  

The shidduch world was a tough place to be if your parents had no money, yichus, or fame, and you really, really wanted to marry a learning boy. And, Rivi liked to make clear, it was not just a seminary-high dream. Especially not three years out of seminary. You want to blame someone for her stubbornness, blame Menachem. Wasn’t that what brothers were for, to take the blame? He’d been sitting in kollel for seven years. Yes, Chaiky’s family had more money than they knew what to do with and were proudly supporting him, but still. Rivi wanted that, too. The fire, the eye-on-the-goal life.

So she’d suffered through three years of barely-there dates, before deciding to take matters into her own hands. Social media was just taking off then and people were horrified by the money kids were making just by unboxing new toys or eating crazy food combinations. But, as Rivi tells it, everything can be used for tumah or kedushah. And she was going to use the institution of video vlogs to support her hypothetical husband in learning. Reel with Rivi started off more as a “shidduchim guide” — best place to date where you won’t meet your students or their mothers, warmest coat that still looks kallah-meidelish, and most comfortable shoes without actually wearing Uggs.

She couldn’t have imagined how successful her channel would become, and that frightened her more than she would admit. But when she was redt to Yossi Kellerman, top masmid, serious learner with a love for all things fun and interesting, she knew it had all been worth it.

  

Rivi Kellerman hates editing. Content is invigorating. Paid partnerships are amazing. Even brainstorming sessions are all part of the fun. But editing her biweekly videos makes her want to put her head down and cry herself into a good, long nap.

Not that she has that luxury. Chaya would be bringing Sima home soon, and then it would be goodbye editing room for the rest of the day. She smiles at the thought of Sima, all apple cheeks and black cowlicks and little feet.

Her computer pings loudly and she jumps, hurrying over to her laptop. No, it isn’t that. She turns and faces the large screen on her right. There, a WhatsApp message. Perching on the cushioned stool, she clicks.

Love your content! DM us for an amazing collaboration! JennasJewels

No and thank you. She’d made several ironclad rules when she’d first started out, a little over five years ago. Rule number three was “Stay true to your goal. Don’t get sidetracked.” Not so eloquent, maybe, but it’d kept her from accepting more such similar offers in the past.

But still, just for curiosity, what was Jenna’s Jewels and how mad should she be at rule number three?

Of course. She groans as sparkling photos fill her screen.

The new earrings she’d admired on Tzippy at the Neshei Chanukah Melaveh Malkah were Jenna’s Jewels. And Racheli had just gotten them as well.

Maybe, just this once…

She imagines herself in — she squints at the screen — the Ice Swirl Hoops at Pinny’s bar mitzvah next month and a small smile steals across her face. She then imagines herself explaining to Yossi about the Ice Swirl Hoops at Pinny’s bar mitzvah next month and the smile swiftly disappears.

Thanks, Jenna’s Jewels! Love love your collection. Collaborating won’t work for me, but congrats on a beautiful debut.

Another ping fills the room. She glances down at the WhatsApp, but there’s no “new message” icon.

She swivels the stool around to the slightly smaller screen on the left. There, the Reel with Rivi Instagram page. A DM.

Reel with Rivi! Amazing content! Kosher Kuisine would love to send you an unboxing this week. Under the auspices of Rav Hershkowitz. You in? @KosherKuisineisIn

Ahh. Now this was lucrative.

Rivi glanced at the huge calendar hanging on the wall opposite. Perfect, she had meetings all day Tuesday, absolutely no time to shop and cook for dinner.

@KosherKuisineisIn sounds great! Have the boxes here by Tuesday and you’ll get a seven-minute unboxing on the following Monday’s Reel with Rivi!

Perks are real.

She scrolls down.

The comments are good today.

Love this so much.

This IS my day.

Riv, you’re my fave! And these biscottis were sick.

Can you do a chocolate babka next?

Rivi laughs while the glaze spills all over the stovetop. Haha, love it!! I would SCREAM.

A small smile steals across Rivi Kellerman’s face.

It’s nice to have a steady parnassah so your husband can learn in kollel.

It’s nice to have a husband who is a budding talmid chacham.

It’s nice to work in the house and not face all the nisyonos of a mixed workplace out in the big, bad world.

But it’s also really, really nice to be liked.

  

When Yosef Chaim Kellerman was 13, he’d wanted a Super Mario video game. And so Baruch Kellerman, his father, had sat down with him and explained the concept of kedoshim tehiyu. Also, anu ratzim v’heim ratzim. He’d made a few more points, and when he was done, Yosef Chaim Kellerman still wanted a Super Mario video game, but he also understood that he’d probably never receive one and that was okay. He’d gotten a Ferragamo belt instead, and although he’d been too shy to wear it at first, he’d definitely worn it out by the time he was 15. He’d received his first cellphone when he left to yeshivah gedolah, a slim silver flip phone that fit neatly in his inner jacket pocket and that he had on silent most of the time, so it wasn’t used as much for making phone calls as for returning all the calls he’d missed.

The first year of shidduchim, he would leave the phone at home, but as he had to start traveling further — apparently he’d dated all the girls in Passaic — he would bring the phone but leave it in his trunk for the duration of the date. And then once he’d met Rivi Diamond, he knew, with certainty, his long drives to date girls in various out-of-town cities — because Yossi Kellerman needs “out of the box” — had come to a glorious, blissful end. Rivi was like no one he’d ever met; her spunk, her zest for life, her passionate desire that her husband sit and learn Torah.

And so he kept the flip phone, but most of the time, it was left on the milchig counter, out of battery. Until he had to be on call to pick up formula and diapers straight from seder, and then it was charged faithfully every night.

Yossi’s relationship with technology has remained lukewarm, if that.

And so every time he pops his head into Rivi’s office, he has to squint, even though the lighting is soft and warm if she isn’t in the middle of shooting. And he never goes in if she is in the middle of shooting.

He’d done it once, and had just stood there, mouth hanging open, as he watched Rivi tucking a sheitel strand behind one ear and talking earnestly about sleep training while holding up Sima’s favorite swaddle.

But now she is just “answering DMs” whatever that meant, and so, squinting, he enters and looks around.

She has three large screens set up around her, with a laptop forming a fourth wall, so that she is literally surrounded by screens, and in the middle, she sits on a swivel stool, hands tap-tap-tapping out responses to her adoring fans.

Or not so adoring, at times.

The first time she’d read him a mean comment, he’d spit his chicken soup out across the room and leapt to his feet, ready to defend his wife’s honor.

But she had just laughed and said that @Ticheltruth was probably just tired or had a long day, and that’s why it was okay to send his wife a message calling her nonsense and a waste of time and blaming her for ruining her day.

But Rivi has a smile on her face now, so he assumes it’s all good comments. She also looks extraordinarily tired.

Sleep trained Sima might be, but teething is no joke, and Rivi had been up half the night with her.

“How goes it, Mrs. Kellerman?”

Rivi looks up and her hands still. He appreciates that about her, that she always tries to be completely present when speaking to him.

“Hey, Mr. Kellerman.” She smiles at him. “You okay? You had a coffee?”

“Sure did. You all right here? I can stay while you nap if you want.”

Rivi grins at him. “And then whose Torah will be holding up the world? Go, go, I’m not even tired, and besides, it’s three hours and 46 minutes until Sima’s bedtime. But who’s counting?”

Yossi laughs but makes no move to leave. He loves schmoozing with Rivi. “Hey, guess who I met at Kosher Korner today?”

Rivi scrunches her face, thinking. “Avraham Fried?”

Yossi cracks up. “How awesome would that be?” The Kellermans are major fans of Avremele and proud of it.

“So awesome. So who?”

“Azi Lehrman.”

“Azi Lehrman, your chavrusa who moved to Eretz Yisrael?”

“Yup, he’s here for a chasunah.”

“Wow!” Rivi looks genuinely excited by the anecdote and Yossi realizes that if he doesn’t leave right then, he’s going to sit down and chat with her about the Lehrmans’ life in Yerushalayim for the rest of second seder. Sometimes, when it’s just him and Rivi and nothing else, the hours seem to melt away.

“ ’Kay! I’m going. Shalom to all.”

Rivi laughs again and waves as he backs out of the room, only stopping to grab his keys and hat before rushing out to second seder.

He’s a lucky man, he knows that.

Then why does he sometimes feel like he agrees with every word @Ticheltruth had posted?

Rav Dovid is waiting for him when he reaches the crowded coatroom of Beis Ahron. Yossi stands respectfully straight, shakes the rain off of his jacket, and offers a hearty shalom aleichem to the rosh chaburah.

“Reb Yosef Chaim, how goes it, how are you, how is everything?”

Rav Dovid is what Yossi Kellerman calls “a holy Jew.” Maybe even the holiest Jew that he knows personally.

He ushers Yossi to a bench in the corner of the beis medrash and they watch as it slowly fills.

Yossi can’t help the smile that spreads across his face. He loves Beis Ahron, he really does. He loves the energy, the kol Torah spilling out into the hallway, the mix of fresh-faced bochurim and grizzled balabatim learning at the worn shtenders.

Rav Dovid is watching him. “You have a bren, Reb Yosef Chaim, you know this?”

Yossi looks down, thinks of how alive he feels when he’s learning, how sure-footed he is in this world, and how lost he feels in other environments.

He lifts a shoulder in a “what-can you-do” way and laughs. “I try, Rebbi. I try.”

Rav Dovid klaps him on the shoulder. “You don’t need to try so hard, Reb Yosef Chaim. That’s why I want you to be shoel u’meishiv for the new building.”

The “new building” was the new chaburah for bochurim. Rav Dovid was putting together a geshmak team of roshei chaburah, and now he was being asked to join!

“Rebbi. I would love to. Love to. Thank you!”

He wonders if Rav Dovid would still ask him if he knew that Yossi’s first instinct is to take a victory lap around the beis medrash.

Rav Dovid shakes his hand warmly. “This is gevaldig. Go discuss it with your wife, Reb Yosef Chaim. Let me know, and then I’ll give you the takanos pamphlet. It’s a whole fancy thing that Reb Uri typed up, we’re having everyone starting in the new building sign. New building, new hasagos. It’ll be gevaldig.”

And that’s when Yossi Kellerman realizes, with a sinking feeling, that the words “takanos” and Rivi Kellerman don’t really mix well.

And that’s why he opens his mouth and tells Rav Dovid that his wife is vadai on board and he’ll sign the takanos, right then and there.

  

They’d called a truce around a year and a half ago. It had taken Yossi all of shanah rishonah to realize that everyone else in the entire world had been correct, and being an influencer was a very strange job for a kollel wife, and Yossi Kellerman did. Not. Like. It. It then took him several more months to admit this to his wife, and several more months for her to stop looking hurt and betrayed every time Yossi made a comment about her work.

They’d called a ceasefire after Sima was born. He would stop making comments, you know, outwardly, and she would do her best to keep Yossi and their marriage and the details of their life off the air. They never really discussed how much she’d mention Sima, because it seemed kind of unfair for him to have a say in that when she took care of the baby 24 hours a day.

But after the truce, she stopped jumping guiltily whenever he entered her office, and would breezily mention if she met a follower while doing the Shabbos shopping. He was glad about that, glad that she could be open with him, that she didn’t have to hide things out of fear of his disapproval.

He’s a happy man, with a beautiful relationship with his wife and a ridiculously cute kid.

Then why did the one blot on the landscape seem to drown out everything else in his life?

Like the fact that he has just been promoted to shoel u’meishiv… and his wife might be the very thing standing in his way.

  

Yossi liked to think that he didn’t have many pet peeves. He was a chiller, low maintenance, easy to please. But if he was hard-pressed to admit it, then he’d have to say that ripping open bagels bothered him.

Why couldn’t Shani have left a clean knife on the tray to slice his onion bagel open with? It was either be the bad guy who steals the cream cheese knife and then returns it, ruining the dill cream cheese with leftover bits of onion; or rip open his bagel like a caveman.

Rivi walks over, juggling a hyper Sima with one hand, and hands him a knife.

“Rivi to the rescue,” she says, grinning.

He stares at her incredulously, holding the knife aloft like it’s the golden ticket. “How did you know?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Three years of marriage have taught me something.”

He smiles at her appreciatively; she smiles back.

Shani looks over from where she’s ladling soup. “Rivi! Stop smiling at my brother, go put Sima down with the other kids, and make yourself a plate.”

Rivi rolls her eyes at Yossi; he makes a funny face.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Yossi spreads cream cheese carefully on his perfectly sliced bagel, then washes, glad for paper towels — wet communal towels are another pet peeve — and joins his siblings in the living room.

His sisters are smiling down at Shani’s phone.

“She’s something else, that Rivi,” Rachel says, eyes never leaving the phone. She angles it so Yossi can see as well.

Rivi, looking as composed as ever, is smoothing a tablecloth over the dining room table. Over his dining room table, the table that he and Rivi had picked out together when they were choosing their chassan and kallah furniture package, three-and-a-half years earlier.

He’d never seen the tablecloth before, white with pink and purple butterflies scattered across it. It looked like a four-year-old’s birthday invitation.

“Love it,” the Rivi on the screen says definitively. “Absolutely love it. It’s so soft and at the same time, so crisp. Table Tops, you’ve done it again. Guys, swipe up for a link to the Flutterby Floral, use code Rivi for 15 percent off your order. Expires in 24 hours, so run, run, run. This is gorgeous.”

He then watches in stunned incredulity as Shani and Rachel, the former a respectable second grade morah, the latter an accountant, pause the video so they can run, run, run, and buy the Flutterby Floral at 15 percent off.

  

The walk home is quiet, and he feels unusually content as they stroll along. Rivi is humming to herself as she pushes the carriage, and he finds himself smiling. He likes to see her happy.

“What?” she asks, noticing the grin.

“Nothing. It’s just… nice to walk with you.”

She makes an “oh, stop” gesture with her hand and they both laugh.

“Rav Dovid asked me to be shoel u’meishiv in the new building.”

He hadn’t planned on saying it, the words just slipped out all on their own and are now dancing in the air between them, too fast for him to snatch back.

Rivi stops walking so suddenly, she bangs into Sima’s carriage.

“Ouch! What? Yossi, that’s incredible. Incredible! I’m so proud. When did he ask? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Oh, right before Shabbos.” You can lie for shalom, right? “I didn’t want to discuss it too much on Shabbos, you know, salary, and all that.”

“Oh. Okay, right.” She is quiet. “Did you not want to tell me?”

He looks at her, momentarily amazed at her intuition. She’s looking down at the hand gripping the stroller bar, her diamond ring glinting in the glow of the streetlights.

“Rivi! No, of course not. I did want to, I do. I just did!”

“But not right away.”

“Well, no.”

“Why?”

He rubs the bridge of his nose. “There are takanos. About technology. And internet use. And I guess… I was scared that if you had to choose, you wouldn’t choose… this.”

He’d almost said, “me.”

Rivi stares at him. “You already signed the takanos, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t answer, but his gaze drops to the ground in an admission of guilt.

She stands frozen for a moment and then she begins to push the stroller, further and further up the block, leaving Yosef Chaim Kellerman, shoel u’meishiv of the new building, alone on the sidewalk, watching his wife disappear into the dark.

  

His breakfast is laid out neatly in the morning, cheerful yellow bowl, spoon, box of Oat Squares, carton of milk.

But Rivi is nowhere to be seen, and neither is Sima.

His heart drops.

He puts the dirty bowl in the sink, stacks the cereal box in the pantry, and grabs his hat. Seder begins in eight minutes. Yossi Kellerman doesn’t do late.

Hat on, keys in hand, he’s in the driver’s seat when he stops.

What is he doing?

How can he go learn, go pound on the table with Benisti, when Rivi isn’t speaking to him?

He’d hurt her. He knows that.

And so he gathers all of the resolve he has, and steps out of the car and back into the house. He quietly hangs his hat on the hook and goes to wait in the living room with a sefer.

She walks in an hour later, loaded down with boxes labeled “Reel with Rivi’s Elegant Eats.”

He doesn’t want to know.

He silently takes the heavy packages and places them on the dining room table.

Rivi is in slight shock at his presence; she perches on the couch, still in her jacket.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

He stands in the doorway. “To talk. To you.”

She gave a half smile. “Nice. What should we talk about? The fact that you didn’t want to share huge news with your wife or the fact that you signed our lives away without consulting with me?”

“What’s Elegant Eats?”

She stares at him. “A new plasticware company, specializing in fake china settings.”

“Oh.”

“Yossi. My parents can’t support you. Your parents can’t support you. I support you. I support you because I want you to learn b’menuchah. I work really hard. I’ve been out since 7 a.m. I’m exhausted. I put so much into my job. And you, Yossi Kellerman, are kafui tov. You should’ve come running in and said, ‘Rivi, I couldn’t have done it without you.’ Instead, you kept it from me. You never share what happened in seder or what your chavrusa said. Even though it’s my money that allows you to be there. So, Yossi, be honest. Do you feel you owe me anything? Or do you feel you made it on your own?”

And in the face of his deafening silence, she gets gracefully to her feet, tears sliding silently down her face, gathers the big boxes into her arms, and makes her slow way up the stairs, toward her office.

  

He’s shaken. Is it true? Does he not value Rivi as he should? But he’s a good husband. He listened to his chassan shiurim, he applies the rules, he shmoozes and compliments and does his best to place her on a pedestal. So he doesn’t want to share a blow-by-blow of his day. Does that mean that he’s kafui tov? Does it?

He doesn’t know. And he thinks that maybe, that’s the problem.

Rav Dovid listens quietly as Yossi pours out his woes, simultaneously grateful to have such a figure in his life, and completely mortified to be polluting his pristine image.

No doubt the shoel u’meishiv position is off the table.

“Yosef Chaim. Why are you here?”

He looks at his rebbi. “Uh, for clarity?”

“No, why are you here? Where is your wife? Why aren’t you looking for answers together? Hashem watches over the fools, but there’s no mitzvah to be a fool. Your wife is upset that you don’t include her. So your answer was to seek clarity alone?”

Yossi feels like stamping his foot. “Rebbi, I can’t include her in everything. Some things are just mine.”

Reb Dovid klaps him on the back, not too gently this time.

“If you think that, Yosef Chaim, then it’s no wonder she’s not speaking to you.”

And then he turns the page in his Gemara. Yossi is dismissed.

Tzvi Henner is the only one in the coffee room when Yossi stumbles in, desperate for some caffeine.

“Kellerman. How are things?”

He nods, hoping Tzvi will get the hint and leave him alone.

But Henner is feeling schmoozy. “My last day here, you know?”

Yossi blinks. He hadn’t known.

“We’ll miss you. Where you heading? Lakewood?”

Henner laughs wryly. “Nah, Manhattan.” He answers Yossi’s unspoken question. “I’m starting a coding program tomorrow. Get to ride the train, buy a laptop, eventually will need a smartphone. Yup, the whole situation. Tzvi Henner 2.0.”

If Tzvi had said he was leaving to join the Mars Exploration program, he couldn’t have surprised Yossi more.

“Wow, Tzvi, that’s—”

“Sad,” Tzvi supplies. “It’s sad. Enjoy it while you have it, Kellerman. It’s a gift. A real gift.”

And if his voice breaks, Yossi is kind enough to pretend he doesn’t hear.

  

He drives home on autopilot, his mind whirring faster than during seder.

Is his reality of sitting and learning in kollel a gift? Or is he just more persistent and resilient then Tzvi Henner? Hishtadlus plays a big part, doesn’t it?

But whose hishtadlus? asks a voice in his head. Whose hishtadlus?

The house is quiet. Rivi is probably taking a nap with Sima, she’s a big believer in “sleep when the baby does.” He rustles around the kitchen junk drawer before heading to the desk in the living room. Aha. He pulls open the top drawer and finds about ten different pretty pads of paper, some of them with notes scrawled on the first page.

A little token for Reel with Rivi.

And,

Here’s some mitzvah note paper for your precious Sima.

And,

For all your stationery needs. <3, Gigi

He bites back his sigh and picks a purple one with gold on its borders.

Then he sits down to write a very overdue card.

Dear Rivi,

Will you please join me at that super-overpriced café for pasta that you make waaay better, with the wicker furniture that looks like it should be on a Brooklyn porch? And then after, can we go see Rav Dovid together?

Waiting hopefully,

Yossi

He hears her snort-laugh from the other room when she finds the note, and waits, feeling oddly nervous.

She comes out, face blank, not a trace of the laugh he’d heard.

“I thought going out to eat with me makes you nervous? That you don’t like me Instagramming the food and storying with the store owner?”

He probably never said those exact words because he doesn’t know what half of them mean, but he still shakes his head sheepishly.

“Well, now I want to. Please? I love going out with you. You’re my wife. But more importantly, can we please go seek daas Torah together? About this whole takanos thing? Please, Rivi? It has to be together. It’s the only way.”

“This from the guy who signed alone just a few days ago?”

Yossi bites his lip. “I’m doing teshuvah?”

This time, she does laugh.

“Who am I to stand in the way of teshuvah. Sure, I’ll join you. I’ll ask Chaya if she can watch Sim.”

“Thanks. See you after second seder.”

Not that he was going to second seder. He was heading to Jenna’s Jewels. See, he did listen.

Sort of; he’d called Shani.

  

She’s floored by the earrings. That makes him feel bad. Does she think he doesn’t want to make her happy?

Tzvi Henner’s voice echoes in his head. “A gift.”

He clears his throat and then jumps right in. “You never got daas Torah.”

She stares at him, the smile fading from her face.

“When you decided to support your husband in kollel through Instagram and YouTube, you didn’t ask a sh’eilah.”

She fingers the jewelry box, eyes cast downward.

“And I didn’t realize what it was that made me so nervous about the whole thing. But I think that now that I’ve done the same thing to you, I think that’s what it is. We’re married, a unit, a partnership, and yet we each keep going about, doing things on our own. And we’re hurting each other. I was kafui tov. You were right. I’m so sorry, Rivi. I’m the luckiest man in the world. I have no words to explain how much I appreciate the gift of learning.”

And this time, when his voice breaks, it’s Rivi who pretends not to notice.

They eat their food in silence, everything has already been said. But stepping out into the cool air breaks the spell, and laughing and chatting, they walk from the restaurant down to the tiny little townhouse near the yeshivah parking lot.

They stop in front of Rav Dovid’s door.

“Ready?”

“So ready,” Rivi says, her earrings glinting in the moonlight.

“You knock,” Yossi says, pointing his chin at her.

Rivi giggles. “Nah, you should knock.” She smiles at him. “For both of us.” 

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 854)