We have heard much about the “shidduch crisis,” with various reasons advanced to explain why there is such a crisis. My wife and I have dealt with shidduchim for the past three decades and have seen many changes. For one thing, the range of choices has broadened, and the question “Why should I settle for this one?” has become much more widespread. It’s become easier to pick on the smallest detail to decline many a good proposed shidduch. The element of hashgacha pratis – divine providence – through various agents in the shidduch process is totally overlooked.
The net result: we have so many young (but gradually getting older) Jewish singles who want to get married as the Torah demands but who are hampering themselves in their holy quest.
Rashi in Shemos (28:6) has something unusual to say about the shape of the efod, the apron worn by the kohen gadol in the Mishkan and eventually the Beis HaMikdash. There are several opinions about this and Rashi has his own. He bases his view on an experience whose lesson we can apply to shidduchim.
Strangely enough, he introduces his explanation with the words “My heart tells me,” a phrase found nowhere else in his entire commentary on Chumash. He then draws a comparison to the apron worn by “princesses who ride horses.” Ostensibly, Rashi wanted the reader to conjure the shape of that apron in his mind and found no other example than that of female riders. By doing so, however, Rashi opened himself to criticism from religious zealots. After all, how does it behoove Rashi, the great scholar and saintly man, to pay attention to princesses on horses and to the details of what they wear?
Earlier in the Chumash, we find Avraham Avinu saying to his wife Sarah as they were approaching Egypt: “Behold I know now that you are a beautiful woman…” The obvious question: Didn’t he know that all along?
One answer is that Avraham certainly was cognizant of his wife’s beauty from the very outset (he probably observed the Talmudic injunction that “it is forbidden for a man to betroth a woman until he sees her first, lest he ends up hating her” (Kiddushin 42a; Even HaEzer 35:1), but his mind was constantly connected to the upper Godly spheres,
and as such the physical beauty he beheld was in a greatly minimized perspective.
It was only upon approaching Egypt, the seat of that era’s most depraved society, that he was influenced to the point of viewing physical beauty in a different light (Meor Enayim commentary).
In a similar manner, while Rashi was not necessarily one of those who “do not look beyond four cubits” as they walk the streets, his mind was constantly engaged with Torah and so it’s likely he hardly “saw” what met his gaze. One day (so we have it from tradition), his gaze met a princess riding a horse, and this time he actually “saw” her; not only that, but all the details of her attire became embedded in his mind.
Rashi felt downcast by the experience (What’s happening to me? Am I undergoing a spiritual descent?) until he realized this was a heaven-sent message to resolve the question of the efod‘s shape.
Often what meets the eye is not what should assume primary importance. In Avraham’s case, his wife’s physical beauty was inconsequential enough to him that under normal circumstances he was unaware of it. And while beauty plays an important role for those of us who are not on such an exalted spiritual level, it still needs to be kept in proper perspective.