Sunday, May 15, 2005

Telepathy - Part Deux - Epilogue


Lo and behold, I got a call from my matchmaker; she received a call from the girl's matchmaker as planned. The girl had the conversation with her matchmaker yesterday, as we discussed in my telepathic discussion. However, the bad news is that she came to the conclusion that we had no connection, and that was her final position.

After my matchmaker spoke with me today, she suspected that the girl might have had a misunderstanding as to what it means to be Chassidish. The girl has many influences who push her to be extremely religious, and similar to those issues I dealt with in my past regarding clothing and movies, she has not yet developed the keen eye to distinguish what is over the top, and what is normal when it comes to orthodoxy.

Her mentors told her that a religious person does not listen to music. While in its ideal this might be true because the ideal person is busy devoting his life to serving G-d and doing His will, keep in mind that when I watch a movie or do anything, it is not uncommon that G-d is the furthest thought from my mind. The misunderstanding is that this level of Chassidishkeit was described to her as the way a person is expected to live rather than the way a person should look to as an ideal when evaluating one's actions. There is no conflict between classical music and Jewish law, just as there is no conflict between a Chassidic person eating ice cream or a good steak for the pleasure he gets from indulging in it. While it isn't the ideal, that certainly does not mean that it is forbidden or somehow against halacha (Jewish law).

As I now understand from what the matchmaker told me, she didn't believe me when I communicated that music was okay and welcome in the home, and instead, she thought that I was bending for her in my religious observance and she thought that by having music in the house, she would be making me less religious. [Music is something that is connected to her essence; this is one of her traits that I admired and liked in her.]

From the guilt she felt from thinking that music and Judaism do not go together, she came to the conclusion that our wonderful conversations ten days ago were not real and that my true interest in music was a farce. Hence, a large whopper of a generalization resulted in the words "we have no connection" because if I have no interest in music, then she can not see herself having a connection with me.

So this is where fate has taken us. My matchmaker will try once more to understand what she meant when she said there was no connection to see if she is misunderstanding what it means to be religious, and if so, to reconcile the misunderstanding and to light the match and bring us back together again.

(My feelings are that since everything in life happens for a reason, perhaps the fates are sending me a message that there is an underlying problem here and that I should not have tried to influence the outcome. For this reason, I am not getting my hopes up, and I will let this issue resolve itself with no further influence from me. I believe this is the right answer because the way things happened today and the way our telepathic conversation went yesterday, I am now of the opinion that there was no telepathic conversation, only a hopeful imaginative fantasy of reconciliation. I must think this way because if it turned out that this was a good match and that some external force got in the way and ruined another one, I would cry.)

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