Sitting in yeshiva, I don’t exactly meet very many women, so my data set is a bit limited. But from using Frumster, here’s what I’ve determined:
Whenever I write to Modern Orthodox women, specifically ones whose profiles evince some basic compatibility with me in terms of both hashqafa (weltanschauung or ideology) and general intellectuality, the response I usually get is quite negative. That is, if I get a response at all, since about half of the women don’t even bother doing that.
By contrast, when I write to the more yeshivishe or Beit Ya’akov-ish women, I almost always get a very warm response. I don’t know how many times the woman has said that if only my hashqafa were further to the right, that she’d be very willing to date me. In fact, several times, I’ve been told that even with my left-wing hashqafa, she’d love to be platonic friends, if only she were willing to have platonic friendships with the opposite sex. So were it not for my left-wing hashqafa, it would appear that the more right-wing young women would accept me just fine, if not enthusiastically so.
When I asked my rabbi where I ought to go to yeshiva after my three-year stint in Machon Meir (a yeshiva for baalei teshuva in Jerusalem), one of the places I mentioned was Machon Pardes, a non-denominational left-wing-but-traditional coeducational yeshiva. My rabbi responded that he could see why I’d think they were good for me, given their generally left-wing stance. Nevertheless, he said to me, what I needed was a place with the character of a traditional yeshiva (unlike Pardes) but with a left-wing hashqafa (similar to Pardes). In any case, I needed to leave Machon Meir; my rabbi told me that its limited degree of tolerance was due only to its baal teshuva character (with the newly religious, one must perforce tolerate some degree of insubordination), and that if I were to attend a frum-from-birth-type yeshiva with the exact same hashqafa as Machon Meir, such as Merkaz ha-Rav, I’d get eaten up alive for sure, my rabbi told me.
In other words: I’m hashqafically left-wing but behaviorally right-wing.
So it would seem that I need to find a young woman who has the personality of a yeshivishe person but the hashqafa of a left-wing MO. Maybe a Beit Ya’akov graduate who’s gone waaaay off the derekh?
Who am I? A shadkhan‘s nightmare.
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