Alef: The NEXT Conversation
Getting Into Ketubahs
by Arielle Angel
I got into ketubahs quite by accident. In 2009, fresh off a year-long artist residency in South Carolina, a family friend asked me to create the ketubah for their wedding. I knew vaguely what a ketubah was—a decorative Jewish marriage contract—but I had never considered that I had something to bring to the tradition.
I met with the couple several times before the wedding and worked with them to come up with a concept. On their wedding day, I was privileged enough to be in the small room where they signed the ketubah—my creation—uniting them as husband and wife, according to Jewish law.
It was a moving experience. After years of art school spent debating about whether or not art had moved too far away from the general population, here I was watching one of my artworks serving not just a useful, but a beautiful purpose. I knew at that moment that the couple would cherish this work of art as a symbol of their marriage for years to come.
Word got out in my network that I had made a ketubah, and friends and friends of friends began asking me to make theirs. At the time, I was working at an art non-profit in Manhattan alongside Maya Joseph-Goteiner. In addition to her work at the foundation, Maya was focused on curating, and helping artists market their talents using social media. She recognized an opportunity in my budding ketubah business to involve a network of fine artists to apply their talents to ketubah-making.
As soon as I heard the idea, I knew it was a good one. It seemed that the reason people were coming to me was precisely because I was NOT a ketubah-maker. It only took a few minutes on the internet to see that the ketubah tradition—once defined by intricate, handmade works of art—had grown stale. The same intertwined pastel trees and watercolor Jerusalems crowded every website. People were looking for something different, something that reflected their values and their tastes. People were looking for something thoroughly modern, for contemporary works of art.
Maya and I quit our day jobs and started working full time on Ketuv. We had a few central goals:
- To recruits artists with dynamic careers outside the Judaica and commercial spheres and encourage them to apply their studio practice directly to a ketubah.
- To provide inclusive text options that took into account the diversity of the Jewish people, whether they be observant, interfaith, secular or non-denominational, same-sex, or even simply influenced by the Jewish tradition.
One of our artists brought this quote by Joseph Campbell to our attention: “In an effort to keep tradition a living experience for the community it serves, every generation produces innovators who reinterpret the common principles upon which it rests; in doing so more innovative ways of accomplishing the same outcomes are established.”
We hope that by moving the aesthetics of the ketubah tradition forward, Ketuv can encourage people to hold on to this meaningful tradition.
Photo provided by the author.
What Comes First?
By Yocheved Sidof
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? What about love or sex? In my life, Love came first; or so I thought…
I grew up in a tightly knit Chassidic community in the Midwest, the first-born child of Iranian immigrants. I was raised with a lot of rules. Some were religiously influenced and others were cultural, but one of the big rules – NO Boys – fell equally into both categories: big-time religious and cultural no-no’s. According to the laws of Tzniut (modesty), boys and girls are separated from a very young age. There is very little socializing, and absolutely no touching, between opposite genders in strict Orthodox communities. (These laws are meant to sensitize us to the power of attraction and the sanctity of sexuality). That aside, there was no way my parents would let their Persian Princess be swept off her feet too easily; it just wouldn’t fly.
I came to New York City at the vulnerable age of seventeen to attend Stern College for Women. It was my first independent foray into this crazy “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” (Sorry, I couldn’t resist). Suddenly, I was surrounded by tons of women who were hanging out with guys, dating, looking for The One. My friends covered the whole spectrum: some dated without touching their partners at all, while others slept with their boyfriends. I fell somewhere in the middle. (Don’t tell my parents.) As I searched for my soulmate, I had one big rule – I would only have sex with my husband.
The issues of touch and sexuality were never so clear-cut for me. My convictions were totally in-line with my upbringing, but it was hard to hold stead-fast when there were so many pressures to deal with. Then, after years of tumultuous relationships and broken hearts, I met my man. We shared common interests, common values, and common goals, but we never shared a bed; we wanted our intimate life to begin as a committed, married couple.
We both believed in the sanctity of sex, and wanted to express that union of body and soul only within the context of a committed marriage. Sure it’s a risk (we all know the ‘test-drive a car’ analogy), but it was a risk we felt was worth taking.
I’m directing a documentary called Can’t Touch This, about the laws surrounding premarital intimacy in Judaism, i.e. Shomer Negiah. We have on-camera interviews with Rabbis, sex therapists, psychologists, and educators, and most importantly, hours of honest conversation with people who grapple with this question almost everyday: What is the interplay between religion and sex? How, if at all, does a person’s belief in G-d inform his or her sexual choices?
For one of my favorite shoots we traipsed to Times Square, camera in tow, to get some man-on-the-street interviews. Under the tantalizing billboards of scantily-clad men and women, we asked our fellow New Yorkers questions about sexuality, such as: How often do you think about sex? How did you learn about sex? What is meaningful touch? If in a relationship, how long would you wait to have sex? One honest man offered this take on building sexual compatibility: “If you have the mental chemistry, and you’re hitting it off, I believe the sex can be just as exciting. It just has to be… nurtured. And I just have not been lucky enough to find someone with that kind of patience. We live in a fast food society, fast sex, everything is fast. I don’t have time to practice with you. We’ve got to get it right the first or second time, or I’ve got to move on.”
I didn’t decide to marry my husband based on our sexual compatibility, how great he is in bed, or how quickly we each learned the other’s desires… I didn’t have any idea how we’d vibe together as a sexual couple. We formed our shared sexual identity as a married couple, and that created a beautiful, yet very vulnerable, sense of intimacy. Love and sex were woven together in a cycle, allowing each to nurture the other. It definitely wasn’t seamless, but I knew that even if our intimate life wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t at risk of losing him–he truly loves me for me, and not for how adept I may be in bed. We would work through the rough patches, and commit ourselves to gratifying each other–not for sex’s sake, but for love’s.
And you know what? That man-on-the-street is right. We do have unrealistic expectations about sexual gratification. Popular media totally misleads us about how sexual compatibility is formed. It’s not instantaneous. Nobody has ‘great sex’ right away. It takes time, practice, sensitivity, commitment … and a whole lot of love.
…
This post originally appeared on Alef October 22, 2010.
Yocheved Sidof is a photographer, filmmaker, and teacher who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She and her husband Yossi are the proud parents of Reuven Uriyah, 4 years old, Ma’ayan Chaya, 2 and a half, and Tzofia Malka, 3 months.
Photo provided by the author.
A Pre-Wedding Dip
by Michelle Fish
Twenty-nine years ago, my grandmother took my mom to the mikvah to prepare her for her upcoming marriage. My mother tells the story of my grandmother shooing my father away from her following her visit to the mikvah and refusing to let my parents embrace until they were under the chuppah.
With this story always planted in the back of my head, I thought I’d go to the mikvah before I got married myself. I never learned the details of why you really go, what you do, or when you go, but figured, my mother went, so I should too.
The months leading up to our wedding, I learned the beauty and power of going to the mikvah from our rabbi’s wife. She answered all the unsolved questions I had, so a few weeks before I traveled home to get married, I called up the local Chabad mikvah and made my appointment.
Our wedding was on a Sunday and I arrived home on Tuesday knowing that my appointment was to be on Thursday night. Those few days were filled with wedding errands; I was so busy that I kept having to remind myself the wedding was THAT weekend. After almost a year of planning, it just didn’t seem real. Everyone kept telling me you better believe that it’s real! There were no pre-wedding jitters, it just hadn’t sunk in.
Thursday evening came and with all my preparations completed, my mom and I drove to the mikvah. We had never been to this one and when we arrived, we couldn’t find the entrance. There was a set of stairs on the side of the building, which lead to a basement door. The stairs looked too deserted to be the entrance, so we kept looking around. A woman who had dropped her husband off to daven was driving away and I flagged her down to ask if she knew. She pointed to the mysterious set of stairs. So down we went, and just as I was reaching for the doorbell, the windowless door swung open! Hello! Are you here for the mikvah? Said the 20-something year-old lady. She swooped us inside and I immediately thought: This is awesome. It’s like a secret society!
I waited my turn, went into the mikvah and when I came out, I was absolutely amazed. My mindset completely changed. I was ready to get married. There was no magic dust sprinkled over me, I said the blessing myself, but something clicked. I felt an amazing sense of separation from my engaged self, to my almost-married self and felt connected to millions of women who also take part in this custom.
Going to the mikvah is an extremely personal decision, but of all the advice I could give to a Jewish bride, it would be to go. Go to the mikvah because there is something that changes your life from past to present. The hour before I went, I was a someone’s fiance and now I was ready to be someone’s bride. Following the mikvah, my mom and I had to make yet another wedding errand- a stop at Kinko’s. Not exactly the place one goes to rejoice, and yet I had the biggest smile on my face. It was here, our wedding was here, I was getting married THIS weekend.
Photo by Jenifer Morris of Freed Photography, Inc.
Dating Jewish Men
This post originally appeared on Alef on February 10, 2010.
Emily and Sarah are twenty-something Jewish women living in New York City. In spite of the odds, their love of Judaism has not translated into a love of Jewish men.
…
Growing up, did your families impose expectations that you should marry Jewish?
Sarah: I think my parents always wanted me to marry a good person. The focus was never on the person’s religion. My father was Catholic when he married my mom (he later converted to Judaism), so it would have been hypocritical for them to pressure me into a Jewish marriage.
Emily: My mom wasn’t Jewish when she met my dad, so my parents were in sort of an opposite situation. She converted before they were married and my brothers and I were raised secularly so there was no discussion at all of religion playing a part in who I decided to be with.
Have your respective family situations affected your dating histories?
Sarah: I haven’t been in a serious relationship with any Jewish guys. In college, I dated a tall, skinny redhead from the suburbs of Milwaukee – definitely not Jewish. Later on, I dated another tall, skinny redhead (I guess I have a “type”) from rural Minnesota – also not Jewish. I thought we might end up staying together for a long time, and he was fine with the fact that I wanted to have a Jewish family. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always wondered if I could raise a Jewish family if my partner wasn’t Jewish. But since my mom did, I thought I could too.
I did date two Jewish guys casually in between relationships, but it never got serious.
Now, I’m single…
What’s your number?
Sarah: …
Just kidding…[smiles; scratches chin; looks away] Right…So Emily, what about you?
Emily: I’ve only been in two serious relationships in my life. I suppose I know what I don’t want when I see it and tend to shut it down as soon as I know it wont work.
My two brief experiences with Jewish men, incidentally, both ended badly. One of them dumped me after a couple weeks of casual dating to immediately begin pursuing my roommate, the other led me to believe he wanted an emotional relationship when all he wanted was a physical one.
My first serious boyfriend was Albanian, Eastern Orthodox, and knew very little about Judaism. Even though the relationship lasted almost two years, we always knew that the difference in religion was going to have a detrimental effect on us. He was happy to celebrate Chanukah and Passover with me, but his ideological issues with some aspects of Judaism gave him cause to debate me on several occasions.
My second real relationship is only just beginning, and although he has one Jewish grandparent, he too was raised with little knowledge of the religion.
Does his Jewish ancestry make you feel any different about him?
Emily: I think what’s more important to me is that he isn’t tied to a religious philosophy that I fundamentally disagree with.
How, if at all, do you want Judaism to play a role in your current relationship?
Emily: I hope that he understands and appreciates it as a part of who I am. We already share the same set of values, regardless of our religious upbringings, so that’s not an issue. I want him to be willing to celebrate with me when I am moved to celebrate.
Sarah: If I fall in love and marry someone who isn’t Jewish, this is how I would want it to be too.
Sarah, so why do you think you’ve mostly dated non-Jewish guys?
Sarah: I really don’t know why I’ve dated mostly non-Jews–they just happen to have been people I’ve been drawn to. As I get older, I’m starting to think it’s more important for me to intentionally date Jewish guys, since I want to marry a Jewish man eventually.
This is a challenging situation. It feels wrong not to date someone I like just because he isn’t Jewish. But I’m also at the age when, any day, I could meet the person I eventually end up marrying.
Have you ever put yourself in a situation where you could be intentionally meeting or dating a Jewish guy?
Sarah: I’m cringing at this question, because the answer is “no.” Outside of work, few of my friends are Jewish, so I’m rarely in a situation where I meet Jewish guys.
I don’t really want to join a synagogue. I’m not interested in meat-market mixers. Should I join J-Date? That doesn’t sound all that appealing either…I think I’ve been hoping that I’ll randomly meet a Jewish guy someday. I live in New York City, so there’s a good chance it could happen.
So who do you want to end up with?
Sarah: I want to marry someone Jewish, have a Jewish household and Jewish children. I’m not at all religious, but I love being Jewish. It would seem tragic to me for my children to not be a part of such a rich tradition.
Emily, what about you? Who do you want to end up with and why?
Emily: One thing you said [Sarah] really resonated with me: I’m not at all religious, but I love being Jewish. I once found myself excitedly describing Shabbat to my current boyfriend as if I were a five-year-old on Christmas morning. At the same time, and after lots of consideration, I’ve decided that I don’t need to be married to a Jewish person to live the kind of Jewish life that I want for myself.
Being the product of a mixed marriage myself, I know that it can be difficult to impart some of the traditions on your children when both parents are not Jewish, but I also found that, being in that situation, I was able to find and choose Judaism for myself.
Sarah: I liked what you said about how having parents from different backgrounds led you to “find and choose Judaism for yourself.” I wonder if the same thing happened to me as a result of growing up in a mixed household. They say that children of intermarriage generally aren’t raised with a strong sense of Jewish identity, but you and I seem to be exceptions to that rule.
Emily: If only there were a formula!
Photo by CarbonNYC, licensed under Creative Commons. Heart photo by easyrab, also licensed under Creative Commons.
The Officianator
by Ruvym Gilman
When Tom suggested we grab a drink so that he could “ask me something,” the first thing that came to mind was that he had a legal question. Before I even got my law degree in 2006, people had been asking me for legal advice and prepping me for an anticipated onslaught of litigation.
“Ah, a lawyer,” one of my parents’ friends said when he heard that I was in law school. “So that means you can bail me out if I ever get in trouble, eh?” he asked as he jabbed me mischievously with his elbow.
“Yeah,” I wanted to say, “that’s why I’m bothering with this whole law gig – so I can help keep you out of prison when you get caught for your involvement in the black market beluga trade.”
Tom was already at the bar when I got there, playing with his new iPad and sipping a beer. I got myself a drink and we sat there for a few minutes bantering about the day.
“This thing really isn’t all that great,” he told me, gesturing to the iPad.
“So what is it you wanted to ask me?” I cut to the chase, prepping myself for a landlord-tenant dispute.
“Well,” he began, “I talked it over with Kaira and we were wondering if you’d be willing to marry us?”
“Marry you?”
“Yeah, like run the wedding ceremony, that whole deal.”
“Me?” I fumbled, trying to make sense of the request. “Sure,” I said eventually. “I’d be honored.”
Because, really, what else can you say if someone asks you to officiate their wedding?
I met Tom a few years earlier during a Passover seder. I was there by way of invitation from a girl I met at a Starbucks while studying for the Bar exam. Tom was there, along with his sister, by way of invitation from another lady friend.
For sure I thought that this guy, with his wavy hair, trimmed beard, square glasses, and prominent nose, was Jewish.
“Italian,” he said, “but I grew up on Long Island, so its kind of the same thing.”
We stayed in touch for a while after the seder, but as tends to happen in NYC when you’re young and have a million things pulling you in different directions, we lost touch. We were friends on Facebook, if that means anything, but we didn’t actually cross paths until a couple of years later when I spotted Tom on the subway with Kaira. The two of them had just gotten engaged.
By some weird twist of fate that had thrown us together for Passover, then reconnected us on a late-night F-train journey, and even decided to place us in nearby apartments, I was now officiating this guy’s wedding.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but be concerned – for Tom’s sake, for Kaira’s sake – that they were making a mistake. Sure, as neighbors we’d gotten much closer, but of all the people they had to choose from, I couldn’t imagine being the best person for the job.
“You speak good,” Tom reassured me. “And you’re a lawyer. Makes it feel more official.”
“It should be official. You’re getting married.”
“I know, that’s why I said it.”
“What about the religion thing?”
“What about it? We want the wedding to be nondenominational, so it doesn’t matter.”
“But I’m Jewish.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you.”
“So I can throw in some Jewish philosophizing then? Spice things up a little?”
“Whatever makes you happy.”
I prepped for the wedding for several weeks, exchanging drafts of what I planned to say with Kaira, who took the lead in communicating with me about what sort of ceremony they wanted.
When the wedding was still months away, it didn’t feel real, it was just some nondescript day in the distant future. But as it got closer I started to panic, it was like “this is really happening!” You would have thought I was the one getting married.
All I could think about during the night preceding the wedding and on the afternoon of the wedding day was the ways in which I might mess up. I’ve been to weddings where the person officiating is so awful that he starts getting death stares from the parents’ of the bride and groom during the ceremony. Then, after the botched affair is finally over, you turn to the person sitting next to you and, wide-eyed, whisper, “what the hell was that?” Sure, the couple is married even if the ceremony sucks, and hopefully they’ll go on to have many blissful years together, but no one ever forgets how terribly it all went down.
“Don’t screw this up!” someone jovially tells me and slaps me on the back while I’m at the bar with a glass of wine, going over my notes. They have, of course, been dampened thanks to an unexpected rain shower. I force a smile and proceed to down the wine.
The wedding takes place in a small restaurant in Brooklyn that’s closed to the public for the night. The room where the ceremony is supposed to go down is at the far end of the restaurant in what looks like a greenhouse. It’s narrow and warm and as the procession begins I feel the sweat forming between my shoulder blades and gliding down to my lower back. The wedding party begins to line up on either side of the room, just as I realize that I don’t know where to stand. I find myself awkwardly positioned in front of the bride and groom just as the music dies and everyone is straining to see them holding hands somewhere behind me.
Kaira forcefully repositions me so I don’t look like a moron, and without thinking about it for too long, I just start speaking. I know there are words coming out of my mouth but I don’t know what they are, I’m just hoping they make sense. When I see people nodding and following along, I realize that I’m doing OK. I get through my introduction and proceed to the story of how Kaira and Tom met. I become more aware of what I’m actually saying and make sure to pace myself, to not mumble through the words as I sometimes do when I get excited about expressing an idea. I have a moment of complete mental clarity where I make a note to maintain eye contact with the entire room.
The ceremony goes mostly as planned. When I get to the end I ask everyone to, as a group, help me pronounce the couple as husband and wife.
“So on the count of three,” I say, “let’s do this together – ‘We pronounce you husband and wife.’ Ready?” I pause. “1…2…3.”
The crowd shouts a collective “yeah!” and start clapping. Kaira and Tom kiss, my date, standing at the back of the room, laughs, because she knows how stressed I was about how to end the ceremony. I shrug.
The wedding turns out to be one of the best I’d ever been to. There’s great food, an open bar, and a dance play list that Kaira put together. After all is said and done, I feel incredibly honored to have played such a central role. And then there is the most important piece of all – Tom and Kaira are married! That concept is still totally wild to me. Sometimes it feels like my friends and I are all still just kids, but meanwhile we’re starting to get married and have kids of our own. I imagine some point in the future when Tom and Kaira have a family, and then I wonder if we’d still be in touch then, if we’d have an opportunity to share more of life’s big moments.
As I sit at my table and ponder, a girl points at me and yells “you’re the officianator!”
“Come with me if you want to get married,” I say in my best Arnold voice, except no one laughs. I like to think it’s because the music was too loud.
Photo by sonictk, licensed under Creative Commons.
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