I met Devorah in graduate school, and after dating for a few months, I asked her to marry me. She said yes — but her mother objected. I was a real hippie type, with shoulder-length hair, and she was not comfortable with that. But I didn’t give up, I cut my hair, and after three years, in 1969, we got married, settling in Silver Spring, Maryland, near Washington D.C.
By then Devorah and I were also in the process of becoming more observant, but even though my mother-in-law had agreed to the marriage, she still wasn’t completely happy with the idea of her daughter being religious. Because my mother-in-law did a lot of entertaining, hosting gatherings for family and friends, our refusal to eat food in her home that was not kosher to orthodox standards was a problem.
Initially, we tried making some changes that would enable us to eat there. She would buy meat from a kosher butcher, but then she would make some mistake so there were still kashrut problems with the food. We offered to get place settings that matched her fancy china and that we would cook for ourselves the same foods that she was serving, but she didn’t like that idea. She kept pushing us to eat her food, we kept refusing, and the tension in our relationship kept getting worse.
During those years, my wife and I were very close with a Chabad emissary named Rabbi Itche Springer. After speaking with him about the trouble with my in-laws, he suggested we make an appointment to meet the Rebbe.
We came to 770 on a Sunday night. There, we sat on a bench with a list of questions for what seemed like forever. At about two o’clock in the morning, we went into the Rebbe’s room.
We had already been briefed on how to act during an audience with the Rebbe: Not to shake his hand, to stand rather than sit, and so on. But when we walked in, my wife was feeling very faint so the Rebbe took one look at her and said. “Sit down!”
We found ourselves very focused on the Rebbe; he seemed to fill the entire room. He picked up the piece of paper I had brought, and glanced at it incredibly briefly, rolling through it the way a winding paper goes through a typewriter. Then, he put it face down on the desk, and proceeded to answer all of our questions in order.
When he came to the question about my mother-in-law, he said, “You need to stop eating at your in-laws: not a banana, not an apple, nothing. But you also have to go more often than you are going now.”
My in-laws lived about three miles from our apartment, so we were already going quite often. In the summer, we would walk over every Shabbat afternoon. But he was telling us that we had to go even more. We had to show my in-laws that we didn’t want to break away from the family, even if we wouldn’t be eating with them.
“Things will get worse for three weeks,” he continued, “and then it will all get better.”
Okay, if you say so, I thought.
So we started visiting my in-laws more frequently but we stopped eating their food. At first, it bothered them immensely. They yelled at us, accusing us of breaking up the family.
But then, after three weeks, my mother-in-law said, “Just come. Bring your own food, bring plastic plates, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what you eat, as long as you’re here.”
And after that, everything was fine.
The Rebbe understood that if we had continued to eat some of their food, we would continue to be challenged: If you’re eating this, why not that? By not eating anything, my mother-in-law ended up looking at the bigger picture and accepting our different standards.
In fact, by insisting that we visit my wife’s parents more frequently, in the end, the Rebbe made my relationship with my mother-in-law much better.
