Bashert: Does God Destine a Spouse for You?

Remember that post about the Jewish teaching that reunites the husband and wife in the next life — the idea that a soul splits into two at birth and comes back together after death. That post came into existence because of some friends of mine whose first marriage was genuinely hard, but they found that the second one was the real thing. And it led us into that question asking if there’s a “primary” spouse in the next world, is it really the one who loved you best, or just whoever got there first?

Turns out, Judaism has a separate teaching — this one has nothing to do with the afterlife — that answers a version of the same question, and it’s a lot more forgiving. Cue the word Bashert!

What Bashert Actually Means

Bashert is a Yiddish word (not Hebrew) that means something close to “destined” or “meant to be.” It’s the word Jewish friends reach for when they talk about a soulmate — the person that Abba destined for you as a spouse.

It’s a different question entirely from the “two halves of one soul” being reunited after death idea from last time. That one is about eternity, but Bashert is about now.

Forty Days Before You Were Even Formed

The idea traces back to the Talmud, where one sage said that forty days before an embryo is even formed, a heavenly voice announces whose daughter will marry whom. Your match, in other words, is being sorted out before you exist. Really, is a shidduch even necessary?

The Torah itself never uses the word bashert, but the story most often pointed to as its seed is Isaac and Rebecca in Genesis 24. Abraham is old and sends his servant Eliezer traveling to find a wife for Isaac. Eliezer prayed for a very specific sign, and Rebecca showed up and meeting it precisely. It reads like providence working through very ordinary circumstances, or as we call it, a match made in heaven. This is basically what bashert claims is happening for everyone, all the time, whether we notice it or not. (If you’re the one currently praying over who that person might be for you, here’s how to continue praying for your future spouse.)

Destiny Doesn’t Mean Easy

Here’s what the tradition doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that finding your bashert guarantees an easy marriage, love at first sight, or that you won’t ever argue — or even that you won’t get divorced. There’s a saying that goes with this same passage in the Talmud, that matching two people is as hard for God as splitting the Red Sea. Predestined doesn’t mean simple. It means the harder work of an actual marriage still has to happen after the match is made.

It also doesn’t mean fast. If your bashert exists somewhere and you just haven’t found each other yet, that gap is still a waiting season, with all the discomfort that comes with one. But it’s important to learn how to stay content while you wait.

Not every rabbi takes the whole theory of bashert at face value, either. Some are worried it turns marriage into a fatalistic search for one perfect person rather than a covenant two people choose to build.

What About the Ones We Miss?

But finding your bashert isn’t guaranteed just because the match exists somewhere. If human choice matters — and it clearly does in Jewish thought — then what happens when someone makes the wrong choice, or circumstances prevent the expected match? Some interpretations leave room for precisely that possibility.

The door doesn’t slam shut when that happens. The match is described as being made available, not forced, which leaves room for a first marriage to genuinely not have been it, and a second one to be.

So where does that leave us?

This reiterates what the afterlife version of this teaching says in some ways. In the “two halves of a soul” framework, the primary bond defaults to whoever came first, unless they were divorced; but leaves many questions for widows and widowers. The idea of bashert is similar in some sense. It doesn’t care what came first. It cares about what was actually real.

I don’t know if I believe in the heavenly voice announcing these details literally. But as a Christian, I’ve always loved the idea of a convergence that was destined by heaven. And I like that Jewish tradition leaves room for both a destiny you can miss and a second chance when you do.

And Then I Think About Adam and Eve

When God put Adam to sleep and created Eve, didn’t he create the first bashert ever? I don’t think Genesis gives us permission to say that God literally split Adam’s soul in two so that one would only be happy when they found the other. But as a Christian reading the story, I can’t help seeing an echo of this idea.

And didn’t Abba create the longing in Adam for Eve long before Adam ever knew she could even exist? Genesis 2:20 says, “But for Adam no suitable helper was found”. And in Genesis 2:23, Adam calls Eve “bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh”. Isn’t that reminiscent of bashert – the belief that God, our Heavenly Father, created a love for you before you even existed? If God is the God who knows us before we are formed (Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:16) and who created us for relationship, why couldn’t the same divine providence of bashert extend to our own stories of love?

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