Wedding Bells

There are many areas of Jewish life in which popular custom adds dramatically to what would just be required by the letter of the law…but the inverse situation also exists in which practices that are theoretically requisite have summarily dropped out of use so totally that they have been mostly (or totally) forgotten by almost all. The procedures involving the death and burial of loved ones stand out as an excellent example of custom deviating from law in countless different ways, but—slightly surprisingly—so do the procedures that govern the maintenance of a strictly kosher kitchen. Synagogue life itself is in that category as well: there are many parts of the standard synagogue service that feel requisite but aren’t actually, yet there are just as many once-standard parts of the worship service that have simply fallen away, barely remembered, let alone seriously missed, by anyone at all.

But I have weddings on my mind this week—my oldest son is getting married to his lovely fiancée next Saturday night—and so I thought I would apply that thought to the customs and traditions that surround the Jewish wedding ceremony and write this week about some of the specific ways what we today find totally familiar and ordinary is not at all what felt that way to earlier generations.

First, let’s talk about the bride’s outfit. There is no legal requirement that the bride dress in any specific way at all! But the familiar white dress, usually incorrectly taken by moderns as a subtle reference to pre-marital chastity, does have a long history and is part of the complex of customs related to the notion that the day of a couple’s wedding is a kind of private Yom Kippur for them alone. It’s a nice idea too, that just as Yom Kippur is a day of atonement and reconciliation, so are all past missteps and errors of judgment both of bride and groom forgiven and forgotten on their wedding day. The old custom, now rarely observed, of brides and grooms fasting on their wedding day is part of the same complex of ideas relating the day of a wedding to Yom Kippur. As also is the old—and now entirely forgotten—custom of brides specifically having their hair braided before the chuppah, which was once intended to bring to mind the old story about God braiding Eve’s hair before bringing her to Adam and to make the simple point that, just as Eve—who, having just been created, obviously had nothing in her non-existent past to atone for—that every bride is an Eve starting life afresh on the day of her wedding.

The veil, on the other hand, actually was intended as a sign of modesty. And that is why the custom lives on: because there is something charming about the bride choosing to veil her face on the very day that she hears over and over how beautiful and attractive she is, thus signaling her understanding that true beauty resides within, that comeliness is a function of virtue rather than mere appearance.

The badecken ceremony, also nonrequisite legally, is only one version of an old custom. There were always places in which it was traditional for the groom to veil the bride as we do today, but there were also Jewish communities in which the custom was for the rabbi performing the ceremony to veil the bride, whereupon the assembled would signal their approval by throwing things at her and the groom: either seeds or wheat kernels, both meant to be suggestive of the community’s prayer that the newlyweds have children easily and quickly. (Wheat was thought of as a plant that grows where it is sown effortlessly and almost always successfully. Whether that is true, I have no idea.) The custom involving kernels of wheat is described in an old book by Rabbi Yaakov Halevi Molin, who lived in Germany at the end of the fourteenth century, in the following way: “The custom is for the assembled to bring the groom to the bride, whereupon the groom takes the bride’s hands in his own, and as they clasp hands the wedding guests shower them with kernels of wheat and call out three times, ‘Be ye fruitful and multiply.’”

The custom of the bride offering the groom the gift of a new tallit has mostly fallen away, but when it was still a feature of Jewish life, the point was that, because there are thirty-two cords that hang from the tallit and the way to write “thirty-two” in Hebrew shorthand is a homograph with the word lev (“heart”), offering the groom a tallit was a way of the bride offering the groom her heart on their wedding day.

The custom of giving gifts to the couple is also very old. In some place, the custom was for the groom to deliver an address on the morning of his aufruf —this was long before brides were routinely also called forward to the Torah on the Shabbat before the wedding—and gifts were then offered as some sort of compensation for the effort of preparing the address. In other places, though, the custom was more like our own and gifts were brought to the wedding itself and presented to the bride and groom formally as they sat together at the head table, the bride always to the right of the groom, just as she stood to his right under the chuppah. (The bride, you see, is always right!)

And that brings me to the chuppah itself, which has its own complicated history. Not precisely legally requisite, yet universally present at Jewish weddings, the chuppah wasn’t a wedding canopy at all in its earliest iteration, just a kind of nuptial tent set up near where the wedding was to take place to which the bride and groom were sent to seclude themselves following the ceremony. (The seclusion part, called yichud, on the other hand actually is requisite.) It was only in medieval times, in fact, that things changed and the chuppah we know came into use, the kind consisting of a piece of gorgeously embroidered cloth held up by four poles. (There was also the custom of using the parochet—the curtain that hangs in front of the Ark of the Law in any synagogue—as the top of the chuppah as a way of signaling the community’s hope that the new union be blessed by God.) The chuppah was most customarily set up outdoors in the synagogue courtyard so that the wedding could take place in the open air, a custom still observed in our day at least by some, and was taken in its own way to constitute a prayer that the couple’s progeny be, at least eventually, as numerous as the stars in the nighttime sky. Even the orientation of the chuppah mattered: just as at Shelter Rock, the chuppah was traditionally oriented towards the east, towards Jerusalem, as a way of suggesting that the couple’s willingness to enter into matrimony and create a family is itself an act of worship.

The parts of the ceremony that are neither legal nor liturgical are pretty much all dictated by custom rather than by law. The custom of the processional, for example, is our latter-day echo of the older custom of the assembled all escorting the groom and the bride to the chuppah, a custom that is the norm today in Israel. (The point of this was to make it impossible for a couple to get married casually since they could obviously not escort each other to the chuppah. In turn, this forced a couple to think twice before marrying, which line of reasoning accords in New York State with the detail that wedding licenses are invalid in New York State for the first twenty-four hours after they’re issued, thus requiring couples to sleep on their decision at least once before actually tying the knot. In my opinion, this is a very reasonable concept indeed!)

In ancient times the bridesmaids gathered to support the bride for the pre-game show, but it was the groomsmen who had the honor of escorting the bride some number of times around the groom before the ceremony could begin. (The oldest texts talk about three circuits, but in our world the number is almost universally seven. And although the circling itself survived, today it’s almost invariably the bride’s mother who accompanies the bride on her seven circuits.) The circling is an ancient custom, not a legal requirement, and has many different interpretations. For me personally, the circling serves as a kind of corrective to the androcentricity of the liturgy: it may be the groom who formally marries the bride and who thus draws her into his sphere of existence, but the seven circuits can be imagined to serve as a prominent reminder of the fact that marriage is a two-way street…and that marriage draws the groom into his bride’s sphere of existence just as surely as it draws her into his.  

There are lots more customs and ceremonies to consider, but these are the ones on my mind this week. Weddings are magic moments for all concerned, particularly (although I wouldn’t have understood this when I was a groom myself) for the parents of the couple, who see their own lives made whole by the willingness of their children to accept the burdens of adulthood, to step into the romance of married life, and to create homes based on mutual respect, affection, and love. Really, what more could any parent want?