Meet One of My Flavorite Rabbis

From: Sunday, December 30, 200711:43:00 AM EST
Rebbe With a Cause Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Rabbi Boteach is one of my flavorite Rabbis. One doesn't have to be Jewish to learn from his wisdom.
The Receding Hemlines of Crown Heights
If even pious and religious men have been conditioned to fixate on a woman's looks, then woe unto the rest of us!
Returning to the Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for a Shabbos is an exhilarating experience. Lubavitchers are arguably the most alive people in the world, and there is a pulse and electricity in the air that can scarcely be found anywhere else.What I did not expect, however, was to be approached by a large number of young rabbinical students (bochurim) of marriageable age who wanted counseling as to how to overcome their obsession with a woman's looks on dates. Some of the bochurim who approached me had dated upwards of 40 women and had been instantly dismissive if she wasn't a beauty. Mind you, these were not bums. Most were outstanding young scholars, deeply religious, serious about their rabbinical degrees, and desirous of going out--right after marriage--to the far corners of the world to spread Judaism. But in the area of dating, they had absorbed the shallow mores of the mainstream culture: They judged a woman primarily by her looks. They had a problem and they knew it. They felt like they were betraying the values of the faith to which they have devoted their lives.It was then that I understood the full extent of the downfall of our culture. If even these pious and religious men had been conditioned to fixate on a woman's looks to the exclusion of most everything else, then woe unto the rest of us! The male diminishment of women to mere body parts--high cheekbones, large chest, and long legs--seemed to have been complete, the sum total of those parts, consisting of spirit and heart, all too eclipsed as a result.Nearly 20 years ago when I married as a young Chabad student, it was almost unheard of for a bochur to date an endless stream of women before he found one that was a suitable wife. On the contrary, we were so enamored by the thrill of just being out with a woman that the dating did its magic and most of us found life partners without playing the unwinnable game of endless comparison. But those days are gone. Perhaps for the first time, Chabad and other religious groups are developing their first ever "singles scene," with literally thousands of single men and women remaining unattached for a good portion of their 20's.Sadder still is the way in which the young women of Crown Heights of marriageable age accommodate this growing male shallowness. Last year there was the tragedy of a young Chabad woman in her late teens who died of anorexia. Her case was not an anomaly, as more and more Hassidic girls do everything to keep the pounds off knowing that few rabbinical students will marry them if they are overweight. Then there are the receding hemlines one sees in religious communities and, of course, in the mainstream culture. Religious girls are showing a lot of leg, which might seem innocuous--but it's not. The one thing religious Jews always understood is that modest is sexy. Magnetism exists specifically in those things which are hidden and obscured. When Oxford's Bodleian Library last week decided to display all four of their copies of the Magna Carta for the first time in 800 years, they did so for only a single day. Likewise, in stark contrast to withered celebrities like Pamela Anderson who overexposed themselves to the point of a public yawn, great stars like Barbra Streisand remain interesting for decades because they know when not to appear in public. Overexposure is the very heart of boredom and one of the qualities that always made religious women so profoundly desirable and attractive was their ladylike demeanor and feminine grace. I remember how, at Oxford, whenever Orthodox Jewish girls would come to spend Shabbos with us, the secular Jewish male students were taken aback by how eye-catching they were--their comeliness lying intheir off-limits mystique. Indeed, the very soul of erotic attraction is what relationship experts call "the erotic barrier," the hurdles that a man must surmount in order to obtain a woman who is always just slightly outside his reach.
That same weekend I spent in Crown Heights, I also saw another group of young men who engaged me in endless debate to justify their preoccupation with their potential mates' looks. One told me that there was nothing wrong with a man wanting to be attracted to his wife, and how else could he guarantee that he would not look at other women after he married? "Of course a man has to be attracted to his wife," I conceded. "But your mistake is to so narrowly define attraction as consisting merely of physical beauty. What makes a woman striking is the totality of her being--her body, her mind, her heart, her virtue. Do you believe for one moment that marrying the prettiest woman in the world will serve as an immunity to a roving eye? You can grow just as weary of waking up the same beautiful face as you do to a more ordinary one. Just look at Hollywood. These actors all marry women who look like supermodels, but they cheat on each other and end up divorced after just a few months. Rather, it's finding newness in a relationship that obviates boredom. And that can only come from a woman with real personality." But what about the Torah, he countered, which refers to the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel as being exceedingly beautiful? I responded that whenever the Torah speaks of the matriarchs' beauty, the remark is accompanied by a description of their virtue which served as the great multiplier of that beauty, such as Sarah's readiness to feed all passersby and Rebecca's kindness in watering Eliezer's camels. But the very fact that I had engaged in a debate with learned rabbinical students about how a woman dare not be reduced to a soulless body was troubling. Of late, I have devoted several columns to the increasingly distressed Orthodox Jewish dating scene, where the core Jewish values of character and spiritual virtue are losing out to the dehumanizing qualities of money and looks. Jews who wouldn't be caught dead driving on the Sabbath or eating a cheeseburger are prepared to base the most important decision of their lives on values that are antithetical to the Jewish insistence on character and depth. King Solomon may have exclaimed that "beauty is false, while a woman who fears G-d is to be praised," but many of the Yeshiva students today prefer a shapely body to a sculpted spirit. Jewish values must be restored to religious dating. The Orthodox community can no longer turn a blind eye to the growing artifice of the religious dating scene. Lectures on the Torah's definition of feminine virtue should be made part of the Yeshiva curriculum for marriage-age men to counter the growing effects of a TV and magazine culture that is increasingly marketing women as all cover and no book. Rabbis should give sermons in synagogues that focus on religious men never punishing a woman who puts more time into developing her mind than choosing her clothes. And the women should make it clear to the men who date them that marriage is for adults, not for boys.