So, more than 22 years ago, I met this cute, curvy Jewess at Sinai Temple’s Friday Night Live. You know the type—age-appropriate, Sephardic fire, Ashkenazi vocabulary. She had hips like a halachic boundary—meant to be respected but very hard not to cross.
First date? We go hiking. Romantic, right? Nature, sweat, modesty in tank tops. At one point I say—trying to be charming but probably sounding like a sex offender with a thesaurus—“I look forward to gaining easy access to your greatest assets.” I meant her personality, obviously. But she looks me dead in the eye and says, “Deep in your neshama, you want to work that reward.”
I mean, come on. This is Torah meets Tinder. Her hips didn’t lie. They chanted Lecha Dodi.
So obviously, I panicked. I’m like, “This is too good. She’s too curvy, too clever, too Jewish. I’m gonna screw this up. I need to sabotage this with someone more… docile. Less frum. Smaller… expectations.”
So I go out with a shiksa. Blonde, A-cup, nose ring, the kind of girl who says, “I’m spiritual, not religious,” while vaping during therapy. On our second date, she—how do I say this halachically?—she deployed her talent. You know what I mean. Let’s just say she put the “blessing” in Birkat HaMazon.
And just like that, I stopped chasing the curvy Jewess and spent the next year trying to convert an A-cup into a soulmate. Like a schmuck. I thought I could mold her into a nice Orthodox wife. Instead, I got a yearlong lesson in how “namaste” is not Hebrew for “clean the dishes.”
Fast forward five years. I’m trying to date this woman—very earnest, very sweet, in the middle of converting to Judaism. She lives in a backhouse. Her landlady? Guess who?
The Curvy Jewess.
I’m like, this is bashert! This is God giving me a second shot at my neshama work. But my new friend-zoning friend with the secret Jewish boyfriend (don’t let the rabbis know or they’ll kick her from the conversion program, her Jewish BF doesn’t want to be bothered going to shul every morning to prove his bona fides) is like, “Oh, you knew her? Yeah… my landlady is totally nuts. You dodged a bullet.”
Dodged a bullet?! Lady, I was the bullet. I swerved out of her path and shot myself in the ego.
So what’s the moral? Never trade a curvy Jewess for a shiksa with a fast tongue and a yoga mat? Maybe. Or maybe the moral is this:
The past has a funny way of renting out the upstairs apartment just when you’re trying to build a future downstairs.
Or maybe—just maybe—your greatest assets are the mistakes that keep you from making even worse ones.
Either way, don’t ghost a woman who talks like a rebbetzin and moves like she’s smuggling Sephardic spices under her dress. That’s a rookie move.
