Every­one, of course, wants a per­fect com­bi­na­tion of the head and heart. But unless a per­son rates, say, eight or higher on the prover­bial dating-scale, he or she must become more real­is­tic and make a choice. So, the ques­tion still stands: what par­a­digm, in terms of mar­riage, should take pri­or­ity — the head or the heart?

In con­trast to places like India, peo­ple in the West have the lux­ury to pon­der these issues. But that does not mean it is still simple.

Prior essay: Mov­ing to Israel. Related essay: The Bat­tle of the Sexes.

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