Shani Leiman with Zivia Reischer

The first thing I thought was, This guy is a treasure. The second thing I thought was, I don’t know a single girl who will date him

G

avriel came to see me when he was 26. He’d been learning in a small yeshivah and was ready to start dating. As we talked, I learned he’d grown up in Hicksville, a small town in Vermont.

“I didn’t realize there was a frum community there!” I commented.

“There wasn’t,” he replied. “We were borderline religious-traditional. I knew how to read Hebrew, and we sort of celebrated some Yamim Tovim. I didn’t become seriously frum until I was in college.”

When he finished his degree, Gavriel (then Gabe) had done something courageous — instead of jumping headfirst into the race to build his résumé, he took off a couple of years to learn in yeshivah full-time.

“I went to yeshivah and sat and learned all day for three years, like the guys who came from Brooklyn and Lakewood,” he said. “And now I’m ready to start dating.”

The first thing I thought was, This guy is a treasure. The second thing I thought was, I don’t know a single girl who will date him.

He was clearly very bright and had a great sense of humor, but he’d grown up in an ultra-liberal, remote community. His parents were divorced. He was a serious ben Torah who wanted to learn long-term, but he was also a quasi-baal teshuvah whose childhood had revolved around sports and included a holiday tree with a menorah on top. It was a bit much for the kind of girl who wanted a long-term learner.

“My dream,” Gavriel told me, “is to move back to Hicksville and learn in the kollel there.”

Where in the world was I going to find a girl who would agree to that?

When the door closed behind Gavriel, I walked to the window. “Hashem,” I said, “I’d love to set Gavriel up with someone special. I see how far he’s come and how incredible he is. But I don’t have a girl for him. He’s too unique for me. I need You to handle this one.”

A week later Devorah came to see me. (Spoiler alert: She didn’t marry Gavriel.) Devorah was 24, working as a teacher and boarding in the community. We schmoozed and it was like making a new friend and reuniting with an old friend at once.

“The Herzogs are great,” she told me, referring to the family with whom she boarded. “There are five girls there now, and they have a really nice setup.”

“Nice you have company,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Three of them aren’t dating yet. The other girl, her name is Aliza, I tried to convince her to come meet you. But she said she’s terrified of shadchanim.”

We looked at each other and laughed; I’m not the kind of shadchan you can be “terrified” of.