Together with the Chief Rabbi, World Mizrahi and this newspaper, Ben Shalom is hosting a shidduch crash course and live matchmaking session in London next week as part of the Jewish Matchmaking Movement launch, an effort to expand one-to-one matchmaking on a global scale. “In the same way that we have a rabbi in every single community, I want there to be a matchmaker,” said Ben Shalom. “If I help train one matchmaker, or 10, or a thousand matchmakers, how many people are they going to be able to help versus me just helping one single person?”
Aleeza Ben Shalom on her wedding day (Courtesy)[Missing Credit]
For the self-described “director of Jewish continuity”, who was raised in the conservative (close to Masorti) movement in the US before committing to an Orthodox life in her early 20s, the initiative is a new way to maximise her decades-long commitment to strengthening the Jewish community by giving people the tools to make matches within their local networks. For secular Jews it could, arguably, be a game changer. And fortunately for them, Ben Shalom’s wealth of dating and matchmaking expertise extends far beyond the Orthodox world.
“I got into matchmaking through the more religious community and worked with them more often than the secular community but now I help the non-religious community equally, if not more,” said Ben Shalom, who lives in Israel with her husband and their five children.
She noticed a spike in interest from secular Jews after her Netflix series Jewish Matchmaking came out in May of 2023. And after October 7 and the Jew-hate that the massacre unleashed on the world, the matchmaker saw a further surge. For Ben Shalom it was evidence that “as much as the Jewish people love the world and help the world and do everything for the world, we need to love ourselves, and we need to direct love towards our own communities to ensure the future of our people.”
Ben Shalom believes that intermarriage is “without a doubt” a threat to Jewish continuity, which is partly why she takes matchmaking for Jews of all stripes so seriously. But although the nuts and bolts of finding matches is the same for secular and Orthodox Jews, thereafter there are differences.
“My religious clients are highly motivated to get married and find their person now. And when I say now, today would not be soon enough – yesterday would have been better.
They are looking to date for between two months and six months, and then get engaged and married. They’re very serious, very focused and very clear about what they’re looking for,” Ben Shalom says.
“If you ask them, ‘What are you looking for?’ they have an answer, and usually they’re pretty specific about what kind of family they want to build. They have usually done enormous amount of thinking about it all.
“But when I ask non-observant Jews what they are looking for, I tend to get very generic answers: somebody nice, who’s good-looking and who makes a good living. The kind of basic answers I’d get if I asked a thousand people, they’d all reply identically. And I’m like, ‘Great, assume that I know all of that. What do you want?’ They’re like, ‘I don’t understand the question.’ So then I have to go through the process of explaining: what kind of life do you want to live? What are your values?
What are your beliefs? What kind of a Jewish community would you want to live in? And those are things that they haven’t usually delved deep into: they say ‘I don’t exactly know’, or ‘I have a lot of flexibility’, to which I say, ‘You actually don’t have a lot of flexibility, you just haven’t thought about, so you don’t have an answer to the question.’”
All of which means, says Ben Shalom, that she often has to do “a lot of pre-coaching to help people figure out what they want”, so she can, in turn, explain how she works.
“I say this is who I am.
Here’s how I work. You want to work with me? No problem but we play by my rules. You’ve been dating according to your rules, and if you like your rules and your game, you keep playing it. But you want to play my game, you play by my rules.”
For secular Jews this invariably means agreeing to something that is almost alien: no touching.
“I think in the secular world, we get caught up very quickly not just with people’s looks but with physical contact. So I have what I call the five-date challenge: no touching for five dates. Because if you can last five dates without physical contact and still want to have a sixth date, there’s something special there.”
While secular folk might move too fast on the physical front, Ben Shalom thinks Orthodox Jews can move too quickly on the commitment front
“I do see a lot of anxious Orthodox people saying things such as, ‘I have to make a decision, we’ve gone out eight times already. By the tenth date I need to know. And my response is: it’s OK okay if it takes 15 dates. It’s OK if you go on 20.’ I think [the community] could give a little bit more time for people who are really struggling.”
One thing that Ben Shalom tells her clients irrespective of their level of observance, it’s that finding one’s beshert requires a level of pragmatism that doesn’t end at the chupah.
“To find your beshert and build the relationship, you need to have things in common and also practical skills,” she says. “We continuously make our beshert as we build and grow together.”
It is insights such as those Ben Shalom is sharing with would-be matchmakers through the Jewish Matchmaking Movement, which aims to connect newly established community matchmakers with their counterparts in other countries. As well as “a really big heart” and some “patience and humility”, a matchmaker needs a collaborative spirit, she says.
“A matchmaker needs to be somebody with a big network. We are not independent at all. If I can connect to 10 other people, I have multiplied my network by ten, which means more people to find the right fit. It is about collaboration with other matchmakers, not competing with them,” she says.
Put another way, the greater the collaboration between matchmakers, the greater the marriage prospects for the community’s hopeful singletons.
Tickets for Aleeza Ben Shalom’s live matchmaking event on June 28 are available here.
