Yismach Articles
Stories, Insights & Guidance for the Shidduch Journey
Fear Arrives After the Danger Leaves
A shadchan calls on Thursday. The date was Monday. Both of them said it went well on the way out. Now one of them will not pick up the phone, and the...
The Wrong Question
The first call comes in on a Tuesday at eleven at night. A mother, trying to sound calm and not quite managing it, tells the shadchan her daughter...
How to Make Your Next First Date Your Last First Date
Chassidim do not go on first dates. They never have. The boy goes to the girl’s house, they sit across from each other for a few minutes — parents in...
Derech Eretz
The Gemara in Sotah makes two statements about marriage that appear to contradict each other. The first: forty days before a child is formed in the...
The Wrong Map
There is a woman who hasn't slept through the night in four years. The doctors have given her the diagnosis. She has completed the workbooks,...
The Stage No One Teaches
On the part of the shidduch process that nobody names — and where most good ones are lostThe dates were going well. Not dramatic. Nobody uses the...
Strange Attractors
On the science of connection — and why the system gets it wrong The “where is this going?” conversation rarely ends well. Everyone knows this....
A Language for What Is Actually Happening
“Something felt off.” Three words. No information. And yet the shidduch ends. Not because the feeling was wrong — something did feel off — but...
Six Channels of Fear
he classical view held that fear was one thing. It registered, it hurt, you fled or froze. A single system, measurable by a single instrument,...
WHY EIGHT? CAUSE IT IS A MIRACLE
Eight meetings with the same person, without the escape hatch of nexting, will surface things. Not just about the other person. About yourself. By...
They Need You to Stay Single
Shidduchim is not a dating method. It is not one approach among several. For religious Jews, it is the way marriages are supposed to happen. A...
The Chaos Inside the No
Somewhere between the first phone call and the panicked text to the shadchan saying "I just don't think it's for me," something happened. Nobody can...
What Fear Knows About Love
What Fear Knows About Love Two new books from Prof. Shmuel Neumann — one on the quantum physics of fear, one on the quantum physics of love — arrive...
Fear: Chaos and a Quantum State
The Mathematics of the Unpredictable Chaos theory was not invented to explain fear. It emerged from meteorology, when a scientist named Edward Lorenz...
Fear Seen Through the Lens of Chaos and Quantum Mechanics
A siren blares. You run into the shelter. You sit on a plastic chair or a concrete floor and you wait, and the people around you are quiet in the...
Two Needs That Cannot Coexist — Yet Must
On the first Friday afternoon after their wedding, the apartment is still half-camp and half-home. Cardboard boxes lean against the wall like...
COMMON SENSE IS FOR COMMONERS
he person who has thought most carefully about what they want in a spouse has usually been looking the longest. This is not a coincidence. It is the...
COUNTERINTUITIVE DATING
You Don’t Know What You Want Researchers gave people a form. They filled it out carefully, describing in precise detail the qualities they wanted in...
WHEN IS GOOD ENOUGH GOOD ENOUGH
Most couples, decades into a marriage, are not in the grip of the feeling that characterized their early months together. What they have instead is...
The Play Date Protocol
Yismach matched you based on your Love Map — your relational patterns, not just your preferences. Tonight you will practice the skills that determine...
The Stories of Sefer Derech Eretz
Sefer Derech Eretz is a 490-page compilation of Torah law, philosophy, and ethical teaching on shidduchim and marriage. Running through it, embedded...
The Face You Already Know
Someone lies down, closes her eyes, and a voice asks her to go back. Back before this life. Back to whoever she was before. She's looking for one...
Nesting
The drive to nest is not a preference. It is not a cultural expectation. It is not something your mother installed in you over Shabbos meals. It is...
Nexting
Saying no to a shidduch suggestion is a reflex. Everyone in shidduchim wants the same thing. They want to find the person they’re supposed to build a...
THE DECISION POINT PROBLEM
Why shidduchim fail at the gates—and what a system without gates looks like Every relationship that has ever worked began gradually. Not with a...
Shidduchim is a Meet Market
George Akerlof won the Nobel Prize in Economics for an insight that applies, almost perfectly, to shidduchim. His 1970 paper — “The Market for...
Yismach AI-Facilitated Play Date
Every approach the community has tried — mixers, speed dating, resume-based matching, workshops — fails at the same point. Each one gets two people...
The Agony and the Ecstasy
It is told of R’ Naftali of Ropshitz that whenever he was invited to serve as mesader kiddushin, he would not go out to the chuppah until he saw the...
The Blind Spot
Why the shidduch system can’t see 80% of the people in it — and what the data says you should do instead
Trials and Tribulations
Rava teaches in Shabbos 31a: when a person departs from this world and is brought before the Beis Din shel Maalah for judgment, they are asked six...
Shidduchim Versus Everything Else
Why the oldest matchmaking system in the Western world still outperforms everything built to replace it The Chassidic world has no shidduch crisis....
The Art of Dating
What nobody teaches you before your first date — or your fiftieth. Let me describe a typical date. Two people sit across from each other. Both are...
The Great Error
Four hundred years ago, in the city of Hebron, a kabbalist sat down to write about marriage — and opened with an accusation. Rav Avraham Azulai,...
No Soulmates Today
Rav Mordecai Eliyahu's granddaughter reports that he told her something that upends everything the shidduch world assumes: today, there are no...
WHAT THEY CALL AI ISN'T AI
Everyone's claiming AI now. Open any shidduch platform's website and the buzzwords are everywhere—"AI-powered matching," "intelligent algorithms,"...
MATCHLESS
We use the word matchless as the highest compliment. A matchless beauty. A matchless talent. A matchless soul. The word means there is no equal,...
Why This One
"Trust me" is not an answer. A shadchan calls with a name. You ask the obvious question: why this person? What makes you think we'd be good together?...
The Problem of Seeing in the Fog
There is a moment that comes after every date—sometimes on the drive home, sometimes lying in bed at two in the morning—when the question arrives:...
ANOTHER YISMACH AI FEATURE: THE MIRROR
A deep dive into the gap between what you say you want and what the data says you actually attract. You have a picture in your head. You've carried...
YISMACH AI FEATURE - BECOMMING REAL
Shidduch resumes reduce real people to flat lists of facts, stripping away personality, depth, and lived experience. Yismach uses AI to gather...
Why Traditional Algorithms Fail at Shidduchim-And What Real AI Innovation Looks Like
When people hear that a shidduch organization uses "AI," they usually picture something familiar: the same kind of recommendation engine that powers...
INTRODUCING YISMACH AI
The shidduch system is broken in ways everyone feels but no one has fixed. Singles wait months without suggestions—not because they're unmatchable,...
The Divine Imperitives
The Torah Commandments That Build Every Marriage There is something extraordinary that happens when two people stand beneath a chuppah. In that...
Set in Stone
A Rav once told his talmidim something that stunned them: "You can marry anyone - as long as you both follow halacha." I found it hard to believe...
Dignity Above All
When we built Yismach, I knew we needed something different. I met with Rav Chaim Walkin, zt"l, before we even launched, and he told me something...
TRUST VIOLATED
One of the ugliest habits creeping into shidduchim today happens the second a suggestion is made. Instead of holding it with the respect and privacy...
WRESTLING WITH YOUR OWN DEMONS
The fiercest battle in shidduchim is not the one we can point to. It is not résumés flooding WhatsApp groups, not mixers that blur into confusion,...
Shidduch Resume: The Solution that Became the Problem
It was supposed to help. The résumé was meant to organize, to simplify, to widen the pool. But what began as a tool has become a trap. Instead of...
DATING LIKE A GOLEM
Everyone thinks they have Chochmas HaPartzuf—that they can tell from the person’s face not only their character but, more importantly, whether they...
A TIME TO LOVE
Love doesn’t test you only while dating, or under the chuppah, or in those golden hours when the compliments flow easily and laughter feels endless....
The Horrific Reality: Anguish and Misconduct in Shidduchim - A Demand for Accountability
“Soon by you." These three words, though often uttered with seeming kindness, are nothing short of a devastating blow to Jewish singles. Each...
Knowing the Image You Project
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. People see you differently than you see yourself. In shidduchim, this...
As Good as it Gets
It is not love It is a negotiation. Marriages that start off or degenerate into transactional relationships will never be mutually satisfying and not...
Speed Dating: Fast Lane to Nowhere
Speed dating, masquerading as an efficient way to find love, presents a theater of hurried interactions and superficial proclamations. Yet, beneath...
Love Hurts
Marriages Built on Quicksand Marriages built on American values are doomed.
Shidduch Date Place: There is no Place Like Home
Where is it written that a yeshiva bochur is obligated to pay a hotel for drinks or a restaurant for a meal, and taxi to take her home?
TO BE or NOT TO BE What You Were Born to BE
The concept that gender is neutral is being strongly promoted and enforced, with government forms required to be gender-neutral in America and...
Sammy's Inferno
Herded like cattle headed to the slaughter. This is how I felt on the way to an event where hopefully, I will meet my one and only. When I got there,...
It is Only with the Heart that One Sees Rightly
Use your head to narrow down the possibilities. Use your heart to recognize your one and only. That sentence sounds like a greeting card. It is...
Mindfulness Causes Lovelessness
Mindfulness has today become sacrosanct. This newfound dogma of mindfulness has become an axiomatic self-evident truth. It is neither self-evident...
What's in a Name? Who you are compatible with!
The Torah tells us that Adam named all the animals. The Torah tells us that names were changed; Avrom to Avroham, Sari to ...
Protocols of Shidduchim
We live our lives distorting reality, at least to some extent, to the way we want it to be, not the way it is. Nowhere is this more salient, as in...
Negative Information that a Reference May, May Not, or Must Reveal
Rabbi Yisrael Gans, Rosh Yeshiva of Kol Torah, explains what a reference is permitted to say, is prohibited to say, or is obligated to say.
Shadchan Fee
A Shadchan is entitled to a fee by Jewish Law. In Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat, Jewis...
America's Secret War Against Marriage
ANTI-MARRIAGE MANIFESTO The famous 19th century socialist Robert Owen included the family, along with marriage a...
A Shadchan’s Perspective on the Shidduch Crisis
Much ink has been spilled about the shidduch crisis, with much of it pointing an accusatory finger at the singles themselves for their single state....
Yismach Uses Today’s Tools to Reinforce the Old-Fashioned Time Tested Shidduch System
Yismach was launched to perpetuate the old fashioned, well established shidduch system. Yismach was created as an aid to the established, recognized...