The more you know...

"The more you know, the more you know you don't know shit."
-Ben Folds

At age sixteen I knew that I was pretty much all set and couldn't get any more knowledgeable when it came to dating and my future. (Let's be serious, though, who doesn't know everything at sixteen?) I've always hung around Jews, growing up in Haifa, Israel, and then emigrating to Brookline, Massachusetts, affectionately known to some as "Baruch-line." My default setting, so to speak, was to be around Jews. To date within the community or the "tribe" came as naturally to me as the guttural sounds of Hebrew or blowing out the Channukkah candles and screaming "Happy Birthday!" at the top of my lungs.

I've heard quotes like "You can't help who you fall in love with." Or "That's just how the Matzah crumbles." I wrote these off since I already knew everything about J-dating. I even had a couple discussions with friends about dating within the tribe, and my philosophy was simple: "If you fish in the salmon pond 100 percent of the time, you can't possibly come up with a barracuda or a swordfish." (Yes, I did once use this analogy in conversation.)

So how did we get to this moment? The one where I am now contributing to a blog created by my non-Jewish girlfriend? This is the 20,000 shekel question. Could it be that a year of intensive Hebrew study and cultural immersion in the Land of Milk and Honey led to a burn out and subsequent need to go to the opposite extreme? Could it be that after 23 years of living as a Jew and approximately 7 years of dating Jews, I needed something completely different in the form of a girl from another world? Could it be that my usual salmon and lox lost it's usual appeal? (All metaphors aside, I just the other day told Rachel that lox were one of the few things I still salivate over now that I eat mostly plants, but that's another story.)

*****

Some of us will always go fishing in the salmon pond and that is that. Some of us may go have a taste of swordfish and say, "Well, that was delicious, but I don't think I'll have that everyday for the next 25 to 60 years." Some of us are pretty indiscriminate about who we date when it comes to religion.

So did I go looking for something new and found it? No, and then yes. When I met Rachel I had zero intention of even going down to the pond that day (okay, metaphor finished), but we found each other anyway. I was skeptical at first of even considering dating someone who wasn't Jewish. I thought, what's the point of dating someone now if I know I'm going to marry someone else later? How can I fully invest myself knowing she's not Jewish? I put those questions aside long enough to find out that some connections don't fall within what we're used to, or what we're brought up with. This became apparent when I found myself walking miles and miles out of the way of my house, or even hers, to continue our long conversations about everything.

Although I do think that in some ways our relationship grows regardless of my Jewish identity, at the same time I think our personalities match so well because of the values and traits I learned and inherited within my family and the larger Jewish community.

I'm 25 now and looking back nearly a decade, I can see how naive I was at age sixteen. I'm glad I can now say I know everything there is to know about dating. Really though, Ben Folds said it best:

"The more you know, the more you know you don't know shit."

Shalom out,

Ilan