Get The Ring: How to Find and Keep the Right One for Life.

Get The Ring

How to Find and Keep the Right One for Life

Featuring: Rosie Einhorn, Shimon Green, Dov Heller, Tziporah Heller, Lawrence Kelemen, Mordecai Rottman, Sherry Zimmerman

By David LeVine

Copyright 2011 Warm Wisdom Press

Smashwords Edition

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Contents

Introduction

Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen

Rosie Einhorn, M.S.W. & Sherry Zimmerman, J.D.

Rabbi Mordecai Rottman

Rabbi Dov Heller

Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller

Rabbi Shimon Green

This ebook includes a free audio book. The link to download the audio book is on the first page of the Review Guide.

Introduction

Hi. My name is David LeVine and I want to welcome you to Get The Ring, where you’re going to discover the secrets of how to find the right one quickly, date successfully and build an awesome relationship. Before we get started, I want to give you a little background information about this book and audio series as well as a quick overview of what you can expect to hear. I guess you could say that this project had its origins back in 1990 in my own search to get married; a search which, thank God, ended successfully quite a while back. I’ve been happily married now since 1994. When I embarked on my search I started by looking at all the dating and relationship data that was available. And then I came across the national divorce rate statistic of over 50%. Now imagine for a second that you’re going to get a nose job, and you go into the doctor and sit down and he says, Dave, there’s a 50% chance that I’m going to get your nose right. You’re going to say, Hey Doc, this is my nose, I can’t hide my nose and 50-50 is not going to cut it. And you would get out of there pretty quickly. Marriage, I thought, is a far more major life decision, yet less than half of the people were getting it right. I knew there had to be a better way. At first I looked around for successful couples, and I thought I would use them as a model. But I quickly realized that it wouldn’t work. Why? Because although there were many similarities in these couples, there was also an infinite number of variables, meaning that I might get really good advice from those couples but there was no way of knowing that that was the magic advice that made their marriage work and that it would do the same for mine. I didn’t want to gamble, not on my nose, not on my future. I wanted a successful, happy and long-lasting relationship. So I kept up my research and finally I came across a very large group of people who, as a group, have an amazingly low divorce rate — Orthodox Jews. Hey, I said to myself, I’ve got to check this out. At first I thought there must be a catch. Like, maybe they aren’t allowed to divorce. But no, that wasn’t it. In fact, the more that I asked and checked out the matter, the more I found out that they were perfectly normal and that in fact, divorce was generally encouraged for couples that couldn’t work things out. So what was so different? What was drastically different was their outlook on dating, relationships and marriage. I spoke to a lot of people in this circle and although they all used different words, themes were consistent. They were new, surprising themes that were very far from the popular views I was used to hearing. So then I took a good look at the facts. My modern world produces more failures than successes in the marriage arena, while their world has a proven success rate. I said to myself, hey, if you want to get married and have a successful relationship, what are you going to do? You’re going to trail after the loosing team or you’re going to follow the advice of the winning team, the ones that are earning home runs year after year? Well, the rest is history. I decided to go with the winning advice. It’s the same advice that you’re going to get here on this series.

I’ve gathered here exclusive interviews with some of the top dating and marriage experts in the Orthodox Jewish world. These fascinating and articulate speakers normally address Orthodox Jewish audiences, and they tend to use a little Hebrew and Talmudic terminology. But they carefully prepared the discussions in this series to make them accessible and understandable for every listener. Be prepared to hear ideas in this series that may seem radical or far out to you at first. I suggest that you hold back your judgment until you’ve heard out the entire issue, as many people have found, when they were open enough to listen objectively to this information, they discovered that employing this approach really did get them to their goals faster because it smoothed out all the common obstacles. When I did my research years ago, I realized how important it was to hear the input of many different people. I used that same approach in preparing this series. The speakers are varied in background and in style. Interestingly though, there are several major themes that will keep appearing in the different presentations. It’s my sincere wish that with God’s help this series will help you to, find the right one, and that the words you hear will be a springboard towards a beautiful and lasting relationship.

Now here’s a quick overview of what you can expect:

Part 1: Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, who is a Professor of Education at Neve Yerushalayim College of Jewish Studies. He’s going to offer us a comprehensive discussion on dating and marriage beginning with the basic prerequisites of marriage, carrying it through the dating process, the wedding and making the marriage work.

Part 2: Rosie and Sherry, professionals who specialize in programs and services to help Jewish singles. They’re going to present a straightforward, eminently practical guide to dating successfully, including recommended preliminary research as well as a list of common dating fallacies.

Part 3: Rabbi Mordecai Rottman, who is a practicing psychotherapist and lecturer in Jerusalem. He’s going to be using the framework of Four Things to Look for in a Spouse to offer us a broad range philosophy of what a successful marital relationship is all about.

Part 4: Rabbi Dov Heller, the Director of the Relationship Institute in Los Angeles. He’s going to enumerate 10 reasons why people tend to marry the wrong person. And he’s going to provide clear guidelines as to how to avoid these common pitfalls to a successful relationship.

Part 5: Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller, a renowned scholar of Jewish studies and sought-after international lecturer, who is going to present us with important insights on dating and marriage, using her inimitable style which is a combination of deep philosophical thought and piercing psychoanalysis that seems to speak directly to the listener's innermost self. And all of that with her unique sense of wry humor.

Part 6: Rabbi Shimon Green, who heads the Yeshiva Bircas HaTorah in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. He’s going to round out our series with a deeply emotional presentation, laced with humor that reveals the essence of the successful marriage in a most original and powerful manner.

I’ve just given you a hint of what awaits you in the audio-experience of what is yet to come. Be prepared to be jarred from your standard way of thinking, moved to tears, roused to laughter, and enlightened to new ideas that ring true in a way that you’ve never experienced before. Your view of dating and marriage will never be the same and your chance at a successful relationship is guaranteed to rise several percentage points each time that you listen to this series. Enjoy.

Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen

Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen is Professor of Education at Neve Yerushalayim College of Jewish Studies, where he also lectures on Medieval and Modern Jewish Philosophy. For more information and to contact his office you can visit: www.lawrencekelemen.com. Rabbi Kelemen will provide us with a comprehensive discussion of dating and marriage, starting from the preparatory stages that precede dating and carrying us all the way through to guidelines for a lasting marriage:

It’s so important for us to speak about how to date, how to get married, because it’s something that our educational system has really abandoned, something that they’ve ignored. In the high school text books, the little bit of information we get about dating and marriage is all about how to stay physically healthy during dating and marriage. You’ll find a lot of material about venereal disease and how to avoid it, but not necessarily information about how to make a relationship go click. The people who teach those courses, they’re usually gym teachers who are saddled with one extra responsibility, who don’t really know anything about relationships. And all the information they can give over is what’s in the text, which is skeletal at best. It’s very, very important for people to seek out expert advice.

Let’s start then from the beginning. How does a person know when he or she is ready to get married?

I’ve found that these Orthodox Jews, they have an unusual definition of love. And their definition of love completely alters their definition of marriage, meaning that their definition of love and marriage is not like our mainstream western definition of love and marriage. I’ll explain.

There’s a Hebrew word which is often translated as love. It is the Hebrew word for love, but I don’t think it means the same thing that we in the West mean when we say love. The Hebrew word is ahava. Ahava is… the word hav conjugated. Hav means to give. Ahav is I will give. Ahava is the state of I will giveness, that is, according to these Jews, love is a state that someone goes into, wherein all they want to do is take care of and give to a partner. Now right away you can start to see the difference between what we mean by love and what these Orthodox Jews mean by love. If I walk up to one of my college students and… I ask a woman, you know, — Do you love him? So she’s an intelligent person so she’ll stop and she’ll think, and she’ll have to ask herself some questions. She’ll say — Well, what does he do for me? What does he make me feel like? How good do I feel when I’m with him? How much does he do for me? How proud am I to be standing next to him? All the questions she’s going to ask herself are questions about Me and I. When I want to know if I’m in love, from a secular western perspective, the real question I’m asking is — how much selfish pleasure am I deriving from the relationship, and if I derive enough, then I cross this threshold called love. But if you pull aside one of these Orthodox Jews and you ask them — Do you love her? So he has to stop and ask himself a completely different set of questions. He has to ask himself — How much am I willing to let go of what I want for her sake? How much am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of my beloved? What am I willing to let go of for her? It’s all about her, her, her. It’s all about the other. Ahava, I will give. If I want to know if I’m in love, if I’m in ahava from a Jewish perspective, so then the whole question is — how much am I willing to let go of for the sake of the other.

Now if the definitions of love in our culture versus this Orthodox Jewish culture are diametrically opposed, expectedly that would lead to drastic differences in the definition of marriage, and it does. The word marriage, if you look it up in a dictionary, you’ll find that it means a merger of two or more corporate entities. It’s a business arrangement. We talk all the time about how the key to marriage is compromise. Fifty/fifty deal. I’ll do for you, you do for me. I’ll take out the trash, you do the dishes. I’ll earn the money, you take care of the kids. And it’s a great marriage as long as we’re both compromising, we’re both doing our half of the deal. Like any good corporate arrangement. But of course, if I refuse to do my half of the deal, so you’ll legitimately say — Hey, this is not fair. I’m doing the dishes, why don’t you take out the trash? I’m earning the money, why aren’t you taking care of the kids. And in fact, because marriage is a corporate arrangement, so divorce is not uncommon, because the marriage is only viable as long as both parties are doing their share.

The Jewish perspective is different because Orthodox Jews, they believe that the model of a perfect spouse is God. They have this wild belief that human beings were created in the image of God, and because they were created in the image of God they have God-like potential. And therefore, at least in terms of character, they could become like God. Now if you add to this that they believe that God is pure ahava, He is pure giving. All He wants to do is to take care of… in fact that's why He created the whole universe, so that there should be someone to care for, someone to give to. That's what they believe. Then He is the model spouse. He just gives and gives and gives, and He really doesn't want anything back. All he wants is our welfare, what's good for us. So for these Orthodox Jews, marriage is not a 50/50 deal. In fact, they don't even have the word marriage in their vocabulary. The word they use, the Hebrew word, nissuin, nissuin is the plural of the word carry. Their word for marriage is the word carryings. One of the rabbis once explained to me, Why do we call marriage carryings? He said, Because on the day of the wedding you step underneath the marriage canopy, you pick up your spouse and you say — I won't put her down no matter how heavy she gets." The idea is that I'm getting married because I'm so full of love, that is, I'm so full of ahava, that is I'm so full of the need to give, that I want to take full time responsibility for somebody else for the rest of their life. I want to care for them in every single way. When a person has a desire to care for somebody else, to take care of them, then it's time to start looking for a partner who they can take care of.

How do we know when we're ready to get married? So the first index, the first measure of traditional Jewish maturity would be — how much have I gotten out of myself and am I capable of focusing on others and