Valentine’s Day, for most people, is a day to celebrate love. For the more neurotic among us, we might be inclined to spend the day analytically dissecting our romantic lives and partnerships. There are conflicting truths about modern relationships: we have to accept that our partners are special, sacred and worth fighting for; and, at the same time, that modern marriage was never meant to be like this. Throughout history, our co-parents, best friends, cooks, nannies and confidants were different people; today, we expect everything from our partner.
It’s no surprise that couples therapy has risen dramatically, and that the shifting role of men in society—more depressed, anxious and lonely—has played a role in this.
Daniel Oppenheimer knows this well. The writer and podcaster recently published a lengthy personal feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me“, in which he details undergoing couples therapy quasi-publicly with the acclaimed therapist Terry Real. He joins Bonjour Chai, our weekly current affairs show, to discuss the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions and the complexities of modern masculinity—especially through the lens of Jewish identity.
Transcript
Note: Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain minor errors.
Avi Finegold: So I guess my first question is: if your wife is a couples therapist herself, would she have titled this article the same way? In other words, is the best kind of therapy the one where you both think that you’re the problem and you both need to fix it?
Daniel Oppenheimer: She would not have titled it the same thing. I should be clear. I’m not sure if I’m throwing The New York Times Magazine under the bus here. We had great ambivalence about that title, which at one point was a subtitle. But I think we have differing opinions on where the problem in our marriage lies. The story, and I’m not assuming people have read it, was less about the problem in our marriage being me. I think it was more about the outcome of this very unique sort of course of couples therapy that we did, which was about me taking responsibility for the aspects of our marriage, or the deficits in our marriage, that were my responsibility. Also, it was my story and it didn’t feel like it made sense to go into too much depth about her issues and what she brought to the marriage. So that’s the kind of. I think “The Problem in Our Marriage Was Me” is maybe a little bit of a vulgarisation of what I was trying to say.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Whose idea was it to attend couples therapy? But in the sense of, like, what was the impetus, like what was going on in your marriage that prompted you to think this was a moment for couples therapy?
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yeah, I think in our marriage of 18 years, there has always been a moment for couples therapy, in a sense. We love each other a lot. We have a lot of things that attract us to each other, but it’s always been conflictual. It’s always been a roller coaster. We have periods of connection and disconnection, and, you know, we both brought a lot of baggage to the marriage. And then, as Terry says in the article, you know, we found these people in each other who were perfectly designed to stick it to us. I, as I sometimes say about my wife, or she says about herself, you know, she’s exactly like my mother and just different enough from my mother that she has the kind of perfect Freudian scent to draw me in. So we’ve always been on this rollercoaster. It’s always been very conflictual. We’ve done various rounds of couples therapy in the past. I think the first time, she was the one who was pushing me into it. For most of the other times, I have been the one who’s been pushing her into it just because we get very tired of the rollercoaster. Things feel really good when we’re connected, and they feel really terrible when we’re disconnected. Even though she is a couples therapist, she’s gotten increasingly resistant to going to couples therapy. She hasn’t found it productive. She’s a couples therapy snob. I mean, she’s a couples therapist herself, and she’s a very good one. Her standards for what would constitute worthwhile couples therapy are much higher than mine. We would joke when we started reading Terry Real, this guy who we ended up seeing, that, you know, Jess would only go back to couples therapy if it was with Terry. And it was a joke because he’s immensely expensive, tens of thousands of dollars to see him for one weekend.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: What?
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Are you saying that I’ve entered the wrong profession?
Daniel Oppenheimer: You have. I mean, if you’re.
Avi Finegold: If you have the Terry Real skills, then yes, you’ve entered the wrong profession.
Daniel Oppenheimer: If your objective is to make a lot of money, then, yes, choosing the profession of journalism and podcasting versus therapy is wrong.
Avi Finegold: But what is his fee schedule? I just want to get more into this because I got to hear if you’re not being recorded for, you know, the world of therapists to watch.
Daniel Oppenheimer: So, I don’t know precisely. I think he charges $30,000 to go in for a weekend for the three-day session where he talks about this as a last resort sort of thing.
Avi Finegold: Yeah. So, obviously, that’s for a certain class of clientele.
Daniel Oppenheimer: There’s no sliding scale.
Avi Finegold: There’s no sliding scale?
Daniel Oppenheimer: Well, there’s no sliding scale unless you agree to be one of his guinea pigs. So we had joked about how he was the only person she would go back to couples therapy for. We would joke that Bruce Springsteen wrote the foreword to his latest book, so very aware, you know. So only we only go back to therapy for Bruce Springsteen’s therapist. And then this opportunity came along to actually do that, to see him. And so, you know, she couldn’t say no. I mean, she actually was wanting to do it too, but also she couldn’t say no to the one person who she granted she would go back to couples therapy with me to see.
Avi Finegold: At what point do you decide that this is worthy of actually writing about for the public? Because being on the video, like you said, is very private and only for the people you know, for therapists to watch. But then you go and write about it, and it basically, you know, opens you up, like, it exposes you to, like, friends and the world. Like anybody that comes up to you now is like, oh, Daniel Oppenheimer, I know about your marriage now.
Daniel Oppenheimer: You know, I think I started—I mean, if I’m being totally candid, I mean, when I realized that there would be video recordings of these sessions, I started, kind of, the idea started germinating for me. Because, you know, one of the things that’s tough about writing about therapy is, you know, it’s just based on your memory or something like that. But we would actually literally have—we would realize we were going to have—the videos, they were going to, they would, said they would share them with us. So then we have these perfect transcripts. It’s not based on my sort of faulty memory, so. And we had been talking, Jess and I had been talking, about writing a book. We’d been talking for a while about writing a book together on couples therapy and relationships. And it seemed like an obvious thing to do, something potentially, whether it was for an article or it made its way into, you know, if there’s an eventual book. So, yeah, I mean, it was pretty early in the process for me.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, it reminded me a little bit of the—we discussed on your podcast—that Emily Gould piece where she takes responsibility for the problems in her own marriage. Did that influence you at all in writing?
Daniel Oppenheimer: That’s interesting. Yeah. You know, I hadn’t thought about that connection until you just brought that up, but that’s a good point. And I’m trying to remember back to her article. She talks about—God, I mean, was it—there was some addiction, right? There was some alcohol. Right.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So she and her—so Emily Gould and Keith Gessen, her husband, are both successful Brooklyn writers, but I guess he possibly more conventionally successful, though I think it depends kind of in what world you live in. And she had initially kind of presented things in this very, like, posting to social media, whatever, in this very conventional narrative—the man is in the wrong kind of feminist way. And then when she actually looked at what happened, it seemed like their marriage was maybe more complicated than that. And then she wrote a kind of mea culpa type essay that a bunch of kind of right-wing men’s rights types kind of jumped on, being like, look, the woman was the problem in the marriage. And she’s like, yes, that was the point of that essay—that the woman was the problem in that marriage, anyway.
Daniel Oppenheimer: No, that’s a really good point. It’s an interesting comparison that I hadn’t thought about before, though. I wonder if it was somewhere in my brain because, yeah, she talks about—I think there was—I think she was drinking a lot. I think there was some mental health stuff. I think she had a fling. So she cheated on him in some fashion.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes, correct.
Daniel Oppenheimer: And she wrote this story. I think you and I did not take it as well. I think we both liked it and were sort of admiring of her honesty. And she and I—and again, I don’t think she was saying, like, everything wrong with this marriage was me. But I’m realizing that I have to reckon with all the things that are wrong— that have gone wrong in the marriage—that were me. Yeah. And then there were these obnoxious right-wing types who were saying, you know, ditch her, like, lose her, like look at all these terrible things that she said about what she did. And yeah, I think there is a parallel there though I hadn’t thought about it. It’s funny that I hadn’t thought about it.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, it’s interesting. It’s just similar because it’s—because it’s also about, like, the taking responsibility and also about the making things work as an outcome rather than the sort of burn-it-all-down outcome.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yeah. It’s funny, I’m trying to think of, did I not think about it because it would have been some kind of anxiety of influence thing, or did I not think about it because I just don’t think of myself in the same category? Emily Gould and Keith Gessen, I mean, they’re not household names, but in the circles in which we run, they’re sort of—they’re literary celebrities and I’m just not.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I read newspaper comments always because I’m like that. And one of the comments said something to your piece, said something like, I have the same issues in my marriage, even though, of course, we’re not glamorous literary types like these people. So I guess it’s all relative.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yeah.
Avi Finegold: So speaking of celebrities though, I, I’m very familiar with the work of Terry Real from reading his books and knowing about him and seeing him pop up in various media.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Does that imply you have issues in your marriage?
Avi Finegold: I am neither confirming nor denying.
Daniel Oppenheimer: If you’re very familiar with Terry, I’m just going to—yeah, I’m going to throw you and your wife or husband under the bus.
Avi Finegold: Absolutely. Yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So Seinfeld reference, evoked him, and he wasn’t even in. He has a wife who’s a rabbi.
Avi Finegold: I imagine that getting a call from whoever his people are that says Terry Real would like to record you for eight hours in order to, you know, that must be like getting Bruce Springsteen to call you and say, hey, I’m doing a masterclass on learning to play guitar. Can you come in and I’ll teach you for 10 hours as long as you don’t mind being recorded.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yes, it was something like that. Yeah. I mean it’s funny because we were just talking about kind of literary celebrity and things like that. Like Terry Real is not a household name.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I have never heard of this person, but I only know like Dan Savage and that’s where my relationship knowledge ends.
Daniel Oppenheimer: So look, he’s not famous famous, but if you live in the world that I live in, where my wife is a couple’s therapist, and so she reads the books that people are reading, and she gets trainings occasionally, and the trainings that people provide in this world, Terry Real is a big deal and it’s not a huge world. I mean, he’s not at the Esther Perel level, who’s maybe the one of these people who a lot of people have heard of, who maybe is verging on an actual celebrity, but he’s kind of one level down from that. So. And he’s also the person who she’s encountered in the last few years who’s had the biggest influence on her. So yeah, I mean getting—I mean, we volunteered for it. This email went around saying Terry’s looking for couples to provide low-cost therapy to in exchange for being sort of guinea pigs for being watched by people who are training in his system, and then the sessions will be recorded.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Do you think that changes the nature of a therapy session, the knowledge that anybody else is watching it? Because, I mean, so I say this as a real outsider to the therapy world, despite being a New York Jew, I’m the one who missed the boat. But I always thought of it as very much like the secret world between, you know, the therapist and the person they’re giving therapy to. And then it’s like… Like. Do you feel like you’re performing in a way that’s different?
Daniel Oppenheimer: Um, I think it was different for Jess and me. Um, there’s some sort of screw that’s not connected in my brain such that I didn’t. I genuinely think I just wasn’t that worried about it. I sort of, and it’s like, I can say this logically, but I realize emotionally this doesn’t make sense, which is, I couldn’t see the people. I didn’t know who they were. I’d never meet them. If I met them, I wouldn’t know that they were among the people who were watching me talk about my marriage. And somehow I just… That. That let me shut it off. I don’t think I was performing. I think I’m always performing. I mean, I think I was performing for Terry and wanted to be appealing to him or seem reasonable. So I’m probably always performing a little bit. I think, for Jess, yeah, it probably inhibited her somewhat. I mean, you know, 10, 15%, not 90%. I think she still was present in the therapy sessions.
Avi Finegold: But one of the things that I find interesting, speaking of the New York Jews in therapy, is that the classic understanding, like the classic image of therapy, is always this incredibly passive, you know, person. Say nothing about the person behind the curtain. And their goal is to get you to understand your issue. Terry Real seems like the opposite, and he’s leading this charge of therapists who want to basically come out and say, listen, there’s no point in spending four years so that you will get to the point by yourself. This is your issue. I’m going to tell you. It’s very similar to Stutz, this documentary. I don’t know if you saw this one, or Shrinking, which is that Apple TV show. Right. Like this notion. And in that sense, right, I actually think that’s the more Jewish way. Because if you go to your rabbi, (I’m a rabbi also,) the rabbis have no problem telling you, like, you’re wrong for this or you’re right for that or whatever. Like, this is what’s going well and this is what isn’t. Not necessarily in terms of therapy, but in terms of, like, spiritual direction, whatever it is. That, to me, is the more Jewish way of, like, just being confrontational. Was that. What was that experience like? I’m sure after having other therapists who were probably much more passive.
Daniel Oppenheimer: I mean, I say in the article, I mean, the, the experience of being directed in that way. And my wife is a very directive couples therapist as well. And I, and I should distinguish. Well, I should say two things. Take anything I say about the field of therapy with a certain grain of salt. I’m not a therapist. I’m sort of an honorary therapist by marriage. I’ve studied a lot, thought about it a lot. Couples therapy is different from individual therapy. I mean, there are also a lot of. I’m sure if you went to individual therapy with Terry, he’d be very directive. I know my wife is pretty directive with people, but it’s a fundamentally different dynamic when you’re in individual therapy where a certain amount of just letting the patient go where they’re going to go, providing a lot of support, can get you a long distance. I really think that doesn’t work with couples therapy, which doesn’t mean there aren’t mediocre couples therapists out there who do a version of that. But you have to be much more directive. You have to be playing referee between people who, in many cases, will just lose their shit with each other in session in ways that can be really destructive and can do more damage to the marriage in therapy than just the absence of therapy. So you have to be more directive. Terry is within that broader scope of more couples therapists being more directive, is at the directive end of it and at the confrontational end of it. I said in the article, like, I found it really bracing. That doesn’t always mean it was easy, but I think a lot of us go into therapy on some level, consciously or unconsciously, wanting somebody else to take charge. You know, we want a kind of wise, forceful, benevolent patriarch or matriarch, mother or father figure or grandfather or grandmother figure to take us in hand and say, hey, you don’t know how to do this right. That’s why you’re here. Let me tell you how to do this right. So I found it compelling. It doesn’t mean in every moment when he was calling me on my stuff and telling me what I was doing wrong, that it was easy. It wasn’t, but at a sort of global, sort of atmospheric level. That’s what I wanted. I wanted somebody like, there were things in our marriage that weren’t working. That’s why we’re in therapy. So the fantasy that we knew what to do ourselves had been mostly obliterated in advance.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So something I wonder though about, like, the transition from a therapy session or a series of therapy sessions to a single-authored article. Is it came across in the article like you were being, like, filleted (or filleted. Is it filleted or filleted?) like you were getting really told what’s what. And your wife was just kind of hearing an affirmation of everything. She, like, a sort of a better articulated, or not better, or a way phrased in a way that you could hear articulation of all of her. Like not to be again, Seinfeld referencing, but like I’ve got a lot of problems with you people style and as it was actually happening without going into detail, since it is your story, was she also getting, like, roasted, filleted, dusted in flour and then pan fried or whatever?
Daniel Oppenheimer: So, yeah, I have a few answers. The answer is no, she wasn’t getting. So I, in my head, it’s filleted, but I feel like maybe filleted is an alternative pronunciation.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I don’t know.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Anyway, no, the answer is she wasn’t. And there’s a few reasons for that. One of them is it was a little bit of a truncated course of therapy. So we did eight weeks. I think the sort of full course is sort of 16 weeks in the way that he, if he’s doing that kind of work. And I think more of the latter eight weeks would have been maybe focused on her issues. So that was one reason. Another reason was he has, and this is part of Terry’s paradigm, like, he has a very different approach to dealing with what he calls the blatant partner and the latent partner. And the… I mean, these are sort of, you know, crude simplifications. But the blatant partner being the one, like me, who deals with distress with kind of anger and sort of very tangible explicit hostility. It’s not always yelling, but it could be contempt or, in some cases, it could even be withdrawal. But the one who’s acting out in that way versus the one… And these things don’t have to be gendered; they often are. So often, that’s the guy, and often the woman adopts what he calls more latent strategies of dealing with distress, which might be things like passive aggression or control or little sort of critical comments or things like that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, something I wanted to ask about that, though, is just the gender versus Jewishness aspect of it is what kept jumping out because I kept thinking, like, because you make a reference to being kind of the Alvy Singer to your wife’s Annie Hall. And I started to just think about, like, I mean, I’m the Jewish partner in my marriage, and am I the Annie Hall or am I the Alvy Singer? And to me, it seems extremely obvious that I would be the Alvy Singer, without a doubt. And I am, if you’re still allowed to say this in America, although I’m not in America, the cisgender woman here. You know what I mean? So, like that. So I just started to think about these roles and about the yelling versus not yelling and all of this, and how much is culture, and how much is gender, and how much… The reason that one tends to think about one role is more how the man is, the other is how the woman is in straight relationships, is because we just have so many cultural models of, like, there’s, like, Meet the Parents, there’s George Costanza, you know, trying to get some kind of record number of these things. There’s Philip Roth novels. You know what I mean? Like, there’s so many examples like that. So I’m wondering, like, how much is this Jewish versus Gentile and how much is man versus woman?
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yeah, I don’t know. And I think… Let me finish my thought about the kind of blatant versus the latent, and then let me try and address the cultural issue. So when Terry… I think Terry ultimately thinks the latent strategies for dealing with distress are no better or worse than the blatant ones. But in his framing, you have to deal… You have to get the blatant under control before the latent can come out. So the arc of it is… And again, it could be the man or the woman. It could be the Jew or the Gentile who’s the one who’s more of the yeller or something like that. But that you have to get that under control. Because as long as that’s in play, it’s kind of inhibiting the latent person. It’s driving them to these sort of indirect strategies of control, aggression. And so you have to do that first to get to the latent. It doesn’t mean the latent are better. It just means that there’s a… As I think I quote him saying in the article, it’s a sequence issue. One has to go before the other. Doesn’t mean Terry’s right. I mean, that’s his paradigm. There are a million of these paradigms out there. You know, the Jewish… I don’t know, the Jewish, you know, Gentile thing is really interesting. I mean, for my wife. And it’s funny to present her as a latent because she’s the opposite of, like, she’s not a wilting flower. I mean, in a lot of ways she’s… You know, a lot of ways she’s very masculine. Not like she’s very… She’s a very, very forceful person, and she’s a very strong personality, I think, in a lot of ways. And this is often the case, you know, it’s one or the other person in the marriage, you know, who the family revolves around in some sense. She is the sun around which our family orbits in a much clearer way than I am. She grew up in a household where there was a lot of yelling. I mean, it was not… So thinking about a culture. She grew up in an Irish Catholic household. Her father was an alcoholic. There was a lot of… And part of the reason that my anger is such an issue in our marriage is not because necessarily there’s something so intrinsically awful about yelling. In my Jewish family’s culture, there was a certain tolerance for yelling, even though I think at the same time it was doing a lot of damage. Part of the reason it’s an issue in our marriage is because the aggression and the anger and the chaos in her household was so threatening and so devastating that it does a lot of damage to her in our marriage. And, you know, we talked about this. I didn’t get into the article, but it’s like the important thing is how is it experienced by the other partner? It’s not some objective measure of whether yelling is bad or good. It’s what is the experience of the partners. And it’s so devastating to her because of where she comes from. Hers was not a stiff upper lip, WASP Protestant household where everybody kind of dealt with their aggression and distress in sort of indirect, quiet, passive-aggressive.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That’s what… Just as an aside, that was how I imagined all non-Jews were. And I married into a Belgian Catholic family. And there ain’t none of…
Avi Finegold: That. To be fair, a growing up in a joint Ashkenazi Sephardic household. You know, you don’t have to be the Jewish model of, like, some people yell, some people don’t. It is… There is just as much, you know, dynamics from different cultures. And that’s what we’re trying to see here is, like, ultimately has nothing to do with the Jewish, non-Jewish in my mind. It’s just so many different cultures have both aspects of these.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, it may have something to do with it. But can I just ask one more question about the editorial aspect of this? Like, was it made to be more about masculinity or was that coming from you?
Daniel Oppenheimer: I’d say 50-50. Like, I… I’m really fascinated by masculinity. And I think therapy and our culture in general has a really hard time dealing with it and not many great solutions. I think therapy… And actually, Terry agrees with this. Like, there are ways in which there… He wouldn’t put it quite in these terms, like there are ways in which the discipline or the profession of therapy is very… I don’t know if feminized is the right word, but it’s much better at dealing with women than it is at dealing with men. I think a lot of the critiques that it’s presented of masculinity—and this is part of a much kind of broader cultural critique of masculinity—don’t work very well. I think they’re alienating to men. I mean, I think they can work with individual men, but I think at a cultural level, like… It’s part of a broader, broader trend that can be really alienating to men. And just to put it simplistically, that, like, we’re the problem. And I worry that my article kind of played into this in ways. It was hard to kind of walk this line. Played into this in ways that I didn’t want to. One of the things I found compelling about Terry is, at one and the same time, he’s saying this masculine coded trait of anger and aggression is really destructive and you need to get a handle on this. But for me, he was doing it in a way that was not disempowering or stigmatizing in a way that I genuinely believe a lot of the critiques of masculinity are. He was doing it in, frankly, what I think was a very masculine way and in a way that was kind of embracing of certain kinds of traditionally understood masculine traits. But it was very complicated for me to try and depict that. All those sort of nuances in the article. I’m not sure I always nailed it.
Avi Finegold: The thing that I… That stuck with me about this whole topic was that, you know, rarely do we hear… And I’m okay with, you know, people telling men that they have to get more in touch with their emotions, right? I think that that is… Is an absolutely fine and valid and important thing to do. I think that we don’t get enough of a message from therapists or popular culture where therapy is, you know, in that thing that there are traits that are masculine that are not only valid and valuable, but are valid and valuable for women too. Like, hey, maybe you should be a little more like the men. And, you know, in this area where the whole message is men, you have to get in touch with your emotions. You have to be more feminine, right? And even on top of that, the thing that, you know, and this is sort of an aside, but not really. If you look at a shelf, if you go to Barnes and Noble or wherever and you look at the shelf of books on sex and sexuality in contemporary society, it’s all geared towards women, right? You don’t have books that help men, you know, deepen their, you know, sexual experience and stuff like that. It’s, you know, so men don’t have this thing of, like, yeah, I want to get better at this. There’s nothing… When you go to therapy, it’s like everything that makes you a male, get rid of it. And, you know, there has to be a better way to, like, embrace the other pieces without losing whatever. You know, the notion that, like, we have to get more in touch with however we are with our feminine sides.
Daniel Oppenheimer: I wholeheartedly agree with that. And I think, you know, it’s interesting. I’m interested in what you guys think about this. This is probably a topic in Jewish discourse that I’m just not tuned into. I actually think Jews have been a lot better, and maybe I should just call them, like, American Jews or something. American Canadian Jews. Like, I think we are a lot closer to what you would want modern masculinity to look like. So, kind of thinking about what the model of, like, the Jewish patriarch is, has long seemed to me better adapted to our world than a lot of the sort of other modes of traditional masculinity that we’ve adopted in our cultures but then all seem to be rejecting right now. Either rejecting from a sort of feminist perspective or embracing in a sort of caricature-ish, sort of Trump way from the other direction or something like that. I’m not saying that Jews have solved it. I just think the Jewish model of, sort of, patriarchy is a better one.
Avi Finegold: But explain a little more. I’m trying to understand what, in your mind, the conception of the Jewish patriarchy is.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yeah, I mean, let me think about how to, like, I should think about who a good example of it is. Well, first of all, there’s an embrace of learning, right. There’s an embrace of learning and intellectuality that’s not at odds with masculinity. I mean, not only is it not at odds with masculinity, but it is, in fact, kind of identified with masculinity. So that’s a part of it. And then I think there’s a connected aspect of it that’s just like talkiness, like talking a lot, that doesn’t get you to emotions. And I certainly know this from my own life, and I talk about it in the article. That doesn’t get you to emotions, but at least it gets you out of that stoic man of few words model.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So, you mean the sort of grunting, watching some sports, having the beer model of masculinity. I’m thinking of Meghan Daum’s essay, “American Shiksa,” that we talked about with her on Bonjour Chai once, where she describes her cultural upbringing and the type of men, and yeah, so.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Not that that gets us half the—
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Way there, but she’s talking about them like being drawn to Jewish men for exactly the reason I bring it up. It’s what you’re talking about—that they wouldn’t be so sort of Neanderthal. It’s a very stereotype-filled essay, I should say knowingly so, and very funny.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Right, well, but we’re talking about stereotypes. I mean, we’re talking about stereotypes in a way.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Or we’re talking about kind of paradigms for being a thing. And I think being talky, I think, in a lot of spaces, American Canadian males… I don’t want to speak to Canadian. A lot of American male spaces being very talky and analytical and discourse-oriented would be stigmatized as feminine or unmasculine. And I think it’s just not the case in Jewish spaces. It is actually identified with being. It’s an acceptable, approved, affirmed way of being masculine. So that gets you half of the way there. What else? I think there’s an emphasis on fatherhood in the Jewish tradition that leads more naturally to being an involved parent. The emotionality… I don’t have a great theory. I just think that a lot of those things get us, you know, 75% of the way there at least compared to a lot of traditional archetypes of masculinity. And then maybe the sort of undiscovered frontier is the emotionality. And I’m not sure we necessarily… I mean, it’s funny. I’m not sure we have an advantage there. I mean, we do have all the psychologists, right. I mean, you know, isn’t psychology a Jewish science? I mean, we have Freud and all of his descendants.
Avi Finegold: Yeah. I’ll tell you, I really want to think about this a bit more, and I’m processing it. But I’ll tell you, the part that really resonated the most with me from a Jewishness perspective in the piece was when you quote Terry, who says, “We all think that we deserve the goddess or God who will deliver us from our childhood, even heal us and make it all better and give us what we didn’t get. What we wind up with is someone who is perfectly designed to stick it to us.” And it’s so epically biblical, right. The whole narrative is these people that are in constant conflict with the very entity that delivered them from Egypt. So many biblical commentators wonder about, like, how could the Israelites who had so recently been miraculously led out of this exile rebel against the God which delivered them in this way? And I’m like, of course, duh, right? God is perfectly designed to stick it to us, right? That’s the God of mercy versus the God of judgment. I think that is the paradigm being discussed in this whole piece. And I’m like, of course, that explains all of the Bible. The thing that gets you out of there is actually the thing that is going to rub you the wrong way within one month of being freed from exile. I don’t know if that resonates or if you thought about this at all.
Daniel Oppenheimer: I hadn’t thought about that at all. I did think a fair amount about Terry’s Jewishness and also what I think of as his Christianity. I mean, he’s a Jew. There’s no Christianity in his upbringing. I think there are aspects of his belief system that I thought felt Christian to me. And I don’t mean that as a sort of pejorative. I think there’s a part of it that is in the kind of philosophy, in the conceptual aspects of it. I think what brought me to it was, and I didn’t get into this in the article, that Terry has a sort of messiah complex.
Avi Finegold: Couldn’t possibly have imagined. Why.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Right, right. And he talks about his way of viewing the world of relationality. I mean, he literally said this is the new news. I’m not sure if he literally says this is the good news, but this is the gospel, this is the new. He talks about his view of understanding relationships between people and understanding relationships and families in the context of culture as a sort of revolution in consciousness that needs to happen for the world to be saved. And I think on some level, implicit and explicit in his worldview is that it’s not just individuals developing this in relation to their partners, but sort of self-coalescing communities of people who learn the good news of relationality, as he calls it, of fierce intimacy. And I just kept thinking of, like, early Christians in the wilderness in the Roman Empire, that this was a new way of looking at the world and understanding their relationship to themselves and to God. That was a technology of relating to other people that was adapted to its time in some way that was so extraordinarily compelling that it just started multiplying. I think that is how Terry sees his understanding of the world.
Avi Finegold: If I can translate it, it sounds like what you’re saying is that the rabbis, the early rabbis were these rugged individualists that care only about the relationship that they have with God, right? Or at least that’s the conception of it. When Christianity comes in and Jesus is like, no, it’s all about the people. It’s the horizontal part of it. To translate it into contemporary, right? And I’ve discussed this a lot on the show, but I’ll say it for you. One of the things I’ve always thought about is how orthodoxy is very focused on the relationship between man and God. So, it’s all about these mitzvot, all the commandments that we do. And the liberal community is very focused on the tikkun olam parts and the social justice aspect. And it’s about like getting into society and social stuff. And the relationality is, you know, the reason why orthodoxy, I think, has a hard time with it is because it sounds very Christian because it’s about this, like, people are more important almost than God. And I’m totally generalizing and flattening it all. But that sounds like what you’re going towards.
Daniel Oppenheimer: No, I think that’s right. And I think that’s right. And so, I mean, Terry is not Christian in the sense that it doesn’t have to pass through. There isn’t a God in the system. It’s not passing through God on the way to people. But I think it is Christian in the way that you’re describing it, that it’s much more horizontal than it is hierarchical.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So is your wife going to write her take of it?
Daniel Oppenheimer: I don’t think she’s going to write a straight, like, reverse take on it. We’re working on this book and.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But together.
Daniel Oppenheimer: But together. But it’s going to be. People always think this is weird. This makes total sense to me. It’s going to be in her voice. So it’s going to be a first person book in her voice, but we’re writing it together.
Avi Finegold: Talk about the ultimate emasculation of therapy.
Daniel Oppenheimer: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that was my call because I just. I don’t want to write. I mean, what’s the alternative? Like, she’s the. She’s the therapist. She’s the one who can talk about, you know, experiences with clients. You end up in these very sort of awkward, kind of like. I don’t even know what that would look like. It’s not that you couldn’t do it. We were joking about. I wasn’t joking, but I think she was like. It’s in her voice. But then there’s like David Foster Wallace style. There are all these footnotes where I’m commenting on what she’s saying. We would have to go back to the footnotes to see what I’m saying, in my opinion. I think that’d be kind of funny.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Sounds amazing, actually. It sounds really good.
Avi Finegold: Okay, well, this has been really, really enlightening, to say the least. Yes. We all. To go back to the first point, we all could use some therapy. We’re all with the wrong person, and we’re all with the right person.
Show Notes
Credits
- Hosts: Avi Finegold and Phoebe Maltz Bovy (@BovyMaltz)
- Production team: Joe Fish (producer & editor), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Socalled
Support The CJN
- Subscribe to the Bonjour Chai Substack
- Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
- Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
- Subscribe to Bonjour Chai (Not sure how? Click here)
