Does choosing a spouse mean settling or giving up?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau teaches that choosing a real person “requires surrender. And surrender is not giving up. It’s how you finally receive.” Choosing is not losing; it is the moment you become able to receive.
He is honest that “choosing is terrifying.” But he weighs it against the alternative: “not choosing is longer pain.” As long as you keep comparing a real person to an imaginary one, nothing can begin. “Marriage begins when you stop comparing a real person to an imaginary one.”
He closes with the words “Hamelech basadeh,” the King is in the field, “not in the palace you’re still imagining.” What you are waiting for is not in an imagined palace. It is in the real person in front of you.
Related concepts: Relationships · Comparison cheats
In A Soul at Peace: When Searching Keeps You from Choosing
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Fear, vulnerability, or tension
Choosing is terrifying, but not choosing is a longer pain.
What may be behind it
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that giving up is a step down, while the choice he means is imagination surrendering to reality.
Deepest human truth
Surrender is how a person finally receives. The King is in the field, not in the imagined palace.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Marriage, Love, and Sacred Partnership · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz