Rites of Passage.

Today marks our eight year wedding anniversary, so I thought it would be fun to look through our wedding album with the girls. We paused on the page commemorating toasts. M pointed to my dad and said, “Dede [short for Dedushka] killed it, he played songs and everything.” J seemed appropriately impressed and they moved on, but my mind stayed on that photograph. What M had recalled as cool and unique, I remembered as utterly embarrassing. 

The average wedding toast is approximately four minutes long. Five minutes in I started sweating. G-d help us, he was introducing EVERY member of my family. And then (I’m still not sure how he thought this was a good idea) my dad proceeded to play music clips. Not via cues to the DJ, but off his tablet and into the microphone. Thankfully there wasn’t a sing-along portion, and the ordeal concluded after 20 minutes of what-felt-like torture. Here I was marrying into a shiny American family, and my dad was underscoring all the ways I wouldn’t fit in. He might as well have said, “she’ll mess up your traditions and spit in the face of decorum.”

This wasn’t the first time Dede had undercut my attempts at conformity. Back in middle school I was working hard to fit into the American Jewish community. My dad knew that the Bat Mitzvah rite of passage should happen at 13, so he thought enrolling me in Hebrew school at 11 was perfectly appropriate. It came as a shock (to both of us) that the other kids had been taking classes since Kindergarten. I had a lot of catching up to do.

Judaism is a religion marked by specificity. Every service has a particular cadence of standing, sitting, bowing, etc. In the middle of Shabbat services someone walks the Torah scrolls around the congregation so everyone can be close to the holy book. You’re intended to touch something sacred and holy (like a prayer book) to the scrolls, and then kiss the item to take in the blessing. Envision half a dozen identical books and a few hands (also appropriate) reaching toward the velvet-covered scrolls… and then one pair of … wait for it… well worn reading glasses. READING GLASSES!! Sigh. Everyone saw. 

Today I understand that religious affiliation is far too personal and indeed too sacred to be undermined by a nonconformist gesture. Once I shed the need to fit into Jewish circles, I could find my own way to belong there. I’m starting to write a similar narrative about the wedding toast. I rather like that it lives on in family lore as “the coolest (and most touching) wedding toast ever”. On my wedding day I felt as though my dad’s toast was an invitation for rejection. Now I see his words as an opportunity for true acceptance. “Here we are, real and vulnerable, just like you.”