Ezra was 27. He was still in yeshivah full time. He’d grown up in a different environment than your typical black-hat yeshivah boy had, but he was one of them now. The same and yet different: His experiences and choices had given him a depth and passion beyond that of his chevreh in yeshivah.

“I need a girl with a passion for life and a passion for learning,” he’d told me, his dark eyes intent. “I spent many years of my life involved in things that were a total waste of time. I’m done with that. I want a girl who understands the opportunity that life offers and wants to maximize it. Can you find me a girl like that, Mrs. Leiman?”

He was definitely sincere. It was the intensity that concerned me. I probed a bit.

“Ezra, what’s your relationship like with your family now? Are they supportive of your life choices? Are you close to them?”

I could see Ezra relax. He even smiled.

“Baruch Hashem, I have very special parents. They’re both doctors — my father is an anesthesiologist, and my mother is a pediatric neuropsychologist. They’re emotionally, financially, and even spiritually supportive of me. They’ve been paying my tuition all these years, even though the whole concept of yeshivah is foreign to them. Whenever I go home for Shabbos, I learn with my father, and my mother recently asked me to learn with her too. We just started learning Koheles together once a week over the phone. She chose it.”

That was so heartwarming to hear. Ezra was lucky.

“I have two siblings,” Ezra continued. “My older brother is married with two kids; he’s doing his residency now. My sister is in dental school. I get along with both of them. I respect their choices and they respect mine.”

The conversation put me at ease. There was balance in his life, and I felt comfortable suggesting Adena.

Adena and Ezra hit it off from the start. They were immediately comfortable with each other and each seemed to naturally get the other’s personality.

“I feel like I’ve known him my whole life,” Adena told me after their third date.

The fourth date brought a curveball.

“Mrs. Leiman,” Adena said. “My rav instructed me that on a fifth date I need to share something specific. There’s a rare health issue that I was born with. Nobody in the world knows about it besides my parents, but I have to tell Ezra now. I’m terrified about how he’ll take it. I really want this to work out.”

My heart went out to Adena. Would this shidduch end, after it had seemed to be going so well? But this was out of my control — or hers.

“We have to do what’s right,” I told Adena gently. “We do what the situation demands of us — what’s yashar. And when we do the right thing, we believe that there’s hashgachah in the results. Even if we don’t get what we want, that isn’t a ‘punishment,’ and it isn’t random. It’s the best thing for us, even though we might lack the vision to perceive it that way.”

Adena was strong. But I admit that I was pretty apprehensive.

On the day of their fifth date, Adena called me at midnight.

In the instant before I picked up the phone, I braced myself. Would there be tears? Would she be calm? Maybe Ezra needed time to think? Could he have rejected her on the spot?

“Hello?”

Adena’s voice was loud. I could practically feel a wave of strong emotion shuddering through the phone line.

“Mrs. Leiman,” she exclaimed. “You’re never going to believe what happened!”

I’d been ready for anything, but not this. “Uh… what happened?”

“I was so nervous,” she started. “So nervous! I mean, from the minute he picked me up, all I could think was that this might be the last time I see him. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I found a good opening and I told him. He asked me a few questions and then…”

Here she drew a deep breath, and I thought I heard her voice quiver.

I couldn’t bear the suspense. “What did he say?”

Her voice was strong again. “He thanked me for telling him. He said he knows it wasn’t easy for me to tell him, and I was probably very nervous. He said he knew that because he had something he needed to tell me, too! He said that when he was a kid, he got some weird virus that damaged his liver. He’s totally fine, he lives a regular life, but he has to take medication for the rest of his life.”

Adena paused, and I tried to process this double turnabout.

“He told me that he’d been so nervous and worried the past few dates, he’d been working on his emunah, hoping I would be okay with the news and trying to prepare himself if I wasn’t. And now it’s like — we both totally understand each other. And we talked about it for a while, but of course neither of us has an issue with what the other one said.”

“Wow,” I stuttered.

“Mrs. Leiman,” Adena said, with her typical exuberance. “I love Hashem! Hashem is amazing!”

I hung up with tears in my eyes. I’d thought Ezra and Adena were compatible, but I hadn’t had a clue how perfectly matched they actually were.

At the vort, many people, including several shadchanim, congratulated me on making the shidduch. But I knew with absolute clarity that I hadn’t made this shidduch at all. This shidduch was made by Hashem while I watched from the sidelines. I was just the shaliach.

Of course, I couldn’t explain that to anyone. To protect the privacy of the new couple, I knew I couldn’t share the story with anyone who knew them at that time.

So I decided to share it with the whole world now instead.

Shani Leiman is a teacher, shadchan, and dating coach. She lives in  Silver Spring, Maryland.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 741)