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AUGUST 1998 EDITION
By Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D.
Reprinted with permission from Jewish Action Magazine, Winter 1992-3
A compound, on the other hand, is something like table salt, which is composed of two ingredients, sodium and chlorine. Sodium is a volatile metal, which bursts into flame when in contact with water, hardly something which one would put into one's food. Chlorine is a green, corrosive gas, which causes a severe choking sensation. Again, something which would certainly not make food more palatable. When the two get together, they form sodium chloride, an indispensable substance that gives a pleasant taste to food.
What happens in a compound is that when two substances combine, they each give up their individuality, as it were, and a totally new substance is born of this fusion.
Why this lesson in science? Because our generation has suffered from an unprecedented incidence of marriage failures and broken families, most of which are due to incompatibilities. But what is incompatibility? It is most often a conflict that results when two people live in a mixture relationship, where each person maintains one's own character, one's own goals, and one's own desires.
The Torah never intended for marriage to be a mixture. "They shall be one flesh" (Genesis 2:24) depicts the Torah's concept of marriage: a compound, wherein both ingredients have divested themselves of their preexisting personalities to a sufficient degree to allow an entirely new entity to combine into being: a family. Perhaps the changes in the characters of spouses cannot be as radical as that undergone by sodium and chlorine. However, the problem in the prevalence of incompatibility is that so often both spouses wish to remain essentially unchanged, but each expects the other to accommodate. Even if one partner of the relationship does yield in favor of the wishes of the other, a unilateral change does not create a compound. If chlorine were to give up all its properties but sodium were to remain unchanged, sodium chloride would still be a volatile, dangerous substance rather than table salt. It is only the mutual yielding of the individual properties that permits the emergence of a new entity. Much emphasis has been placed on the importance of a person understanding oneself, and indeed, I too have stressed this in discussing the concept of self-esteem in a number of my books. However, two points should be carefully borne in mind:
(2) In marriage there must be a new self which is the family. To the degree that self-awareness and self-esteem are permitted to become self-centeredness of the individual, the family unit cannot come into being. The relationship then remains a mixture which is not what the Torah intended by "they shall be one." Yielding of oneself may not be easy, but the alternative is risking the tragedy of incompatibility. Here too, taking the route that requires more effort may be like taking the "long route that is shorter" instead of choosing the "short route that is longer."
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