Alef: The NEXT Conversation
Once Upon a Time in Kiryat Shmone
by Emily Cornell
I’m getting married in nine weeks. If there’s a groom, that is.
The US consulate in Jerusalem is playing hard to get with my fiancé’s file.*
I’m trying to be all cool about the fact that I am supposed to be standing under a chuppah on November 22nd and there may not even be a hatan there with me thankyouverymuch, but “yiyeh b’seder” just doesn’t fall as easily from my lips as I wish it did.
It’s sometimes hard to believe that it’s already been two and a half years. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I fell in love with a soldier who boarded my Birthright bus in Kiryat Shmone. Thousands of conversations on Google chat and almost as many on the phone, seven FTD bouquets sent in an attempt to make up for the anniversaries, birthdays and no-good-very-bad-days spent apart; five transatlantic trips, three care packages filled with pop rock chocolate, cds of the latest hits getting playtime on Radio Galgalatz and random, quirky finds from the shuk; and two years after one very important promise: we will make it work.
I haven’t always believed that. Add to the count above at least thirty times that I’ve declared the situation utterly hopeless. Pure meshugas to think that two people who are so different – she an American WASP turned Nice Jewish Girl and he a Russian-born Israeli – and with so many obstacles in the way could ever even dream of getting to happily ever after.
But just as I raise my voice to argue the point yet again, I hear him say “Get real mami. When was the last time you heard a fairytale that started: Once upon a time in Kiryat Shmone?”
Again I’ve been outdone.
Of course I have. I’m marrying an Israeli. From a land where arguing is an official national sport. Where telling somebody “you can’t” is just some encouragement for them to continue on.
It doesn’t take long before I am laughing again – through the tears of frustration and longing to be in the same time zone as my best friend. I realize that this doesn’t have to be a fairytale. It just has to be the unlikely story of two people who made it work.
My name is Emily and I’m getting married on 26 Heshvan 5772. Maybe. Hopefully. Whatever happens: yiyeh b’seder.
*Update: It is early Friday morning and just a few days after I have written this. Igor waited hours to wake me up to tell me that the consulate has called. There’s not an exact date yet but “maybe in September or definitely in October,” he’ll have an appointment with a visa official. I think I’ll send the wedding invites out this week…
photo by jaaron, licensed under Creative Commons.
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.
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.
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.
Give Me Crabs On My Wedding Day
By Lauren E.
I love crabs. Get your head out of the gutter. I mean the cute, crawly, Sebastian-esque singing crabs. Growing up in Maryland, I learned to have pride in our Maryland crabs, mastered the art of eating crabs at an early age, and personified them as my make-believe friends at an annual picnic of mostly-Jewish lawyers from a prominent Baltimore law firm.
Now I’m getting married and what better way to welcome my out-of-town guests than with a good ol’- fashioned Maryland crab feast? Just one problem. One of the “benefactors” of the wedding says “NO” to crabs at a Jewish wedding. I won’t bore you with all of my family and future-family treyf stories. The bottom line is, it’s a big fat NO.
I’m a bit disappointed.
Beer + crabs = a great way to begin a life of commitment to my best friend and soul mate. But if this is the biggest disagreement we have throwing together a wedding, then so be it!
Click here to read more about our “Why I Eat What I Eat” series.
Thumbnail photo courtesy of Williams and Sonoma, licensed under Creative Commons
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