What Do Religious Women Want?

The Messianic Intermarriage Series

Yet side by side with these couples, there are quite a few for whom the searching phase is never ending. Some have been searching for years, have met hundreds of potential partners and have broken up with all of them, or have been broken up with. At the end of the day, they're alone. In a study carried out by Audrey Leiman, a couples' councilor, in her thesis on Being Single in Religious Society for Lesley University, Leiman discovered that for religious women, the process of searching for a partner is even more difficult.

Study: What (religious) women want
Tzofia Hirschfeld
YnetNews.com

Men have been asking (and continue to ask) "what do women want" probably ever since Adam had his first "disagreement" with Eve, and we men still don't know the answer. The comedy film What Women Want (2000) highlighted this question (and potentially the correct response) when misogynist ad man Nick Marshall (played by Mel Gibson) gained the (unwanted) ability to hear women's thoughts (and they aren't always pretty thoughts, especially if they're about guys).

Fiction aside though, what do women want in a man? More so, what do religious women want?

Couples counselor Audrey Leiman attempts to answer this question from a religious Jewish perspective in her soon to be published study on the topic, but this could have implications in the Messianic world as well.

Some of what religious women want in a man is what I think many women want:

"An additional paradox is the conflict between the traditional views on marriage and relationships and the sector's modern views. Today most religious women have an equalitarian view yet at the same time, still have the traditional view with regards to a man's role – from the religious domain and through to the internal management of the household."

While Leiman is describing "the Zionist religious sector of (Israeli) society", and in spite of almost 50 years of American feminism, women still want a "life partner" who she can respect and (even secretly) one whose accomplishments outstrip her own, at least in some areas.

But Leiman's target population is extremely unlikely to marry outside of their faith group, even to the degree of marrying a secular Jew, must less a Christian or (heaven forbid) a Messianic Jew. How can her data be applied to us?

I once knew a fellow who was (and I suppose still is) a brilliant scholar and linguist. Although not Jewish (even though he looked classically Ashkenazi), he had a command of multiple languages, including fluent Hebrew and Greek, and he was scrupulously observant in many Jewish religious practices. He was also young and single and finding a mate was a rather painful "adventure" for him.

He has since married (and I'm sorry to say, I never got the opportunity to meet his bride), but I remember the discussions we had over his quest to find a proper mate, who would not only have to share his religious convictions, but be intellectually and characterologically challenging for him.

In the Messianic world, can we always find mates to match our unique requirements?

I suppose, for Jews in the Messianic movement, that's why they intermarry so often. How many truly observant Jewish people are Messianic? The "potential mate" pool must be rather thin. However, there are a ton of Gentiles who call themselves "Messianic" swimming in the same pool and some of them are really cute.

Also, it's not unheard of for Jews in "the movement" to marry "straight up" Christians or, for a Jew and a Gentile to self-identify as Christians, worship in a church setting, meet and marry in a Christian context, and then transition into a Messianic religious context (and a variation of the latter is what originally happened between my wife and me).

Another viewpoint about what Jewish women want is represented by my daughter. She's Jewish and not Messianic (like her mother) and she's told me that, after two trips to Israel, she has no intention of marrying a Jewish man. She finds Jewish men controlling and overbearing, even secular Jewish men. Being a moderate feminist, she wants to be treated as an equal, not an object. She's not alone:

"Most religious women still hold with the traditional views that the man must be more than them – taller, more educated, earns more. The problem is that they themselves have advanced and hold key positions. Earn well, have masters and doctorate degrees. These two conflicting views must live together under one roof, and they don't have a clear message."

Even among the Zionist religious population of Israel, women are adopting an attitude of equality where they can pursue greater levels of personal advancement than past generations. Religious women want what many secular women want; equal access to resources such as education and employment, while still establishing and sharing a religious Jewish home with a compatible mate. As these different worlds collide, it becomes more difficult to find a match. How much more so in the Messianic community, where potential spouses must meet so many different and sometimes conflicting requirements.

What is the future of marriage in the Messianic movement? Can intermarriage be reduced or eliminated? Probably not in the short run. The religiously observant Jewish population of Messianic Judaism would have to increase by a significant factor to provide an adequate pool from which mates could be matched. However, there are a multitude of Gentiles available to choose from as potential mates. Unless you want to perform a world wide search for, not just an observant Messianic Jewish partner, but one who matches all of your other specific requirements, Gentile Messianic or Christian men and women are a more viable, or at least readily available option.

Gentiles in "the movement" don't face the same challenge because we're so plentiful, relative to observant Jews. Finding a Gentile mate is fairly easy, at least in larger population centers with a sufficient number of "Messianic" congregations. Also, since many Gentiles in the movement married while still affiliated with a Christian church and then transitioned into "Messianism" as a "unit", no dissonance in the relationship ever occurred.

I just ordered Making a Successful Jewish Interfaith Marriage by Kerry M Olitzky and Joan Peterson Littman. Up until a few years ago, I never considered myself part of a mixed marriage, but that has changed. Now with me worshiping in the "Messianic" realm and my wife being affiliated with the Chabad, our paths, though joined in marriage, have diverged in faith. We aren't experiencing any (or at least not very much) day-to-day dissonance in our relationship, but I do want to visit the larger world of Jewish and Christian interfaith marriages for my personal development. It's part of why I've been reading books such as Choosing Judaism by Lydia Kukoff and Choosing a Jewish Life by Anita Diamant, since a Christian converting to Judaism often stems from a Christian/Jewish interrelationship or marriage.

I'm sure the Olitzky and Littman book will fuel additional blog posts in my Messianic Intermarriage Series.

Oh, and apologizes for "borrowing" an image from Judah's blog for the photo at the top of the page, but they make such an adorable intermarried couple.