Do you guys agree with this American Rabbi?

Why Can’t Jewish boys Fall in Love?
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach - From World Jewish Digest

If I were asked to sum up the Jewish religion in a single sentence, I would say that Judaism is an attempt to make the world more feminine. The essence of Jewish belief is the creation of a kinder, gentler world, suffused with God’s abundantly nurturing presence.

Femininity shines through nearly every Jewish practice. Before eating an apple we say a blessing because Judaism insists that we be grateful. Kosher food laws force us to abstain from eating predatory animals and to hate the site of blood, in order to wean us off violence. With its commitment to holiness, prayer, and relationships, the Sabbath is the quintessential Jewish day. Finally, Judaism promises a time in the future when men will beat their swords into ploughshares, aggressive masculinity will be transformed into nurturing femininity, and men will no longer teach their sons the art of war. The male, linear, goal-oriented energy of the present world will be converted into a more feminine, circular, means-oriented energy of a perfected world to come.

It is no secret that intermarriage is the biggest challenge facing the Jewish community, with nearly half of all Jews tragically marrying outside their faith. What is not as commonly known, however, is that intermarriage is spurred in part because non-Jewish women like marrying Jewish men. They find them more nurturing and family-oriented, more domesticated and interested in children, no doubt a direct product of the Jewish values with which these men are raised.

And up until recently, I think this was largely accurate. At least that’s the way it used to be. But now, it is changing. Jewish society through the 1970s did not seem to exhibit the same level of marital dysfunction as the wider culture. The Jewish divorce rate was lower and Jewish families stronger. Jewish men were a key reason for the stability of Jewish relationships.

But now, a great many Jewish men have completely thrown out Jewish values when it comes to finding a bride or playing the part of a good husband. King Solomon may indeed have said that, Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised, but the average Jewish man today dismisses such ancient wisdom as so much claptrap. Indeed, the only thing that seems important to many of these men is a woman’s packaging. What lies behind her figure is not only less significant, it is utterly unimportant. Whenever I tell a bachelor friend of mine that I have a wonderful young woman to introduce him to vibrant and spiritual his first question always is, but what does she look like??

It would be foolish to deny that attraction is the most important ingredient in a romantic relationship. If a man doesn’t feel pulled toward a woman, and she to him, the marriage will be a prison sentence. But in the past attractiveness involved so many different factors, with physical attraction accounting for just one.

In the past, women who were spiritual and modest exuded an erotic femininity that drew men to them like bees to the honey. A woman’s personality aggrandized her in a man’s eyes, making her electric and vibrant. And a woman’s kindness proved equally compelling. In a world where a man was evaluated primarily on his accomplishments, a woman’s faith and support provided spiritual succor, drawing men back to what was right and true.

No longer. Today, men see a body not a soul and we are impoverished as a result.

In our grandparents Generation, boys played with toys, and when they grew up they put they put them aside in favor of more honorable pursuits. Sadly, today’s men are still playing. The toy boat has been replaced by a speedboat or yacht, symbols of their material success. And if they have that, then they can play with a Barbie doll, a woman whose looks make them feel successful in the eyes of their friends and colleagues.

Take, for example, a singles event I spoke at recently at a large synagogue in Los Angeles. One of the women in the crowd had blond-haired blue-eyed Aryan looks. Indeed, she was a non-Jewish woman from the South who was in the midst of converting to Judaism. Every guy there made a beeline for her. Of the approximately sixty men present, nearly ten came over to me at different times and asked me if I knew who she was. Not a single other man asked me about any of the other women. I was embarrassed and humiliated for the other women present.

Now, obviously, there were other women who were also attractive, dynamic, and magnetic even. So why weren’t the men speaking to them? Because the woman I described most closely resembled the women on television and in magazines, most closely conformed to the single image of beauty which today is being imposed endlessly by media outlets.

In my newly-released book? Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex? I tell the story of a Jewish singles cruise I led to Alaska for an internet dating company. Little did I realize that it was to be The Singles Titanic?

Ostensibly, every person who came on the cruise was there to meet someone for the purpose of a long-term relationship and marriage. There were approximately 100 singles that made up our group, certainly numbers that might provide for a positive outcome. At the very first meeting on board, where I gave a lecture about the essentials of attraction, I asked the 50 or so men present (most of whom were in their 40s and balding) to raise their hands if they found 25 of the 50 women in the group attractive. No hands went up. Okay, I said, how about fifteen women out of 50?? Three hands went up. Okay, how about 10 women out of 50?? About five hands went up. Five out of 50?? Fifteen hands went up. How about two? Are there two really attractive women out of the 50?? I queried. Nearly all the hands went up.

And what do you know? Over the next week it was these two women, considered attractive by a consensus among the men, who became the objects of all the male attention on-board. The ship had a small disco floor. It was sickening to watch how these two women would be asked by one guy after another to dance while nearly all the other women looked on from the sidelines. The men had no idea of how stupid and foolish they looked as they competed against one another for the trophy girlfriend. The rest of the women could not wait to get off the boat.

I spent the next week in two daily seminars trying to educate the men about the real principles of attraction and eroticism, among which the physical should account for no more than twenty percent (I discuss this in my book Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin with your Spouse). After all, look at the longevity in the public eye of women like Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand despite the fact that there were many women who were considered to be much more beautiful. But in Streisand, all the other ingredients of attraction were present, including a keen sense of humor, dynamic personality, sultry demeanor, ultra-feminine voice, and a razor-sharp mind. Had Barbra Streisand been eighty percent looks and twenty percent personality, like Paris Hilton, she would have been forgotten like all the other starlets who get their fifteen minutes of fame and retreat to the obscurity whence they came.

I said to the men present, ?If over the next week I can get you guys to look at these same hundred women and see half of them as beautiful, then I have succeeded on this voyage.? And I did succeed with a few of the men and there were even three couples who are still together a few years later. Nevertheless, this remains an embarrassingly low success rate.

Jewish teachings revolve so much around the idea of men respecting women. The 16th-century scholar Rabbi Isaac Luria, Judaism’s most important kabbalist, wrote that Messiah would not come, and the perfection of the world would not be achieved, until men started to listen to their wives and women started demanding their rightful role in the world. This was the concept behind God’s insistence that Abraham follow the opinions of his wife Sarah. Her judgment, and indeed the judgment of women in general, were considered more discerning. The Bible sums it up with simple profundity: He who has found a wife has found goodness.

The secular world has a similar saying: behind every great man there is an even greater woman. Today’s women have rejected this adage because of the word behind. To them, it sounds as if women are being asked to play second fiddle to a man. But in truth, they have missed much of the point of the adage. It doesn’t merely suggest that a woman facilitates a man’s success. It also asserts that whereas a woman can be a woman without a man, a man cannot be a man without a woman.

This tradition, of a woman completing and refining a man, was what the entire system of courting was once based on. When men courted women, it was the man who did the work. He had to refine his character and go to work on becoming a gentleman. He had to learn manners, dress immaculately, behave chivalrously? And only then was he deemed worthy of courting. Without developing these qualities, the chances of a man acquiring a wife were virtually nil. Today, however, women are actually devolving to appeal to men, rather than inspiring men to reach their elevated plane. On a modern date, while the woman goes through her two-hour routine to get ready for a night out, all the man has to do is shave, scratch his crotch, jump in the car, belch, and pick her up. This is certainly not the way a man should treat someone he prizes.

The problem is basically this. In the West, the disparagement and negative depiction of women as the lecherous man’s plaything has already fostered a generation of loutish and unrefined men who have no incentive to become gentlemen. With women so significantly devalued, and with men subtly taught to look down on women as playthings created for nothing but their personal entertainment and pleasure, men are making little effort to ennoble their character in order to be worthy of a woman.

No single factor has led to the greater debasement of women than the widespread availability of casual sex. If a man can get a woman without having to earn her, then what incentive does he have to try and become a gentleman? And men want sex more than anything else. He’ll take the easiest path to get it if that’s offered to him.

This whole idea is worth reviewing for a moment. What incentive is there for a man to move away from his natural aggressive and self-absorbed streak and become a gentleman? Is it making money? Of course not. On the contrary, ruthlessness in business is rewarded. Screwing your competitors is what is going to make you money. And do you need to be a gentleman if you want to succeed in politics? Forget it. Politics is about viciously attacking your opponent. That is what usually makes you successful. What about earning the respect of your peers? Do you need to be a gentleman for that? Absolutely not. Your friends, in this shallow culture, are going to respect you for being rich, famous, or influential. And if you achieve those things you are going to be top dog in your community whether you are a gentleman or not. If you do not believe me, just look at Donald Trump as an example, an inveterate womanizer and braggart who is known for his selfish and gaudy lifestyle rather than for any kind of philanthropy. Trump remains an American icon simply because he has money and is an expert at getting attention.

So the question comes back: what incentive does the male species have to refine his character, to pull himself up from the level of animal and become a man? And the traditional answer to that question had always been that the pursuit of a woman would elevate him. The one object of male desire that could not be won through ruthlessness. Women wanted romantic and loving men who knew how to dress, how to behave, and how to treat a woman softly and devotedly. Women were refined creatures who could not be wooed by vulgar suitors. So a man simply had to ennoble his character, soften his touch, and become a romantic if he wished to have a woman. Then, along came the 1960s sexual revolution and all of that went up in smoke. Men discovered that in this new climate of feminine liberation? Which in reality turned out to be masculine liberation, liberating men from having to be gentlemen, they could act like complete pigs and still get girlfriends.

Therefore, if we want men to raise themselves up, as they used to, back in the medieval days when courtly love prevailed, and men had to better their character in order to be worthy of women, the formula is straightforward and simple: women should not make themselves available to men who haven’t earned them, or ever have sex with men who haven’t married them. Period. if women collectively implemented this policy, it would change men overnight. Not only would men begin courting women again, and looking forward to marrying them, but they would also return to the idea of sex as a spiritual act that sews and fuses together two individuals into one flesh. Gone would be all of the horrible misogyny we hear about in rap songs with women being described as bitches and hoes. We’d cease to hear mention of men doing women? (One of the most horrible euphemisms for sex ever invented) thrown about in casual conversation. Likewise, we’d no longer have to endure the college term of two co-eds hooking up which seems better suited to describe the interaction between a station wagon and a U-Haul than a man and a woman in love.

Jewish women, from secular all-the-way up to modern-traditional, complain to me all the time that in their relationships it is they who are doing all the work. The men affect this aloof nonchalance, being only half-engaged in the relationship, while the woman summons her energies to make the relationship work and ends up making the effort of two people. Even then the man may suddenly decide to stop calling with barely an explanation. And why shouldn’t he? The entire dating scene is stacked in his favor. He recognizes that while his dating shelf-life will last for nearly three decades, the women has only her 20s and maybe her early 30s to make an impression. After that she is treated as yesterday’s goods, While he remains a stud well into his late 40s.

And where are the rabbis through all this? As Jewish men fail to seek out the kinds of women that Jews have cherished for millennia prizing women of piety, character, devotion to family, and spirituality, rabbis refrain from even admonishing the men in their audiences from the pulpit. Indeed, you are more likely to hear a sermon about the death of the old Pope and appointment of the new, in synagogue than ever hear a sermon about what Judaism says about masculine virtue. The rabbis are playing passive observer as amazing 30- and 40- and 50- year old single women in their congregations utterly ignored by men who prefer to chase after women in their 20s.

Time was when the world was much more innocent and wholesome. When we were kids, our parents told us we were beautiful, even if the world did not agree. That is what love is: the inability to be objective about the object of one’s love. To be in love is to be rendered incapable of rendering a rational evaluation. If you love your house, then you prefer it to a palace. If you love yourself, then you dress according to your own style, not someone else’s. But I know very few women today who are in love with themselves and who would not radically reconstruct their faces and bodies with plastic surgery if they had the money. Just tune into the reality hit Extreme Makeover to witness how this kind of transformation has become a fairy tale dream for many American women with faltering self-esteem.
The constant bombardment of beautiful faces, and the portrayal of women as the lewd man’s plaything, has rendered us incapable of being subjective about beauty. We have all become experts in objective standards of attractiveness. those five or six standardized models of beauty that have become the only acceptable images to which all women are meant to conform: a round face, blue eyes, blonde hair, and wafer-thinness.

Forget that Marilyn Monroe was a size 14, or that the great art masters never painted a single skinny woman. Television and glossy magazines have changed all that.

Once this kind of behavior is accepted, it is no surprise to find that any woman who is considered to be ugly by these strict standards is doomed to an existence of insecurity and misery. They can look forward to a life of dating where the guy rarely ever calls back, unless he has just broken up with a girlfriend and wants some uncomplicated sex with a person whom he considers desperate. Why do you think that so many women go to the gym at night instead of to the library? Why do they go jogging instead of attending a night class? They realize that the real rewards in society come from looking great rather than being great.

The situation becomes all the more tragic when we realize that these values are pervasive in the Jewish community. The Torah taught the world to appreciate what could not be seen over what could. While the entire world paid homage to gods of gold and stone because they were tangible, we spoke of the blessings of an intangible God who was too infinite to be captured by any corporeal matter. And from there we extrapolated to all kinds of other intangible gifts. Men were taught to value women not just for what they could see but more so for what they couldn’t see: a woman’s heart, spirit and dignity. This is why the Eishes Chayil prayer, which celebrates a woman’s virtue over her beauty, is recited by men at the Sabbath table every Friday night: it is a weekly reminder of what is truly important in another person. How tragic that, as Jews, we have forfeited what we once gave as a gift to the world.

And why should the men care? Why not continue to chase women who are bombshells? Because in so doing these men are diminishing their own masculinity defined as the ability to be drawn to a woman’s spiritual energy rather than just an external husk and ensuring that they will never be happily married.

For a relationship to be truly successful, a man must drink up a woman’s seven dimensions: her voice, her feel, her scent, her taste, her looks, her personality, and her soul. When we fire on only one cylinder, the relationship is commensurately diminished. Intimacy never ensues. We end up in a functional marriage that never achieves unity and oneness. And in a marriage that is so utterly unsatisfying, not only is the possibility of divorce greatly enhanced, but much more tragically, the men never end up feeling like men, and the women don’t feel like women.