Why does the Torah give a newly married man a full year for his home?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau explains the verse “Naki yihyeh l’veiso shanah echas” this way: a new husband “should be free for his marriage for one full year. That’s the time for him to get to work on his marriage.” The purpose of that year is what comes after it: “the marriage should start working for you.”
He shared this with a man who complained he was struggling both at work and in his marriage. If the marriage isn’t working for you, he told him, that is “an indication, not a cause,” of why you fail at home and at work.
When the home is built right in the first place, “home is not where you lose energy. It’s where you get it back.” But if it was never built, and “your marriage feels like a second shift, you will fail at the first shift too.”
Related concepts: Marriage and the steering wheel · When a machine does the work
In A Soul at Peace: Free for His Home
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
The first year of marriage is set aside to build the marriage.
What may be behind it
A marriage that drains a man is a sign, not the cause, of his struggles at home and at work.
Deepest human truth
Built right, the home works for you and becomes the place where you get your energy back. In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that what is built in the first year stands.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Marriage, Love, and Sacred Partnership · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz