The thing that strikes me most is the silence.
I don’t know whether Rachel has read Walter Kaufmann, whose thoughts on ritual helped me understand what I wanted out of a wedding ceremony, and wants us to hear “the voice that the rest of the time one is prone to forget,” but I’m amazed at her ability to be silent. Mike and I, having circled each other seven times (it did get a little dizzying by the end), are standing in front of her under the chuppah and she’s saying nothing.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is gorgeous, and the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden is the most gorgeous part of it. Jesus, it’s so beautiful I almost feel silly.
Rachel is still silent, but it’s a full silence, not an empty one.
Julia looks so beautiful in that dress. And Victoria’s shoes are stunning. And I love the smile on Sarah’s face. And Peter and Len and Sean seem so dignified, and Angelo has never been hotter. And I hope Jason and April will be doing this soon themselves.
“Bruchim haba’im b’shem ahavah; Bruchot haba’ot b’shem ahavah,” Rachel finally says. “Blessed are we who have gathered in the name of love.” And then she goes back to being silent.
Oh, look, the koi have gathered here from around the pond! It’s like the fish want to watch our wedding.
The thing about this silence is that it doesn’t feel uncomfortable, like silence usually does, like when you’ve run out of things to say to somebody you don’t know well. This silence really does feel like it’s leaving room—no, creating room—for everybody to calm down, to settle, to relax. Rachel’s silence somehow sanctifies the time and place, and we New Yorkers, constantly on alert, constantly on the lookout for the next crazy homeless person who’s going to accost us on the subway or the next car that’s almost going to hit us or the next piece of electronic equipment we’re going to have to buy: in this moment, we feel safe. Our guard begins to drop. As the silence continues and nothing alarming happens, no alligator jumps out of the pond to eat us all, nobody makes a joke that requires a witty response, I feel the tension draining from my body—God, I sound like a meditation prompt, but I swear it’s true—and my focus coming to rest here and now.
“Splendor is upon everything,” Rachel finally says, giving a loose translation of the traditional blessing of the couple under the chuppah. “Blessing is upon everything. Everything full of this abundance, bless these loving grooms.”
“The circles you have just walked,” she says, “are a symbol that you have made each other central to your lives, set apart, holy, created sacred space that is yours alone to share. Now you stand under the chuppah, a symbol of the home you have created and will continue to create. It’s open on all sides, welcoming, surrounded by loved ones. Yet the flimsiness of the chuppah reminds us that the only thing real about a home is the people in it who love each other and choose to be together, choose to be a family. The only anchor they will have to hold on to will be each other’s hands. Joel and Mike, may your home be a place of abounding love, creativity, passion, and peace.”
My dad and my aunt Suzie step forward to light the candle to commemorate the departed. (We’re Jews. We can’t pick up the mail without commemorating the departed.)
I wish my mom were here.
Rachel picks up the wine bottle.
“You can just use grape juice for the kiddush,” she said last week when I told her I don’t drink. The reason I don’t drink is that I sang in my college’s church choir, and as a chorister I was invited to the parties thrown with some regularity at the house of
Peter Gomes, minister in the church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. At these parties Professor Gomes served, among other refreshments, a concoction of his own invention called Bishop’s Punch, which was made up of one part fruit juice to two parts bourbon. During the first few parties I acquitted myself admirably—and when I sang at Professor Gomes’s piano a blood alcohol concentration of 0.19 did wonders for my Mendelssohn—but eventually, like Icarus flying toward the sun, I went too far and was hard put to explain my dry heaves during Introduction to Homeric Greek the next afternoon. Since then, the taste of alcohol has turned my stomach.
Grape juice struck me, therefore, as a more than satisfactory alternative, until I opened the refrigerator this morning and realized that we had forgotten to buy grape juice. The grocery store around the corner wasn’t going to open till after we left for the Garden, which meant we were limited to whatever was in our kitchen. This proved after a few minutes’ searching to be Diet Coke, Diet Mountain Dew, chicken broth, apple juice, slightly turned milk, water, appletini mixer (unlike me, Mike does tipple now and again), and High Efficiency Tide laundry detergent.
So apple juice it was; the problem now was what to put it in, because I would be damned if my wedding photographs were all going to feature prominently a 64-ounce plastic bottle of Juicy Juice. So I rooted through cabinets until I found an appropriatelysized Tupperware box, filled it half-full with apple juice, and then realized that a Tupperware box of ersatz wine would be even worse than a bottle of Juicy Juice. So I grabbed a bottle of Trader Joe’s wine, uncorked it, poured it down the sink, transferred the apple juice from the Tupperware to the bottle, and went to get dressed.
“Wine,” says Rachel now to the assembled guests, “is a symbol of joy and of celebration of life’s energy. Mike and Joel, let this . . . um . . . apple juice—”
“Wine,” I hiss.
“Let this wine represent the sweetness we wish for your married life. As you drink from it, we pray that the joys you share be doubled and any bitterness be halved.”
We both take sips of apple juice.
“Mike and Joel are now going to exchange rings using words they have chosen.”
My little first cousins once removed from Los Angeles step solemnly forward, holding out the ring boxes on which I’d used a Sharpie to scrawl “M” and “J.” (“You’ve got to help me out here,” their father, my first cousin, wrote me. “My kids won’t shut up about wanting to know what they’re doing in your wedding. Please, just give them something. Anything. They can hold a fucking flower. But you have to do something. Because this is going to kill me soon if you don’t.”)
“I am my beloved’s,” I say, quoting the Song of Solomon, as I put the ring on Mike’s finger, “and my beloved is mine.”
“I am my beloved,” he says, putting the ring on my finger, “and my beloved is mine.”
“I am my beloved’s,” I say under my breath, thinking, I’m the narcissist in this relationship, buddy.
“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”
I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.
“A ketubah,” says Rachel, “is a legal document that makes this marriage official within the Jewish community. Mike and Joel have chosen two witnesses who will come forward to read it. If they find all that it contains acceptable, they will sign their names, followed by Joel and Mike, and then me.” My friend Sarah and Mike’s friend Aaron come up to the tiny table we brought from the back yard to examine the ketubah, which is written in Hebrew, a language neither of them speaks. They nonetheless find it acceptable and sign their names, followed by me, Mike, and Rachel. I’m careful to make my signature neat, and I love the thick line the Sharpie produces. “This ketubah,” says Rachel, “has been witnessed and signed according to tradition. It is valid and binding. Mike and Joel will now read it aloud.”
“I betroth you to me forever,” Mike and I read in translated unison. Rachel said we could do it that way or alternating sentences; Mike wanted to alternate, but that seemed very second-grade to me, so I strategically turned the conversation to other matters so that when the moment came, since we hadn’t practiced alternating and didn’t know who’d start, we would pretty much have to read in unison. “I betroth you to me in everlasting faithfulness. I will be your loving friend as you are mine. Set me as a seal upon your heart, as the seal upon your hand, for love is stronger than death. And I will cherish you, honor you, uphold, and sustain you in all truth and sincerity. I will respect you and the divine image within you. I take you to be mine in love and tenderness. May my love for you last forever. May we be consecrated, one to the other, by these rings. Let our hearts be united in faith and hope, to beat as one in times of joy as in times of sorrow. Let our home be built on understanding and lovingkindness, rich with wisdom and reverence.”
We are smiling.
“Blessed is the creation of the fruit of the vine,” says Rachel, giving the secular version of the first of the traditional seven wedding blessings.
“Blessed is the creation which embodies glory.
“Blessed is the creation of the human being.
“Blessed is the design of the human being. We are assembled from the very fabric of the universe and are composed of eternal element. Blessed be and blessed is our creation.
“Rejoice and be glad, you who wandered homeless. In joy have you gathered with your sisters and your brothers. Blessed is the joy of our gathering.
“Bestow happiness on these two loving mates as would creatures feel in Eden’s garden. Blessed be the joy of lovers.
“Blessed is the creation of joy and celebration, lover and mate, gladness and jubilation, pleasure and delight, love and solidarity, friendship and peace. Soon may we hear in the streets of the city and the paths of the fields the voice of joy, the voice of gladness, the voice of lover, the voice of mate, the triumphant voice of lovers from the canopy and the voice of youths from their feasts and song. Blessed, blessed, blessed is the joy of lovers, one with the other.”
“We’re coming to the end of the ceremony,” says Rachel. “As we know, Mike and Joel legally married in Iowa. But their marriage wasn’t complete; they needed this ceremony to make it whole. The completion of their marriage is us, their friends and family. The holy rituals we’ve enacted in this morning’s ceremony solidify and strengthen their bond, but these rituals—along with our presence—also heal a little bit of the brokenness that they and so many others experience because of the injustice that still works in our lives.
“There’s a legend that, when God created the world, He filled a collection of jars with light to help Him see what he was doing.
“But there was too much light, and the jars couldn’t hold it all; they broke, and now the world is filled with the fragments of these shattered jars, light trapped in each one. As we go through life, it’s our job as human beings to search for shards of these broken vessels and put them back together so that the light imprisoned in them can be released. In Hebrew this is called tikkun ha’olam—the healing of the world.
“Joel and Mike will now break a glass, reminding us of our duty to confront injustice wherever and in whatever form we find it and indicating that this wedding takes us one step further toward the healing of the world.”
We move our feet next to each other over the light bulb wrapped in a napkin. (“You’d be surprised how hard it can be to break a glass,” said Rachel when I objected to the substitution she suggested, to which Mike responded, “Joel has a special talent for it,” but we followed her advice anyway.) When our feet are aligned, my size eights centered against his size elevens, we stomp down, shattering the light bulb.
We stand, unsure of what to do.
We look at each other.
We look around at our guests.
We look at each other again.
We start walking down the path out of the garden.