I’d like to begin my remarks tonight by introducing you to two married couples. The first was my Great Aunt Florence and her husband, Uncle Joe. Florence was a stylish dresser who appointed her family home with fine artwork that she and Joe had collected on their world travels. For many decades, Aunt Florence owned a ballroom dancing school – a kind of finishing school – and at weddings and Bar Mitzvah parties, during the line dances and disco numbers, you could always count on seeing little old, white-haired Aunt Florence strutting her stuff like she was in Saturday Night Fever. One night on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Florence had a couple of drinks, started dancing up a storm, got spotted by a TV producer…and that Fall, on the national TV commercial announcing the new season on CBS, there was Aunt Florence, dancing the night away.
Uncle Joe was a World War II vet – an attorney who made his living in commercial real estate. He was a quiet man, with a wry sense of humor and a sweet, sweet smile.
Aunt Florence and Uncle Joe were married for over 60 years before they died several years ago. And for most of that time, they couldn’t stand one another. They hated each other, it seemed; all anyone remembers about their marriage was the bickering! They fought about where to go for dinner, about how to hang the pictures on the walls, and about what tie Uncle Joe should wear to dinner. When Joe was driving and Florence was in the car, it was said that an innocent passenger in the backseat could easily get killed in the crossfire.
It became a running family joke – even between the two of them. At their fiftieth anniversary party, the family hired a magician to entertain. At one point, the magician called up Uncle Joe for part of his schtick, and then invited Aunt Florence to join them a few minutes later. As she was walking up, Uncle Joe turned to the magician and said, “Are you gonna make her disappear?”
I picture Aunt Florence and Uncle Joe standing at their wedding, full of great happiness and joy and love. The rabbi may have read beautiful words of scripture to them, words from the Song of Songs that lyrically expressed the stirrings of their hearts. “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone, and the time of singing has come.” It must have been beautiful.
They were so full of hope for the future at that moment. I know what that future would bring, and I wonder how it happened.
The second couple was one I met years ago when I worked as an assistant rabbi in Dayton, Ohio. Bill was a single attorney in his fifties who had grown up in Dayton, and lived in Idaho at the time. His eighty-something year-old mother still lived in Dayton, and taught English as a Second Language at the local community college. One day, Bill said, “Mom, why don’t you find me a young woman in your class who I can correspond with?” She set him up with Min Anh, a petit and very shy 23 year old Vietnamese immigrant, who didn’t speak much English. Somehow, they were able to correspond, and after a few months, Bill came to Dayton and asked Min Anh to marry him. She said yes, the couple scheduled a wedding with the senior rabbi, and, since her English wasn’t good enough for her to be in the regular class, Min Anh began working on a tutorial with me toward conversion to Judaism. Bill returned to Idaho, and they resumed their correspondence.
Months passed, and shortly before the wedding weekend, Bill came back to town for about ten days. After he’d left, Min Anh confided to me that, while Bill was in town, she realized that he was a nasty man. He spoke to her cruelly; he was insensitive to others; and, worst of all, he was rude to her family. She could hardly stand to even be in the same room with him.
I said to her, “You know, Min Anh, you don’t have to marry him.” She looked confused. “This is the United States,” I said. “You get to decide who to marry and when to do it – you get to pick somebody wonderful!”
“Oh,” she answered. “I could never cancel the wedding. The invitations have already been mailed, and canceling would bring shame upon my family. I would never do that.”
Later, I went to the senior rabbi, and said “Irving, you can’t officiate at this ceremony. It would set this woman up for a lifetime of misery – you don’t want to be part of that!”
He reminded me that these people are grownups. “This is the United States,” he said. “Here, they get to decide who and when to marry; not their rabbis.” He officiated, and the couple moved to Idaho.
Well, I’ve kept in touch with Bill and Min Anh over the years – at least sporadically. Last I heard, they still live in Idaho, they have three bright, healthy kids, and – wouldn’t you know it – the couple is very, very happy. Go figure!
I picture Min Anh standing at her wedding, so frightened about what the future would bring. I now know what that future held, and I wonder how it happened.
If you think about it, the decision to marry is an utterly awesome one. For many of us, it is the single most significant decision we will ever make, and, nobody who gets married ever knows for certain how it will turn out. Sometimes, as with Uncle Joe and Aunt Florence, you can go into a marriage deeply in love, only to end up bitter and angry. At other times, like with Min Anh, you can go into it scared and uneasy, only to be surprised by the love that you and your partner come to share. You never know which one it will be.
Sadly, these days it seems that there are far more unhappy marriages – Uncle Joe and Aunt Florence marriages – than ever before. But these days, Uncle Joe and Aunt Florence don’t stay married for 60 years. They tend to get divorced far earlier.
The statistics are sobering. Study after study has shown that a couple getting married today has about a 50-50 chance of avoiding divorce. For second and third marriages, the odds are even lower. Many couples live together without getting married these days, and those that eventually do tie the knot have a lower chance of staying together than the couples who wait to share a home until after their wedding.
One study compared the divorce rates of four groups: Born-Again Christians, other Christians, Jews, and the nonreligious. The study found that among those four groups, the one with the highest rate of divorce was…Jews. Born-Again Christians came next, and then came Other Christians – non-religious people had the lowest divorce rates. If marriage was our only concern, I’d suggest you get up right now, walk out the door, and leave religion altogether. Or at least become Christian!
Marriages seem to be breaking down everywhere, particularly amongst our own people, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of watching so many people I know – so many people I care about – suffer horribly through the ravages of separation and divorce. I’ve been through it myself; I know that pain. And for so many good people to have to endure it simply isn’t fair.
Some marriages need to end, of course – our tradition knows this and allows for divorce.
If only it were otherwise. If only all marriages could stay good. If only each of us could find our soul-mate and live happily ever after. Our ancient sages taught that as the sun was about to set on the eve of the very first Shabbat after creation, God realized that there were a few details that still needed attending to. So, God looked into the future and paired-up each of us with another person – our bashert, our destined one, the one to whom fate has drawn us since the very dawn of creation.
Hearing that legend, and having seen so many marriages end in painful divorce and separation, I’m tempted to say, “God, did you ever think of letting us know who our partners are supposed to be? A little clarity here would have saved a lot of us a whole mess of trouble.”
Alas, we all know the answer to that question. God leaves it up to us to figure out who our soulmates are. Sometimes we get it right; sometimes we don’t.
It is particularly troubling that so many of our own people – Jewish people – have to endure broken marriages, because our tradition not only sanctifies marriage, but it also gives us some important tools to help us stay married once we get that way. Tonight I would like to share a few of them with you, each of which we can learn from one of the symbols of a Jewish wedding. They each, I believe, have a great deal to teach us all – not only about marriage, but about all of our other interactions with other people, too.
The first symbol is one about which I received a telephone several years ago. A woman on the other end of the line said, “Rabbi, my fiancé and I are planning our own wedding, and we want it to be Jewish, and we have the rings and the glass, and now all we need is the hoopla.
What she meant to say, of course, was “the chuppah,” the Jewish wedding canopy, under which the bride and groom stand during their wedding. It can be as simple as a tallit tied to four poles and suspended over the couple’s heads, or far more ornate. Originally, the chuppah was the bridal chamber where the couple consummated their union, but nowadays, what with all of the complicated clothing of the modern wedding, it has become a symbol, instead: a symbol of the home the couple is about to create; a marker, setting the couple apart from the gathered throngs during the few sacred moments of their marriage ceremony; a fragile, temporary reminder, as William Henry Channing said, "to live content with small means: to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy not respectable, and wealthy, not rich."
According to an ancient Jewish custom, at the birth of a baby boy, his family plants a cedar tree in his honor; and at the birth of a baby girl, her family plants a pine or a cypress to honor her. And years later, when that boy is a groom and that girl is a bride, their families take branches from each of their trees, and those branches become the poles supporting the chuppah at their wedding.
It’s not a very time- or labor-efficient method of construction. I have a feeling that if efficiency were the primary concern, we’d chop both of those trees into pulp, mix them both together, add some water and heat, and extrude perfectly manufactured particle-wood poles for the chuppah. Each of the poles would be identical, and nobody would have a clue as to what the trees they came from ever looked like.
But of course, it’s not about efficiency. The cedar and the cypress stay separate, and their separateness teaches us an important lesson. The chuppah can only stand, the household can only be stable, the marriage can only work when both of the poles – husband and wife – stand tall, proud, and separate and distinct from one another.
Many of us think of love and marriage as the unification of two souls, as two hearts becoming one. But for a marriage to be healthy, it can’t work that way. Two people – two human souls can’t become one, nor should they. The attempt to unify two separate people is far more likely to destroy their relationship, not strengthen it. Think of what would happen if we tried to physically unite brides and grooms into one single being – it would kill them both. The same is true of their spirits. In its account of creation, the Torah teaches that God created us “male and female,” which the rabbis understood to mean that God created us as a two-headed, four legged creature – what they called an androgynos, from the Greek – and later divided that creature into two separate people. To rejoin them would be to undo the work of God; it would turn bride and groom a monster rather than two distinctive, strong human beings.
To have a healthy marriage, to have a healthy connection, they need to stand separate. Marriages work best when, like the chuppahs under which the Jewish ones begin, they are cedar and cypress marriages, not particle-board ones – when each partner can maintain his or her individual identity, and not let it melt away into a slurry of wedded togetherness.
The point is far more than symbolic. We all know people who, in the name of marital unity and harmony, give up on their own uniqueness, on what makes them special. They try to meld their soul into that of their partner, and they lose themselves in the process. I hear it all the time. He says, “I used to like seeing shoot-‘em-up movies, and eating big greasy hamburgers, and singing in the shower.” She says, I used to have so many friends; I had music playing all the time; my bedroom was neat.” The both say, “Now, all of that is gone. What happened to the me I used to be?”
My friends, the fundamental question of marriage is not “How do we two separate people join together?” The central challenge of marriage is, “How can we two people stay separate even while maintaining a connection at the same time. How can we hold hands without smothering or being smothered in the process”?
Of course marriage always demands changes of habit, but never the denial of self. It calls us to listen to our partners, but also to stand firm when we know we’re right. It calls us to honor spouses’ tastes and values and dreams, while also making sure to advance our own. It means singing in the shower and keeping up old friendships and seeing Lethal Weapon and being you, because, if I’m not mistaken, hugging you – hugging the real you – is far more enjoyable than hugging a blob of mush.
Yes, God chose your soulmate, but God also created you. And God created you the way you are on purpose. And I don’t think God wants you to disappear the moment you step out from under the chuppah.
Another important symbol of the Jewish wedding is the ring. It serves an important legal function in traditional Judaism – it’s an item of value that the groom gives the bride as a way of sealing the deal on the marriage. Nowadays, many Jewish weddings are more egalitarian, and the bride and the groom exchange rings.
As they do, they recite a legal formula which makes the marriage official – the Jewish marriage vow. “Behold, you are sanctified to me with this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel.” You’ll note that this Jewish marriage vow doesn’t say anything about love. It says “you are sanctified to me with this ring.” Love doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it.
That’s because, up until relatively recently in history, people never got married for love. They married to unite their extended families, to perpetuate certain social structures, or even for economic reasons – but not because they loved one another. When Tevye asked Golda, “Do you love me?” Golda was flummoxed, because love wasn’t ever supposed to have been part of the deal.
“Harei at m’kudeshet li. You are sanctified to me with this ring.” In Judaism, to be sanctified means to be separated, or devoted. Our pledge means “You will be set apart for me, and I will be devoted to you as I am to no other individual.”
Our marital vows call us to live a life of devotion – to set ourselves aside exclusively for one person and one person only. Someone once said that love is attention, and being married well demands that we devote huge amounts of attention to our partners. Romantic love is a great way to start, but Judaism reminds us that marital love is far deeper that candlelit dinners and walks on the beach. In fact, it’s a lot of work.
Thinking about wedded bliss in the abstract is easy and fun. Creating wedded bliss is usually far more difficult. You need work long and hard to build it, and you need to do so in partnership with another person – another very complicated person who, despite your efforts to the contrary, won’t always see things the way you do. The challenge is to foster what Martin Buber called an “I-Thou” relationship, in which we encounter and engage with our partner not as who we want them to be, but as who they truly are, fully other, a sacred unique and sacred creation of God.
Once, a synagogue member described his deceased rabbi to be, saying, “He loved humanity; he just didn’t like people very much.” Marriage calls upon us to love – to love people – to love real people, not the idea of a person, and not the idea of being in love. This kind of love is the hardest of all, because it is so very human. It demands that we focus on one particular individual as they are, replete with strengths and deficits, great habits and annoying ones, beauty and warts.
That’s far more than romance. Romance is to marriage like good shoes are to dancing – only one small part of a far greater picture.
Harei at m’kudeshet li. Behold you are sanctified to me. M’kudeshet means devotion. M’kudeshet means commitment. M’kudeshet means holiness. Devotion, commitment, and holiness are the stuff of Jewish marriage.
The third and final symbol I’d like to mention tonight is the glass. For some reason, we conclude our wedding ceremonies by having one partner, usually the groom, smash a glass, and then we all yell mazel tov. We don’t really know where that custom comes from. Anthropologists suggest that Jews may once have believed that the sound of breaking glass scares off evil spirits; the Talmud explains the custom as a reminder of the destruction of the Temple; more recently, some have suggested that the groom breaks the glass at his wedding because it’s going to be the last chance he has to put his foot down about anything!
When I officiate at a wedding, I often linger up in front for a while after everyone leaves. Sometimes, I’ll reach down and pick up the napkin or sack holding the shards of the broken glass, listen to their jingly sound, and think, “I wonder what we can do with this now.” The glass has just changed – permanently. Now, just as before the glass was manufactured, it is raw material, and it can become anything. There are companies that will make that glass into a mezuzah, or reassemble it inside a Lucite block. Those are just two of the options. There are so many others.
So too, the couple’s lives – individually and together – have both changed, and regardless of what happens, things will never be like they were before. The success of their marriage will depend upon their ability to take raw material and shape it into something good. Of course, once they do, what they create may someday get smashed again, in which case they’ll have to begin their creative work anew.
Once, and older colleague boasted to me, “I’ve been married to my wife for 35 years. No,” he continued, “that’s not quite right. It would be more accurate to say that I’ve been married five times, for seven years each time, to the same woman each time, with no breaks in between.” His point was an important one. Over the years, marriages, like all relationships, change. And one marker of a marriage’s success is its ability to reinvent itself. Like the glass, it can and, at some point probably will, break into a million different pieces. Are they shards of destruction; or are they the beginnings of something new and great? That’s what the couple gets to decide.
These then, are the messages of the Jewish wedding. Hold onto yourself, remaining as separate and distinct as cedar and cypress, even as you connect with your partner. Devote yourself to your spouse as fully as you can. And always be sure to adapt to the changes and transformations that time will inevitably bring.
What will happen to the couple that stands under the chuppah? Nobody never knows just then. We all need to wait to discover how it will turn out. But living these Jewish values can certainly help their union thrive.
There’s one more thing. Remember my Aunt Florence and Uncle Joe – the Bickersons? Well, late in their lives, at around the same time, they both were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Suddenly, almost immediately, they became sweet and loving and affectionate with one another. We saw it. They smiled at each other; they flirted with one another; they held hands, and sometimes, they even kissed in public. It was a little embarrassing – almost like they were teenagers.
Soon, their dementia rendered even that affection impossible. But for a brief, shining moment, these two old warriors seemed to have gotten over their disagreements and fallen in love once again.
Was their affection a delusion of their illness, or did that disease somehow strip away their tough outer rinds and allow their true love to blossom? We’ll never know, I suppose, but of the two explanations, I choose the latter.
During that final springtime of their love, each of them was an individual– cedar and cypress; each cherished the other; together, they rebuilt something special.
And maybe, as they gazed into each other’s eyes, somewhere up in heaven, there was an echo of those ancient words they had heard so many years before. “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone, and the time of singing has come.”
Shanah Tovah
