A Bond That Lasts

The Torah says: “When you lay siege to a city for many days, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them. For you will eat from them, so do not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a man, that it should flee from you into the siege?” The Wells of Isaac Isaac, our forefather, dug wells. They were not new wells. They were the very same wells that his father Abraham had dug, which the Philistines had blocked up and filled with dirt. Isaac gave them the same names that his father Abraham had given them. Not a new name. Not a new place. The same water. The same source. Only, you have to dig. Young married man, take this parable to heart. Your Wife Is Not a “Single-Use Product” We live in a generation of “replacing.” When something gets old, we replace it. When something doesn’t “work,” we throw it away and get a new one. Sometimes, in a moment of tiredness and burnout, this attitude finds its way into the home too. The first excitement has faded. Daily routine feels heavy. There is the struggle to earn a living, the work of raising the children, and pressure from every side. Then the thought creeps in: maybe it’s simply over. Maybe the love has run out. But this is a basic mistake. The Talmud teaches that a match is announced from Heaven: “The daughter of this man is for that man.” The holy Zohar says that a husband and wife are “half a body,” one half of a single body. These are not two separate people who found each other by some happy coincidence. This is a connection of their very being, a bond at the root. It comes from one single source, and it longs to return to that oneness. Marriage is not a contract. It is “an everlasting building,” a building whose foundation lasts forever. “A bond that lasts” is not just a pretty phrase. It describes a spiritual reality. If You Loved Once, You Can Love Again Here is the simple thing you need to hear, straight from the heart: if you loved once, you can love again. That first love you felt, that bright feeling of “This is the one,” was not an illusion. It was not a passing rush of hormones. It was a glimpse of the inner truth, a moment of revelation. Think of the moment the Torah was given at Mount Sinai. It revealed the very essence, what had always been true. Afterward, that truth was covered over again by the work of everyday life. In the same way, your first love was a brief revelation of the eternal bond between the two of you. So what has happened since then? The dirt came back and filled up the well. The worries, the small angers that piled up, the disappointments you never worked through: these are the “Philistines” who blocked the source of the water. But the water, the water is still there. The Work of Digging The Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, explains the difference between “love that depends on something” and “love that does not depend on anything.” Love that depends on something depends on pleasure, on excitement, on “chemistry.” When those fade, the love fades. But love that does not depend on anything comes from knowing who the other person truly is, at the core. It is about who she is, beyond anything she does or does not do. That kind of love cannot run out. It can be covered over. It can become “a hidden love.” But gone? No. So what do we do? We don’t try to force a new feeling. We don’t recreate the honeymoon trip and expect the outer setting to rekindle what is inside. The work is digging, removing whatever is covering it. The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, taught us to look for the inner point, the divine spark, in every Jew, beyond all the difficulties and all the surface. The very same work applies here, inside your own home. Ask yourself: who is she, really? Not what annoys me about her today. Not what she didn’t do yesterday. But who she is. What did I see in her back then? Did that really disappear, or is it only covered over? This reflection is the shovel and the pick. It is the digging. And whoever truly digs finds water.