Born to Kvetch Chapter 11: More Difficult than Splitting the Red Sea COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE
Born to Kvetch extract:
Mitsves might begin at thirteen, but maturity is a matter of marriage. A bar mitzvah ceremony acknowledges developments that it does nothing to bring about; a wedding canopy turns boys and girls into men and women. “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife,” says the Bible—a man, not a boy: a kid stays a kid until marriage, and the unmarried never really mature. Bokher, the Yiddish for bachelor, can also describe a junior high school student; its basic meaning is “male youth, adolescent,” someone steaming along to manhood in an engine stoked with hormones. The alter bokher’s train, the train of the “old adolescent, the confirmed bachelor,” never quite arrives, and it’s nobody’s fault but his. In light of the surprising fact that the Torah’s first commandment, “increase and multiply,” is incumbent on men but not women, bachelorhood is seen as a deliberate flight from authenticity, a refusal to face up to the fundamental imperative of masculine life. An alter bokher of eighty is only a minor on the verge of senility.
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