EXOD247 … dating isn't marriage. It also isn't something for which there is a set playbook (would that it were so easy!) Instead, it is the chance to be intimately uncertain with another human being. Dating is about uncertainty, about learning to shepherd uncertainty and allowing it either to grow into a commitment or a separation. The question we need to ask, as a result, is how we embrace that uncertainty when we are in relationships, and how we honor it while protecting both people involved. For this reason, I think that the gender and sexuality of the partners does not matter at all. The obligation to protect another human being and treat that person well has no gendered boundaries or boundaries of sexual orientation. The question of how to embrace that uncertainty is a very straightforward one. But the problem with straightforward questions is that the answers are often messy, nowhere more so than in relationships. So to try to answer this question, I want to bring in a metaphor from Torah. One of the pleasant things about our Torah is that it doesn't have much patience for idealized relationships. There isn't a single one in the text that I can think of that isn't fraught with real tensions in a whole lot of problems. As a result, Torah can speak to both difficult relationships and difficulties in relationships with a relevance that is almost surprising. One moment in particular is of use for our purposes, an example of one of the failures in the relationship between God and Israel. During our time in the desert we didn't eat food, per se. We ate manna, which was both quite good and easy to collect. No matter how much time one spent harvesting it, everyone would gather the same amount. The first question to ask, for the purposes of our metaphor, is why manna in the first place? It does not seem, from the biblical sources, that God had any concern about providing regular food. What was the point of the manna? Here's the Torah’s response: “And God said to Moshe, ‘Behold I will rain down bread for you from the sky, and the people shall go out and gather each day that day's portion—that I may test them, to see whether they will follow my instructions or not.’ (Exodus 16:4). There were definitely some who were not satisfied with the situation: (Numbers 11:4-6). God was not pleased with this complaint, and eventually fed the people so much meat that they choked on it. What was the problem? Why was the desire for variety such an anathema? I understand manna as the symbol of the early romance between God and the Jewish people. Manna is both real and not real, like early infatuation. The thing about manna was that you didn't have to work for it; it existed in the same amount no matter how much you invested in collecting it, and it was meant to be replaced by the harvest once Israel made it into the Promised Land. (Deuteronomy 25). Manna hinted at the promise of a fuller relationship, one that was built on work and a mutual covenant, but one that had not yet been realized. Israelites couldn't figure this out. When the newness and novelty of the manna began to fade, they made a double mistake. First, they idealized their life before the covenant with God, “We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leaks, the onions, and the garlic.” This of course was ridiculous--the life of slavery that they endured had a high price, whether or not their slave masters required them to pay for their food. Second, they weren't able to realize what the manna represented--a honeymoon, as it were--and that the substance for which they were looking required a deeper commitment, not a lesser one. As the mistake was doubled, so was the lesson: In order to protect our partners and ourselves, and in order to allow the possibilities to play out, we have to be able to be patient with the uncertainty of our relationships, be that expressed through boredom, infatuation, or doubt. Both realizing other relationships and expecting more from a relationship we have than that connection is ready to provide are ways of being impatient with what we've got, as the Israelites were impatient with manna. (By Scott Perlo)