My grandmother believed exactly two forces ran the universe: God, and her chicken soup. Everything else — weather, presidents, the stock market — was details.
So when I asked her, at age nine, how she met my grandfather, she gave me one word: “Bashert.” Then she went back to peeling potatoes as if that settled the matter. In her kitchen, it did.
It took me another sixty years to figure out what she meant. This is my attempt to save you the sixty years.
What Does Bashert Mean, Exactly?
Bashert (pronounced bah-SHAIRT) is a Yiddish word that means “destined” or “meant to be.” When someone asks what does bashert mean, the short answer is: it’s the person — or the thing, or the moment — that was assigned to you before you ever showed up to claim it.
Most people use it for one thing: a soulmate. Your bashert is the one you were supposed to find, the way a sock eventually finds its match in the laundry. Sometimes it takes a few loads. Sometimes the match turns out to be a slightly different shade of brown than you expected. You wear them anyway, and after a while you can’t remember them apart.
But bashert is bigger than romance. A missed train that put you next to your future business partner? Bashert. The house that fell through so the better one could find you? Also bashert. It is the Jewish way of saying the universe has a filing system, even if the filing looks, from where you’re standing, like a mess on the floor.
Forty Days Before You Were Born
The Talmud has a line about this that I love. Forty days before a child is formed, a voice calls out from heaven and announces: this one’s daughter will marry that one’s son.
Forty days before you were born. Before you had a name, a nose, or an opinion about anything, somebody upstairs had already filled out your paperwork.
The mystics took this idea and ran with it — I write about that side of things in my Kabbalah Kronicles, where the rabbis argue and I take notes. They taught that a soul comes down to this world split in half, and spends a lifetime looking for the other piece. Which explains a great deal, if you think about it. It explains why the wrong person feels like a shoe on the wrong foot, and why the right person feels like coming into a warm kitchen after shoveling snow.
My grandmother never studied Kabbalah. She just knew where the soup was.
How My Grandparents Actually Met
Now, the full story — the one I got at nineteen, not nine — is less mystical.
My grandfather was supposed to be introduced to my grandmother’s cousin Rivka. A matchmaker had arranged the whole thing. He showed up at the apartment on a Tuesday with a box of chocolates and his one good tie, and Rivka wasn’t home. She’d gone to her sister’s with a toothache.
My grandmother answered the door. She was flour up to the elbows — Tuesday was bread day — and the whole hallway smelled like yeast and onions frying in schmaltz. She looked at this skinny man holding chocolates like a subpoena, and she said, “Rivka’s not here. You want to wait, you can peel.”
He peeled. Fifty-one years, he peeled.
When I asked my grandfather if he believed it was bashert, he shrugged and said, “I believe in Rivka’s toothache.” Which, I have come to understand, is the same answer. Bashert doesn’t always arrive with trumpets. Sometimes it arrives with a toothache and a potato peeler.
Bashert Is Not the Same as Easy
Here is where people get the word wrong, and where a lot of perfectly good marriages get in trouble.
People think “meant to be” means “effortless.” They think if you find your bashert, the two of you will glide through life like a pair of figure skaters, never once dropping each other on the ice.
My grandparents fought. Not often, but memorably — a door here, a Yiddish word there that I was told meant “stubborn” but I suspect meant something stronger. And yet every night his tea was poured before he asked, and every winter her boots were by the radiator before the first snow, warmed and waiting.
That’s the part nobody tells you. Bashert isn’t the absence of work. It’s the presence of a reason to do the work. Heaven makes the introduction — the rest is peeling potatoes, every Tuesday, for fifty-one years.
I wrote a whole book about a family finding out that love and faith take work — you can find The Rabbi’s Daughter, The Rabbi’s Son in my shop if you’d like the long version with a plot.
When Bashert Seems to Get It Wrong
And what about when it doesn’t work out? What about the divorces, the heartbreaks, the ones who never find anybody? Is the filing system broken?
I asked a rabbi this once — a small man with enormous eyebrows who answered every question by first sighing like a teakettle. He said, “Zalman, bashert is not a guarantee. It’s an invitation. God sends the invitation. Plenty of people don’t open the mail.”
I’ve chewed on that for years. Some invitations we lose. Some we open too late. Some we open, attend the party, and behave so badly we’re asked to leave. Free will and destiny are business partners — destiny brings the merchandise, free will runs the register.
And sometimes — my grandmother again — the plan is bigger than the piece of it you can see. “You don’t complain about the soup,” she said, “until you’ve tasted the whole pot.” She said this holding a wooden spoon, which made it less a proverb and more a warning.
A Grandfather’s Field Guide to Spotting Your Bashert
People ask me how you know. As if I know. But I’ve been watching couples for seventy years — at weddings, at funerals, in waiting rooms — and I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed, free of charge.
Your bashert is not the person who makes your heart race. Racing hearts are cheap; a good scare on the highway will give you one. Your bashert is the person who makes your shoulders drop. You don’t perform. You exhale.
It’s the person you can be silent with. My grandparents could sit through an entire Sunday afternoon without a word — him with the paper, her with the mending, the clock ticking like a metronome for an orchestra of nobody talking — and it was the fullest room I’ve ever stood in.
And it’s the person who shows up on the wrong Tuesday and stays to peel. Watch what a person does when the plan falls apart. The wrong one checks their watch. The right one rolls up their sleeves.
The Word My Grandmother Was Actually Saying
Near the end of her life, I asked my grandmother one more time: did she really believe God matched her with Grandpa, forty days before they were born?
She thought about it longer than I expected. Then she said, “I believe when I look back, it couldn’t have been anybody else. Forward, who knows. Backward — bashert.”
That’s the truest thing anyone has told me about destiny. Looking forward, life is guesswork and toothaches. Looking backward, it reads like it was written by somebody who knew the ending — and every wrong turn was a plot point.
So that’s what bashert means. Not magic. Not a guarantee. Just the strange, warm suspicion — usually confirmed in a kitchen — that you are exactly where the paperwork said you’d be.
If this made you think of somebody, go tell them. And if you’d like more stories like this one, I keep a shelf of free Jewish stories and another of inspirational stories on the house — and if you want me telling them out loud, there’s the Kabbalah You CD in the shop. My grandmother would tell you to take the soup too, but that part you’ll have to make yourself.