The Rabbi Asked

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—3/15/10—I attended my first Saturday dinner, or Shabbat meal, at the home of observant (understatement?) Jewish friends here in Teaneck a few weeks back.

I had about as much trouble at this small gathering as I do at Sunday dinners with my South Carolina cousins, whom I’d term highly-observant Southern Baptists.

I’m not a Bill-Maher-variety-atheist, but I honestly don’t believe in a deity who goes in for all this davening, hand-holding, head-bowing, and endless, endless, endless blessing of bread. If I were God, Jesus, Buddha, Aphrodite, Mohammed, Moses, Patanjali, or any of the Mary’s, looking down on this from on high, I’d wonder why someone didn’t get on with it and pass the potatoes and gravy to the Young’ns.

I never express such sentiments while awaiting the passage of potatoes, however. I just sit, long-sufferingly, and marvel at our species, and its multitude of peculiar ways.

My mother tried to bring me up a “good Presbyterian”: she’s just going to have to be satisfied with her only child’s having the manners, usually, to hold her peace while those around her are engaging in age-old rituals of fear, terror and subservience. The manners stuck; the “davening,” or what passes for it in The Scottish Church, did not.

Anyway. . .  At some point, the Rabbi stunned me into speech by asking me a direct and pointed question which came, seemingly out of nowhere, between the pickles and the pastrami.

“What do you think makes for a good marriage?” he asked.

Jesus wept, I thought to myself.

My answer, which came up swiftly, like a small piece of half-digested pickle, was: “I haven’t the faintest idea.” (Reader: I married two closeted homosexuals. Not one right after the other, mind you. But. Liza Minelli probably knows more about what makes for a good marriage than I.)

But his question—though not right then and there—did get me thinking about what answer I’d give the next time I was asked such a thing. If ever anyone’s daft enough to ask me such a thing again.

In fact, in my all-but-six-decades, I’ve known quite a few “good marriages.” I’ve also known some conflagrations of passion I’ve envied from afar (not good marriages, but Oh, Lordy!), and I’ve known many dull, sad tutoiments that limped along on three wheels like children’s tricycles: serviceable but boring, and liable to tip over at any moment. Mostly, I’ve known crash-and-burn marriages: they started fast and sure, and headed for the nearest wall.

Only two marriages in my own life “lasted,” the current one being the longest-running (knock wood). The other successful relationship in my life involving an altar of sorts and a Justice of The Peace (in Walhalla SC), came up against the wily vicissitudes of cross-cultural difference. As a close friend once opined: A marriage between a Greek man and an American woman is like the union of a goat with an iceberg. (Well, of course, the friend was a Greek man, but he did have a point about goats.)

Other people’s marriages? A number of “good ones” spring resolutely to mind. Eleni and Vassilis. Rhona and Jerry: Even though Rhona’s no longer on the planet, their marriage remains, defying the laws of physics as we know them. My late parents. Angela and Martin. Mary and Spiros? (What? Mary and Spiros have been divorced for years, and he’s remarried and divorced again twice! No matter: his marriage to Mary never really ended and, in their old age, survives, even if no longer strictly legally.) Where was I? Ingrid and Skip. Jill and Ron. My Highly Observant Southern Baptist cousins, Lana and Randy, and their son and his wife, Stacey and Clay.

There are others. Lots, over the years, if I really put my mind to it. Several of my Yoga students’ marriages are solid and loving. My own Yoga teacher’s marriage is a good one. Fellow Yoga teachers’ marriages are happy.

But why? WHY? And why aren’t the Rabbi and his wife in an especially “good” marriage? What are the specific ingredients required for success? What are The Rules? So, OK: Elizabeth’s Rules For Creating A Good Marriage.

I guess the first rule is that both people in a marriage (a woman and a man, two women, two men—Spiros and his three serial wives) have to be able to suspend their disbelief. They have to take it on some kind of faith that being with one other person for a good long stretch is something to be desired. Both spouses have to be, on the face of it, gullible idiots from the git-go.

Two: one of them has to be able to cook, and like to do so. It does not have to be the woman. If it did, Dean would have starved a decade ago.

Three: both spouses cannot, on a regular basis (some exceptions allowed: plane crashes spring to mind) fall all to pieces at the same time. They have to take turns. (Sub-Rule: both sets of in-laws, or their moral equivalents, may not visit simultaneously.)

A lot of this, as the Rabbi can plainly see, is just common sense.

Four: It helps, a lot, to marry someone from your own neck of the woods. If you were both tortured by nuns, suffered through trig under Mr. Barr McCutcheon or tear-gassed during Vietnam War demonstrations, you always have something to fall back on. (If you both know all the words to “Stairway To Heaven,” marry, but do not breed.)

Five: If one person is a sex maniac, and the other is not, there is going to be trouble. (In related news, if one person wants children and the other doesn’t, there’s going to be trouble.)

Six: He, or she, has to get your jokes.

Seven: There have to be jokes.

Eight: No fighting dirty. You can give your spouse The Great Ice Treatment in punishment for an offense, but no fighting dirty. If you don’t know what fighting dirty is in the first place, do not get married. Ever.

Nine: Realize, from Day One, that there will come a time when your spouse will regularly floss his or her teeth on the sofa during “Countdown With Keith Olbermann”; will have to prep for a colonoscopy and need your help and support; will steal the blankets, fart continuously through the night, snort milk out her/his nose, gain 20 pounds seemingly overnight, and/or lose all of his/her hair or teeth. Visualize that time now, and embrace it, with a big grin.

Ten: And the last rule? Expect to consider divorce, very seriously, along the way. At least three or four times. Both of you are going to change. Both of you are going to hit walls, together, and separately. But, most probably, if you’ve followed Rules One through Nine, you’re going to have collected one big, fat, jointly-held family album of images and memories together (her snorting milk out her nose; his bald pate from above), and you’re not going to want to drop that book off at the public library.

. . .and if the Rabbi ever asks me again, this is what I’d tell him.