In Jewish belief, a beshert is one’s “fated one”, the person with whom God means you to be.  In one of the sardonic twists that makes me so love and revere Jewish thought and worldview, being with your beshert does not necessarily mean you will be happy.  Haredi (that is, very Orthodox) couples, for instance, may be automatically assumed to marry their fated ones, but doing so does not guarantee that the marriage will be smooth or successful.  It just means they did what God meant for them to do.

This may not be the way we like to envision it--many of us like to assume, if we have any belief in any Creator at all, that He (or whoever) “wants us to be happy”.  It’s a fair assumption, surely.  But why, really, should He agree with us on the matter of love more than anything else, as though that were everything to our contentment, and we were always right about it?  Virtually every age before ours viewed marriage and mating in a way far different from our own; romantic love in marriage (or marriage-like relationships), in the generic western sense of the term, is really a nineteenth-century construct.  It used to be enough for God just to send us someone, and for that someone to prove compatible over the long term, if we were lucky; these days we tend to insist that He send us exactly the right person, by our definition, not His.  The term “fated” would, in the vocabulary of most of us, be synonymous with “perfect”.  The man or woman of our dreams, or, as the French and Spanish say, the man or woman of our life.

I am not saying anything against this, please understand.  The burdens others wish to put on love’s slender shoulders are their business, not mine.  For my part, I have simply never believed in a man of my dreams.  I would have to be a fundamentally different person to have even a concept of such a thing.  Dreams like the ones I have don’t harbour the sort of men with whom one would long to build a life.  I find in my soul recognition of the Jewish understanding of beshert.  My husband proved unequal to the task of marriage, but he was, indeed, my beshert.  He was the one I ended up with.

But what if you meet someone and you feel, almost immediately, That was the one, it was him, he was supposed to be mine--what then?  One could simply be wrong, of course, and that thought can be backhandedly comforting.  We are so often mistaken; we know so little of love.  But what if one feels something much, much worse--that one is being shown a true beshert, in the ideal, softest, sweetest, most stupidly hopeful sense of that term, in such absurdly impossible circumstances that the whole thing can only be some sort of divine joke?  

A friend of mine has a philosophy of life, such as it is, that strikes me as flaky and shapeless, but it’s important to him, and that’s good enough for me.  He is, however, enamoured of his take on life, and consequently talks about it too much.  I once snapped at him that whatever he thought he was, I was hard and dark and western, and he would have to accept that.  I do not discuss religious beliefs, or lack thereof, with much of anyone, largely because I have no interest in converting anyone, and less in arguing about the subject.  But I am a basically orthodox, if very disobedient, Christian, and my God is thus sometimes an angry God.  He doesn’t need to “be okay” with everything I do.  He doesn’t need to think that my own idea of what would make me content is the right one.  And He doesn’t have to give me everything I want.  He may be vindictive with me if He chooses, although I hope he will be merciful; He may impose unhappiness on me, although I hope He will send me contentment; He may disapprove of my behaviour and punish me for it, although I hope He will correct me gently.  The only thing I need out of all of that is to be able to see something--to learn something--even if it hurts like hell to do so.  And I have consistently found this to be my experience.  God has never, in fact, toyed with me.

 

So I try to appreciate the Creator’s sense of humour, even when it is dark and acid and aimed at me.  I am Irish, after all.  And thus I have been considering the meaning of feeling the presence of a beshert in circumstances that do not permit of such fate.  And let me be clear, before anyone well-meaningly suggests otherwise, that the boy is definitely not my fate, nor am I his.  I am nearly fifteen years his senior, and we currently live thousands of miles apart.  We live in different worlds.  And he would have no notion of this fatedness himself.  I understand and accept all of that, and have never viewed it in any other way.  I simply struggle at times to discern just what I am supposed to take away from having known him, aside from the obvious pleasure of it.  Why throw into my path someone who, had circumstances been different, I would have followed to the ends of the earth, someone I recognised in some sense from the first time I saw him?  

I am not asking this rhetorically.  I know there is a reason.  My childish sense of petulance tells me that this is only cruel.  But I realise that that is the reaction of a wounded person, not a whole one.  What if I were given this gift simply so that I would be able to believe such things existed, even if they could not, in this life, now exist for me?  My heart is not the softest.  I am proud and very weary.  Sometimes I have to be shown things the hard way.  I know that.  This may have nothing to do with the boy.  This, as self-absorbed as it sounds, and doubtless is, may have everything to do with me.

It comforts me to think of this; to think of the little dialogue between God and me, to think of how well He knows my closed and diamond-hard places, and my vulnerabilities, my curiosity, my sense of alien wonder at so much His other creatures do, and my distance from them.  To think of how frustrating it must be, maybe even to the divine, to teach me, to surprise me, to catch me off guard.  So I think of God winking, laughing, but not mocking.  Just reminding me of how much I have, and how much I have had.  And how wrong I may sometimes have been.