[Avodah] Love and Marriage

[Professor L. Levine via Avodah]

Frank Sinatra used to sing a song about love and marriage.  In part the lyrics are


Love and marriage, love and marriage
They go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you, brother
You can't have one without the other


I am sure that RSRH would insist that the order is wrong and it should be marriage and love. My reasoning is based upon Rav Hirsch's commentary on Bereishis 24;67 which is below.


67 Yitzchak brought her into the tent of Sarah, his mother. He married Rivkah, she became his wife, and he loved her, and only then was Yitzchak comforted for his mother.


This, too, is a characteristic that, thank God, has not vanished from
among the descendants of Avraham and Sarah, Yitzchak and Rivkah.
The more she became his wife, the more he loved her! Like this marriage
of the first Jewish son, Jewish marriages, most Jewish marriages, are
contracted not on the basis of passion, but on the strength of reason
and judgment. Parents and relatives consider whether the two young
people are suited to each other; therefore, their love increases as they
come to know each other better.


Most non-Jewish marriages are made on the basis of what they call
"love." But we need only glance at novelistic depictions taken from life,
and we immediately see the vast gulf - in the non-Jewish world -
between the "love" of the partners before marriage and what happens
afterward; how dull and empty everything seems after marriage, how
different from what the two partners had imagined beforehand. This
sort of "love" is blind; each step into the future brings new disillusionment.


Not so is Jewish marriage, of which it says: va'yekach es Rivkah va't'hi lo l'eshah

va'yeehhaveha! Here the wedding is not the culmination, but only the beginning
of true love.

And now four more words, which, since God led Eve to Adam, until
the end of time, have remained and will remain unsurpassed in beauty
and glory: va'yenacham Yitzchok achrei emo. A forty-year old man, inconsolable over the
death of his aged mother, finds consolation in his wife! This is the position
of the Jewish woman as wife! What nonsense to identify Jewish married
life with oriental sensuality and harem conditions! With Sarah's death,
the feminine spirit and feeling departed from the home. Yitzchak then
found his mother again in his wife (hence, "When he brought Rivkah
into the tent, to him it was as though his mother were again there" -
see Bereshis Rabbah 60:16). This is the highest tribute that has ever been
paid to the dignity and nobility of woman - and it is in the ancient
history of Judaism.
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