By Alex Gordon
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HAIFA, Israel — In Judaism, it is considered bad for a person to live alone. People have to get married. And in order to marry properly and skillfully, one needs a matchmaker. A matchmaker in Jewish belief is not just an expert leading to a godly cause, a wedding, but a person securing a place in the world to come. The matchmaker’s winnings are monetary, earthly and heavenly.
Matchmaking is an important matter. One must be an expert in it. It is an occupation that must be learned. I did not study matchmaking, but physics, mathematics, all kinds of exact sciences, which also make calculations, but they are of a very different nature. A matchmaker should be able to combine mastery of the exact sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. He must be a good calculator and a psychologist, a connoisseur of human souls.
Have you ever been a matchmaker? Do you think it is a creative job? Creating a couple, a family, is creative. A matchmaker is undoubtedly a creator. He picks a couple and creates a family. The result of the matchmaker’s work can be good, but he can also fail. True, the failure of the matchmaker is most often the unhappiness of the family he makes.
But the matchmaker does not always know the result of his efforts. He is rarely held responsible for a failed marriage. I was unlucky. I worked as a volunteer matchmaker for the first, but really the last time in my life. I hadn’t considered that majoring in the exact sciences wasn’t enough to succeed in matchmaking. I suddenly decided to do a dangerous and thankless job, and I failed. Both parties held me responsible for the failure of the project.
Where did the foolish desire to create a couple and thus solve another problem come from? Perhaps there was a ridiculous and widespread confidence in me that I could be a doer of fortunes. A professional matchmaker is accustomed to his job and treats it calmly. An amateur matchmaker can be an unreasonable and irrepressible fanatic fixated on his task.
It was at the dawn of my conquest of Zion. I saw a fat man in smoky glasses. There were a few people I knew floundering around him. I listened. They were telling him and reassuring him: “It’s okay. You’ll try another time. Everything will work out.” And he answered them: “It’s all gone.” They reassured him, but he kept repeating his own words. We were introduced and wanted to tell me what the problem was, but the hero of this incomprehensible drama took me by the elbow and said: “I’ll tell you myself.”
He graduated from two institutes – engineering-physics and foreign languages, English. He came to Israel with his Jewish father, leaving his Russian mother in Russia. At the airport in Tel Aviv he was asked his nationality and it turned out that he was not Jewish. Jews are known to have their nationality by their mother. He told me how many jobs he had started, but had failed, how many jobs he had failed to get, no luck. His reflections were full of criticism of society and concern for the future.
I heard beautiful Russian speech and subtle analysis of circumstances. Such a man had to be helped. I mobilized my Haifa and out-of-town acquaintances. Dozens of people helped him to get a job, but nothing worked.
Everyone always felt sorry for him, including me. He evoked sympathy and understanding. I began to revolve around him, like an artificial satellite, like the other people I had seen in the scene of our acquaintance. His intelligence and tragic fate attracted me like a magnet. The desire to help was growing. But gradually it began to dawn on me that my buddy simply did not go to interviews with employers for some subtly motivated reason or another. It was hard to help such a person because he was not helping himself. He began to remind me of the hero of Russian classical literature, who came down from the pages of that literature and found himself in the East by mistake.
He was a “superfluous man” or “extra person,” an 1840s and 1850s Russian literary concept derived from the Byronic hero. I realized that neither I nor my friends would be able to get him a job. In the meantime, he was telling me what unpleasant situations he got himself into no matter what he was doing. Doing things brought him failures. He was a big proponent of doing nothing.
How to save the “extra person” in the Jewish state? How do you save a man who is estranged from Russia and Israel, who thinks more about the fate of these two countries than about getting a job? I was reminded of my father’s favourite saying: “If the wife does not dominate in a Jewish family, it is not a normal family”. So, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea: Cherchez la femme! Look for a woman! Only a woman can get him out of the hole. He will obey her. She would guide him. But he had no woman. I never heard of a woman in his life.
I had an acquaintance close to his age who was clearly looking for a husband. I asked if she would like to meet one highly educated and thin man. She eagerly agreed. I asked him, too. He thought long and hard about my proposal and agreed. The meeting was not a close one, and both parties were looking forward to it, they informed me. I was proud of the idea of saving two souls. I thought my matchmaking idea was a genius solution to a difficult problem.
The day before the meeting, he called me and informed me that he had decided not to go on a date. “Right, like going to a meeting with his employer.” – I thought. He began to tell me, in general phrases, what harm women in Israel had done to him. “But what are you risking by getting acquainted – because the acquaintance may not continue?” – I asked. He began to describe to me the traps that my acquaintance could catch him in.
He said that women rejected him when they found out he wasn’t Jewish. He spoke harshly to me and accused me of wanting to ruin his personal life for the benefit of my acquaintance. When I explained to him that I had no personal interest in this acquaintance, he disagreed, alluding to my hidden interest in the matter. I objected, saying that I was not making money by matchmaking. We quarreled. My desire to help him he perceived as a plot against his freedom, against his personality, against his human dignity. My acquaintance was offended that I was messing with her head.
A few months passed, and I learned that he had decided to leave Israel. He said that Israel was to blame for all his misfortunes, that the fact that he was not Jewish had ruined his life. I met him before he left and asked him where he was going. “I wanted to move to the United States, I have a brother there, but they wouldn’t let me go there. I’m going to England. I know the English language. It’s a beautiful country. I was oppressed in Israel. The Jews didn’t help me. When I was an adult, my mother persuaded me to be baptized. There, I began to wear a cross around my neck. I was going to England to become Orthodox. The Christians there will help me, not like the Jews.”
Accused of not helping him in this way, I bid him farewell in full confidence that I would never see him again. From a mutual acquaintance I learned of two enthusiastic postcards he had sent from England.
A year later I came to London with my wife. Of course, I had long forgotten about our hero and did not associate him with that city. But we met there. He called out to me in a store I happened to walk into. He was buying a bunch of grapes. “Here, this is not Israel. You can’t buy grapes by the kilogram.” – he said. “Well, how’s England?” – I asked. – “Terrible country.” – “Do the Christians help you?” – “Disgusting people, worse than the Jews, who at least helped me, but they don’t even want to teach me how to pray properly. I don’t know how.” – “So how do you live?” – “I applied to the Interior Ministry for refugee benefits from Israel for religious reasons.” – “Will they believe you were oppressed in Israel?” – “They won’t believe it, but as long as they check, they pay.” – “And then?” – “I want to go back to Israel.”
He called me from London at my expense. Attempts to return to the country of the Jews who underestimated him from the country of the English Christians he overestimated did nothing. And then the Interior Ministry in England refused to grant him refugee status from Israel. The money was running out. He stopped calling and writing me. I thought I would never hear from him again. A year went by. Suddenly I received a letter from him from the US. He had moved there. How?
Who had saved the refined intellectual, the failed Jew, the Christian loser, the failed Englishman, the eternal and hopeless candidate for laborer, the refugee escaping his own, sophisticated laziness and lack of initiative and returning to himself? His mother, a Russian woman, kept the wayward son from falling into the abyss. The woman who gave him life saved him from starvation. His mother, whom he left behind in Russia, moved in with her eldest son and summoned her youngest son to the United States. Thanks to her, he received refugee status. She spared him from the things that inconsiderate people like me foolishly slipped him – from his job.
Now he could contemplate life and destiny at the expense of the American taxpayer. I turned out to be an adventurer who was looking to him for a saving woman in all the wrong places.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.