Our son’s rebbi thought he knew him better than we did

Mendy: Why are you encouraging our son to look into a shidduch we know isn’t for him?

Reb Yehoshua: Your son wants something different and you just won’t listen.

Mendy

"Pesach’s on the way,” Minna announced, one icy evening in December. I blinked.

“Pesach? We’re just about done Chanukah.” I looked at Minna questioningly. Cleaning already? It didn’t look like it, and besides, Minna was efficient, but not extreme.

She laughed. “No, no, not Pesach Pesach, I mean Pesach bein hazmanim. Yossi. Shidduchim.” She stressed the last word so I couldn’t miss the significance.

I was surprised. “Is Yossi in shidduchim? We could give it another year, no?”

Minna gave me a look. “He’s 23, we started the others even earlier.”

Yossi? Twenty-three? I rubbed my forehead. Where did the years go?

Minna shrugged as she set down two salad bowls and a glass dish with piping-hot meat. I kept telling her there was no need to serve supper on real dishes, it was just the two of us after all, but she said that was why she did it.

“All the years with kids home we used the cheap stuff, now let me set a table how it’s meant to be set,” she’d told me.

We let the conversation about shidduchim slide; Minna knew I trusted her to start the process, narrow down the candidates, and present me with the information when she was ready to say yes. Some fathers like to be super-involved in every aspect of their kids’ shidduchim, but I was blessed with a wife who loved doing shidduch research and knew how to find out every last detail. Yossi’s our youngest — his three older brothers and two sisters are married already — and by now Minna had honed her shidduch protocol to a fine art. She has her preferred shadchan who knows the type of family we’re looking for, on every prospective shidduch she has a file that would rival a police dossier, and she can probably do a research call in her sleep — and get every one of her 60-plus questions answered.

I was grateful that she was capable of handling the thousands of phone calls. My schedule was jam-packed: full days at the office, minyan, my daf yomi shiur every morning, preparing every night. I preferred getting the rundown from her only once she’d narrowed the list down from hundreds of names to the one she felt would suit our son best. Minna also appreciated how limited my time was — she knew that handling shidduch calls left me able to use those precious evening hours for learning. Our kollel years were long over, but it was nice that she still had that idealism for Torah. It was something we really tried to give over to the children as well, notwithstanding the successful family business. All our sons spent time in Eretz Yisrael learning after the chasunah, and I was sure Yossi would want to do the same.

But first things first, the harrowing — and hallowed — shidduchim process.