The Perils of Free Association
by: Schvach Yid

I can’t drop names – too many bloggers are getting sued for posting their minds (does this sound like a parody of Dylan?). But I can unload about my peculiar sense of free association.

So there I was, surfing the J web, and I picked up a link from the comments section of an extraordinarily popular J blog site. The link connected to the blog site of a young woman, a Jady of the world – well, at least of 4 cities on 3 continents, or so she advertises. She uses her blog to describe her international jaunts (no, not Jewish haunts!) and her attraction to what sounds like an ever-increasing level of Jewish observance. Hazak! Good for her. She’s even searching for a shomer Shabbos shidduch.

Why mention? Because, as I read her blogs my mind wandered (when doesn’t it?). I began to have images of Reese Witherspoon’s portrayal of the character Elle Woods in the flick Legally Blonde.

Elle Woods is at first portrayed as a frivolous, light-hearted, not-altogether-bright sorority girl who in the end graduates from Harvard Law School and is offered employment at a class A law firm in Boston. Not bad – I should only achieve such things! Frivolous ‘air-head’ thus develops into significant substance, and all in the context of a love story.

But after concluding my first reading of this new (for me) blog site, I took stock of the probable significance of this Jewish freelance on-line hobby-writer. She lives and flies all over the place, and that costs, so either she has a rich daddy (oy!), or a rich sugar daddy (oy vavoy!), or, I hope, she’s independently successful. I’ll pick the last case – after all, she portrays herself as a career woman and she's entitled. And boy, does she manage to get around.

So first impressions may count, but further and kinder considerations are more important. And I hope she ‘goes frum’, finds her Shabbos observant shidduch, and has lots of Jewishly committed kinderloch. As a Lubavitch rabbi (no, not the Lubavitcher Rebbe) once said to me: ‘every Jew is precious’, so the more imbued with Yiddishkeit she becomes, the better.