Women writing in the Times credits her relationship to a Rabbi's blessing

December 17, 2010
What the Rabbi Said
By AMY KLEIN

“A husband you want?” the old rabbi mumbled in Yiddish-accented English.

I was probably the last person you would expect to be going to a kabbalist rabbi for a blessing to marry. I’d stopped being religious 10 years earlier, uninterested in pursuing the typical Orthodox Jewish lifestyle of settling down and having babies straight out of college.

But the summer I turned 38, I freaked out about the approaching Four Zero — which was old even for the nonreligious world — so I went to Israel, where I had lived in my 20s, to visit old friends and figure out where my life had gone wrong. On my last day there I ran into the mother and father of my best friend from high school. Without prompting, my friend’s mother insisted I go see the rabbi she’d entrusted with such weighty matters.