CHAPTER FOUR - The Question of Marriage

A: BACKGROUND

7. The move to modernity – love and marriage in the modern world

A classic modern story dealing with the theme of the shadchan as huckster is Bernard Malamud’s great story “The Magic Barrel”, which tells the tale of Leo Finkel, a Rabbinical student who feels the need for a wife and finally, with great misgivings, approaches Saltzman, a matchmaker - who uses all kinds of half-truths and untruths to try and close a match for Leo. Ultimately the story turns tragic – and in this lies its greatness – but, on the way, the reader receives a clear picture of the matchmaker as con man: an image that gradually developed into a stereotype, perhaps a little unfairly.

One reason Leo finds it so humiliating to go to a shadchan is that, in the modern world (outside the circles where matchmaking is a norm), resorting to a matchmaker is often deemed a sign of personal failure. The onus for finding a mate has passed mainly to the individual, which is an enormous change in the traditional way of doing things.

While there have been individual cases of romance in Jewish history, these have never formed any sort of a norm, but have always been seen as a deviation from collective norms. Now, in the majority of the Jewish world, the norm has totally changed.
In going to a matchmaker, Finkel himself feels like a deviant.

One of the best illustrations of this change is another famous ,modern Jewish story, the first of the classic Tevye stories written by Sholom Aleichem around the beginning of the twentieth century, which formed the basis for the play called, “Fiddler on the Roof”. The fascinating aspect about the series of stories that the author wrote over many years is that each story tackles a different problem in the modern Jewish world of Eastern Europe in that era.

The framework for the discussions is the character of Tevye, a milkman, and his many daughters. Tevye represents the old traditional Jew, while his daughters represent the new, enlightened world. The attempt by the father to try and come to terms with the world of his daughters and to understand them provides much of the comic basis for the tales which are rightly seen as among the greatest of short stories in modern Jewish literature.

The first of the stories, “Modern Children”, written in 1899, introduces a major change in the Jewish world at that time: the transition from the old world approach to marriage to the new. Briefly, the story revolves around a match that Tevye makes with the wealthy butcher, the elderly widower Lazer Wolf, for the hand of the former’s eldest daughter, Tzeitel. But Tzeitel, while acknowledging her father’s right to make a match for her, begs him to break the match and not to force her into it. Finally, it becomes clear that Tzeitel is in love with Mottel, a poor tailor and the two of them have sworn to marry each other. Mottel then comes to ask Tevye for permission to marry Tzeitel and finally the father agrees.

Part of the interest for the modern reader is the way that Tevye’s world-view is based on traditional attitudes and beliefs. When Tzeitel appeals to Tevye to cancel the match with Lazer Wolf, Tevye soothes her.

“What are you crying for?… For Heaven’s sake, if you say no it’s no. Nobody is going to force you. We meant it for the best, we did it for your sake. But if it doesn’t appeal to you, what are we going to do? Apparently, it’s not ordained.…
“Apparently if He ordains it this way, that’s the way it has to be. What good are complaints? Forty days before you were conceived, the Holy Book tells us, an angel appeared and decreed, 'Let Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel take Getzel son of Zorach (a name of nobody specific i.e. someone else) as her husband: and let Lazer Wolf the butcher go elsewhere to seek his mate.' And to you my child, I say this; may G-d send you your predestined one, one worthy of you and may he come soon...”
Sholom Aleichem “Modern Children”

When Mottel later breaks the news to Tevye about the fact that he and Tzeitel have sworn to marry each other, Tevye, who is narrating the story, says the following to himself.

“If someone had stuck a knife into my heart, it would have been easier to endure than these words. In the first place, how does a tailor like Mottel fit into the picture as my son in law? And in the second place, what kind of words are these, 'We swore to each other that we would marry'? And where do I come in? I ask him bluntly, 'Do I have the right to say something about my daughter, or doesn’t anyone have to ask a father any more?'”
ibid.

Mottel and Tzeitel stand on the edge of the modern world at the end of the nineteenth century. As Mottel himself makes clear immediately after the above piece, he had come to Tevye to ask permission; the story does not make clear what would have happened if Tevye had stood against the match. Since he agrees to the match, the tension shifts elsewhere, together with the humour, as Tevye tries to think of a plan to convince his wife that the rich Lazer Wolf should be exchanged for the poor Mottel.

In the modern world in which we live, outside of the traditional circles where a marriage is still arranged, to a large extent, parents are not even consulted, in many cases.