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Mar. 28th, 2014 08:07 amIn the Saw You at Sinai FAQ:
What is the difference between Modern Orthodox (liberal) and Modern Orthodox (machmir*)?: Good question! People define these terms in different ways. However, we use these terms because they are currently used and recognized in the Jewish community. Please answer it per your understanding. You can always change it later, if you feel the matches being sent are not exactly for you. Your answers to the religious questions will clarify your interpretation of Machmir or liberal.
I had a conversation with my Rabbi about using the site appropriately and usefully toward my goals, and it was both helpful and frustrating at different moments. But we spoke for several minutes about this question, since I identify on the site as Modern Orthodox (liberal) at the moment and he felt this was maybe not the best identifier about the seriousness of my faith. The crux of the matter, he said, was that I was using liberal to mean broad, open-minded, and expansive, whereas many use liberal to mean relaxed in their practice. [My Rabbi attempted to gauge my commitment by asking how I felt about partnership minyanim. I told him that I'd attended a partnership minyan once or twice, and sometimes felt they were a good approach to bringing more active participation by women, and sometimes felt that they were inappropriate alterations in our tradition. Which raised a tremendous eyebrow. I think he was impressed by the depth of my indecision.]
So far on the site I've been more interested in women identifying as Modern Orthodox (liberal), but not because of religious compatibility, necessarily. It's more a question of background, and what background authorizes us to share comfortably about ourselves. Women who identify as Modern Orthodox (machmir) tend to have had a somewhat narrower upbringing, in my totally amateur and probably incorrect observation. The range of professional outcomes modelled for them is narrower; the range of possible school choices presented to them is narrower; the range of encounters with people outside of their own community is narrower.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY ARE LESS CRITICAL THINKERS OR LESS INTELLIGENT OR LESS INTERESTING TO ME. {THIS IS A THING I HAVE STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT.} But it does mean that they have been trained to hide those qualities a little bit more. So when I see a match offered to me and I can see that the woman followed the narrow path, from girls' yeshiva high school to Stern College at Yeshiva University to a degree in social work or education to one of the expected careers working with children... I have interpretative difficulty. I do not know how to read personality out of this trajectory, and figure out if their personality is one I would like spending time with, sharing the world with. Which would be okay if their profile descriptions included a little more information about how they see the world, but because they have been trained not to really share this, their profiles just don't tell me enough to evaluate.
I was therefore kind of excited to see a match who identifies as Modern Orthodox (machmir) this week that appears to defy those expectations. It almost reads like my own profile, in that it demands someone who is deeply religious but also open-minded and questioning. Of course, I don't know if we are both exaggerating our own capacity for critical thinking, but that's what the dating process is for figuring out.
Then there's the other more prosaic problem with SYAS that I am struggling with. There are more women than men on the site, and the matchmakers tend to send matches to the men first before to the women. This means I'm fairly being inundated with matches, most of which are neither clearly bad nor clearly good matches.
The thing is, if I had infinite time I would probably accept most of the matches I'm getting, since you get a much better sense of a person by talking to them than by reading profiles. But I don't have infinite time, and I certainly don't have infinite energy when I get off work.
The site strongly encourages you to reject a match quickly if you are not interested, but I find that if I do that, then within an hour I am almost invariably sent a new match. I have thus taken to stalling on rejections in order to avoid having to do the same process again so soon. Since this is apparently rude, I've gotten some politely chiding messages from matchmakers asking me to be more prompt in my responses. I haven't yet figured out the correct balance. I think my fear is that after some number of months of being inundated, I will have rejected all of the possible matches, and because of these rejections inspired by nothing more than my time limitations, I'll be unable to revisit these matches later. God willing, I suppose, I'll meet my bashert before that happens.
*Machmir means restrictive, or strict. It really ought to be used as a descriptor for an interpretation of a particular law rather than as a descriptor for a person, but it has reasonable currency as a descriptor of a person who generally speaking tends toward more restrictive interpretations of many laws.
What is the difference between Modern Orthodox (liberal) and Modern Orthodox (machmir*)?: Good question! People define these terms in different ways. However, we use these terms because they are currently used and recognized in the Jewish community. Please answer it per your understanding. You can always change it later, if you feel the matches being sent are not exactly for you. Your answers to the religious questions will clarify your interpretation of Machmir or liberal.
I had a conversation with my Rabbi about using the site appropriately and usefully toward my goals, and it was both helpful and frustrating at different moments. But we spoke for several minutes about this question, since I identify on the site as Modern Orthodox (liberal) at the moment and he felt this was maybe not the best identifier about the seriousness of my faith. The crux of the matter, he said, was that I was using liberal to mean broad, open-minded, and expansive, whereas many use liberal to mean relaxed in their practice. [My Rabbi attempted to gauge my commitment by asking how I felt about partnership minyanim. I told him that I'd attended a partnership minyan once or twice, and sometimes felt they were a good approach to bringing more active participation by women, and sometimes felt that they were inappropriate alterations in our tradition. Which raised a tremendous eyebrow. I think he was impressed by the depth of my indecision.]
So far on the site I've been more interested in women identifying as Modern Orthodox (liberal), but not because of religious compatibility, necessarily. It's more a question of background, and what background authorizes us to share comfortably about ourselves. Women who identify as Modern Orthodox (machmir) tend to have had a somewhat narrower upbringing, in my totally amateur and probably incorrect observation. The range of professional outcomes modelled for them is narrower; the range of possible school choices presented to them is narrower; the range of encounters with people outside of their own community is narrower.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY ARE LESS CRITICAL THINKERS OR LESS INTELLIGENT OR LESS INTERESTING TO ME. {THIS IS A THING I HAVE STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT.} But it does mean that they have been trained to hide those qualities a little bit more. So when I see a match offered to me and I can see that the woman followed the narrow path, from girls' yeshiva high school to Stern College at Yeshiva University to a degree in social work or education to one of the expected careers working with children... I have interpretative difficulty. I do not know how to read personality out of this trajectory, and figure out if their personality is one I would like spending time with, sharing the world with. Which would be okay if their profile descriptions included a little more information about how they see the world, but because they have been trained not to really share this, their profiles just don't tell me enough to evaluate.
I was therefore kind of excited to see a match who identifies as Modern Orthodox (machmir) this week that appears to defy those expectations. It almost reads like my own profile, in that it demands someone who is deeply religious but also open-minded and questioning. Of course, I don't know if we are both exaggerating our own capacity for critical thinking, but that's what the dating process is for figuring out.
Then there's the other more prosaic problem with SYAS that I am struggling with. There are more women than men on the site, and the matchmakers tend to send matches to the men first before to the women. This means I'm fairly being inundated with matches, most of which are neither clearly bad nor clearly good matches.
The thing is, if I had infinite time I would probably accept most of the matches I'm getting, since you get a much better sense of a person by talking to them than by reading profiles. But I don't have infinite time, and I certainly don't have infinite energy when I get off work.
The site strongly encourages you to reject a match quickly if you are not interested, but I find that if I do that, then within an hour I am almost invariably sent a new match. I have thus taken to stalling on rejections in order to avoid having to do the same process again so soon. Since this is apparently rude, I've gotten some politely chiding messages from matchmakers asking me to be more prompt in my responses. I haven't yet figured out the correct balance. I think my fear is that after some number of months of being inundated, I will have rejected all of the possible matches, and because of these rejections inspired by nothing more than my time limitations, I'll be unable to revisit these matches later. God willing, I suppose, I'll meet my bashert before that happens.
*Machmir means restrictive, or strict. It really ought to be used as a descriptor for an interpretation of a particular law rather than as a descriptor for a person, but it has reasonable currency as a descriptor of a person who generally speaking tends toward more restrictive interpretations of many laws.