The second most memorable wedding I’ve attended was in the hills of Northern California. There on a date, I didn’t know the bride and groom nor most of the guests but I will never forget the lovely afternoon of their wedding.
We were perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and a roving violin player traipsed among the tables, which were hand-sewn floral cloths placed in a semicircle on the grass.
At the center of each cloth was a basket filled with bread and other light food. Beside a small pile of disposable cameras was a note telling guests that the photos that they take will capture the intimate and real moments of the wedding.
Dinner was a blur and I never saw the couple again but they taught me something that became a defining principle as I built my life as an adult and planned my own simchas: Your celebration, like your life, can be a real reflection of you. Not every bride needs to wear a big white gown and not every event needs to fit a mold.
Some five years later, I stood sweating under a chuppah looking at my soon-to-be husband. It was June in Israel, in Ronen’s parents’ backyard, and I was wearing harem pants.
Ronen and I are a picture of contrasts: he grew up in a kibbutz in central Israel; after 11 years in Milwaukee’s North Shore, I spent six formative years in Salt Lake City, Utah. His parents are fiercely secular; my parents are Orthodox. He was supremely practical and hoping to be upwardly mobile; after earning a most unpractical fine arts degree in creative writing, I moved to San Francisco and rejected the pursuits of wealth and status that felt like a defining piece of suburban life.
So we held a small, simple wedding that complied with Jewish law. My parents, siblings and some friends came from the U.S. My grandmother sent a cassette with her good wishes (and sincere threat that if Ronen didn’t care for me properly, she’d ensure his demise). Ronen wore a suit for the first time in his life and I wore a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind beaded outfit that I bought from a designer in Tel Aviv.
After the chuppah, we walked to the kibbutz clubhouse/social hall/dining room for dinner and dancing with a live blues band.
I loved my wedding and couldn’t have imagined myself in the starring role at any of the great weddings that my friends held. I didn’t want to wear a frou-frou wedding gown and harbored no unfulfilled princess dreams. Instead, I wanted a soulful and fun wedding that would be a great beginning to a marriage of equality.
Short on fashion
Last summer, 16 years later, almost to the day, we gathered our families and friends together again in almost the same spot. This time, we were in the front yard, it was a Monday morning and our 12-year-old daughter was going to read from the Torah as a bat mitzvah.
It was wonderful in a million unconventional ways. Ma’ayan had spent months studying with our rabbi and cantor, and we could easily have held a lovely bat mitzvah service at our synagogue. But that service would have spoken only to half of our family identity and culture.
So we chose to celebrate in Israel, where my father-in-law arrived as a 14-year-old Holocaust survivor and started a new life, where my husband ran around barefoot and learned the names of almost every flower and animal on earth, where I learned to love being a Jew.
Ronen and I also hoped that celebrating in the Jewish state would tie our simcha to the Jewish story in a poignant way, that Ma’ayan would see the connection between Jewish history and her life.
So, after months of coordinating with Ronen’s parents, we arrived at the kibbutz four days before the bat mitzvah day. On Monday morning, we shlepped the hammock and assorted lawn stuff out of the way and set about arranging red and green plastic chairs under a large tree.
We left one chair empty in front as part of Ma’ayan’s participation in Remember Us, a program that twins a bar or bat mitzvah celebrant with a Holocaust victim who did not reach the age of bar mitzvah.
And then our friend, a Reform rabbi in Israel, arrived with a guitar, a Torah scroll and a box filled with the Conservative prayer books that Ma’ayan preferred.
As the service began, Ronen and I embraced Ma’ayan with the tallit that she and I, with a few loving helpers, made from scratch in the preceding months.
I wondered if a Torah scroll had ever been brought into the devoutly secular kibbutz and think that our Shacharit service may have been a first. What I know is that our spirited morning service didn’t fit anybody’s mold. As we sang and chanted and prayed, kibbutz residents walked over to check it out: What was that singing?
After the service, we re-wrapped the Torah for transit, collected and packed the books, piled the plastic chairs into towers, and headed to the clubhouse for a kosher catered lunch. We then spent the day at the kibbutz pool.
It was utterly memorable, short on fashion but long on what was most important to us — celebrating our daughter’s life as part of a continuum that began at Mt. Sinai and reaches across time and space to our lives in suburban Milwaukee.
Loading ...