Story that was all too familiar
DIVORCE. IT’S all the rage. Deuteronomy 24: 1 states: “A man takes a wife and possesses her. She fails to please him because he finds something obnoxious about her, he writes her a bill of divorcement, hands it to her and sends her away from his house.” I think I can safely say we have all moved on since then. There is a lot of divorce in the air. Getting through the last bar/batmitzvah seems to be the final hurdle that a couple can manage together, before they call it a day.
It’s sad that two people enter into the contract of marriage and forge a family and home, only to discover years down the line that the contract has been broken in some form; indiscretions of a personal, financial or spiritual nature have made being together untenable. Living under the same roof is proving more destructive than positive.
So there we have it. Divorce is part of our culture. I’m not even going to enter into a discussion about the ridiculous sexism and archaic preposterousness of the get in this day and age, or recall that divorced friends of my parents, back in the day, particularly the women, found themselves with a difficult role within the shul community.
When I was younger, my friend’s mum was not allowed to walk her to the bimah on the day of her bat chayil ,because that was “the role of the father”, even though the said father had done a runner. No! I’m not going to go into all those horror stories because the times, they are a-changing. Being a Jewish divorcée these days is too normal. And with the number of gorgeous, intelligent Jewish divorcées on the market you would think it’s a buyer’s paradise. Not so.
Where are the males? My blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful sister is recently divorced but the dearth of eligible sober men is proving depressing. However, while filming in Vancouver, I suddenly received a flurry of emails and texts.
The night before, at a charity event (the Jewish equivalent of meeting someone down the pub), my sister had apparently “pulled”. A nice-looking man came to her table, a spare seat was found and she spent the rest of the night locked in intense conversation.
Unbelievable! Sis had bucked the odds, she had found a Jewish, professional male not dating a 21-year old, leggy Eastern European. The tom-tom drums were going meshuggeh.
But, on further investigation, it emerged that the man whom she had been observed talking to, as “if she had known him for years”, was indeed someone she had known for years.
The man who had been chewing her ear off was… my husband. Knowing nobody in the room he had plonked himself at her table and taken the opportunity of lecturing her on what we’d all been desperate to say: that after two years of fruitless wandering in the dating wilderness, she should go on J-Date immediately.