The Torah Can Save Your Marriage

A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend in New York. He told me that he has been married for 22 years — and his relationship has become functional. He told me it’s all about who is picking one child up here and dropping another off there — that kind of thing. He said that much of his communication with his wife is on a Google Sheet, which they use to manage the schedule of their busy family. The passion they once shared, he said, is gone.

He wanted to know whether the Torah had any insights regarding how he could understand and improve his marriage. As always, it does.

I told my friend that he is acting in accordance with our most ancient teachings. We learn in the Talmud (Berakhot 5b) that, “A prisoner cannot free himself from prison” — and in Pirkei Avot (1:6) that everyone is to “acquire for himself a friend.” Everyone facing a challenged should seek an objective perspective. It is not easy to do — it does not happen nearly as often as it should (which is why Jewish teaching commands it so emphatically and persistently) — and he should be praised for just having done so. And he should be praised even further for asking what the Torah says – for his question acknowledges that our great guidebook is the place to search for answers.

Indeed, the Torah offers very clear guidance here – as if its Author was anticipating the question. The guidance comes in three parts:

#1: Reframing

It is late Genesis. Joseph had been sold by his brothers into slavery, where he was expected to experience a miserable and short life ending in an anonymous death. But it was not to be. Due to an astonishing turn of events, Joseph becomes the viceroy of Egypt — the no. 2 man in the country, charged with saving his adopted country and through it, the entire world from a global famine.

Years after they thought they had condemned him to slavery and death, his brothers come to Egypt to get the food they would need to survive the famine. The brothers, in asking the Egyptian political leader for food, have no idea that they are speaking with Joseph. When Joseph eventually reveals himself to them, the brothers think that he is about to take his revenge.

Instead, they find that Joseph understands his situation entirely differently. “And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.”

Joseph has reframed his situation. He takes his experience – whose reality he completely accepts – out of the frame of being sold into slavery and puts it into the frame of being positioned to save the world during a global famine. By reframing his experience – by choosing to interpret his situation both beneficially and truthfully – he is able to both forgive his brothers and feed the world. Joseph gifts us with the concept of reframing which can be applied in many circumstances.

(‘Joseph recognized by his brothers’, by Léon Pierre Urbain Bourgeois, 1863 oil on canvas, at the Musée Municipal Frédéric Blandin)

How could my friend apply Joseph’s concept of reframing to his marriage? He is seeing the pick-ups, drop-offs, errands and tasks that constitute much of his marriage as individual tasks, devoid of romance and even love. He could choose to see them as the core tasks in what he is really doing – which is building a family.

When he and his wife go over the activities of the day or week, in conversation or on a Google doc, they could – and should- acknowledge (perhaps out loud) that they are engaging in the best and most meaningful task of all: building a family. They could go even further, and realize that their activities are not just meaningful– but quintessentially romantic. Many of the great romantic songs, for instance, are about finding a true love with whom to build a life. My friend and his wife are doing it.

#2: Newness in Routine

Even with reframing, the problem that my friend identified speaks to a real problem precisely identified by the Torah. This is routinization — and it presents in a paradox that the Torah both identifies and resolves.

In order to survive and to thrive, we have to live by routine. The Torah calendar, and the Jewish practices that follow from it, recognize this fact. The major Jewish holidays, many of which are ordained in the Torah, come at the same time every year and are practiced in the same way. Ritually observant Jews say the same prayers every day or each week, at the same time.

But there is a problem with this — perfectly captured by the 20th century sage Rabbi Norman Lamm. He identified “the danger of routine,” and said of the Torah: “It considered boredom and rote as poison to the spirit and to the soul.”

This is what my friend, at least before reframing, was experiencing.

The solution? It is Leviticus 16:23, where the duties of the high priest on Yom Kippur are enumerated. The high priest is to wear the same kind of clothes each Yom Kippur – but he must wear half of them only once, and then discard them. The reason for this expensive rule? To be sure that the priest – and, by his example, each of us – does not allow his routine to make its activities routinized. He must, in other words, make newness a part of his routine.

The inclusion of newness as a part of routine – the protection of routine from the crippling boredom that Rabbi Lamm described – is present in the Torah’s rules of marital intimacy. A husband and a wife are forbidden from having sex while she is menstruating. The reason behind this rule? Rabbi Meir explained in the Talmud (Niddah 31b) : “It is because if a woman were permitted to engage in intercourse with her husband all the time, her husband would be too accustomed to her…when she becomes pure again she will be dear to her husband as at the time when she entered the wedding canopy with him.”

The lessons for my friend are clear. Every marriage – like every enterprise, like everything done well – needs routine. But routine, as is reflected in his marriage, risks being routinized – which can be a poison in the relationship. The solution: Add newness to the routine.

This can be done in any number of ways – after all, it’s newness. It can be a date night each week. It can be a short getaway to a different place each season. It can be something else that is responsive to what the couple enjoys. Anything would work, so long as the couple goes to a new places and just rejoices in each other and the family they are building together.

#3: Honor the Sabbath

The ultimate answer to my friend’s situation resides in one of the Torah’s most ubiquitous commandments: to honor the Sabbath. The Sabbath – which begins every Friday at sundown and concludes a day later – is a time when we are instructed to stop our routines, put aside the urgent and focus on the important. This is a time when spreadsheets close, appointments stop, schedules pause and work ceases so that we can focus on family, friends and faith – by sharing long meals, reading, studying, praying and playing.

(‘Friday to God’ woodcut by Joseph Budko, 1921 , via Information Center for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem)

It may be difficult for a family who has not started with Shabbat to suddenly implement it. But the biblical Jacob, in perhaps the quintessential biblical moment, had a dream of angels going up and down a ladder. The image of the ladder contains a lesson for the development of faith (and everything else) – as we climb ladders one rung at a time. A family whose parents are experiencing routinization can start by committing to a weekly Friday night dinner – when outside activities don’t happen, phones are off, friends are invited and conversation flows about anything except the routine activities that populate the week.

Will this sublime and rational combination – this triple threat to marital unhappiness – work? As always, I’d bet on the Torah.