Marriage Blessings

It is difficult to speak of love - or any other fundamental truths in the world - without sounding corny or overserious. It's even harder to write about them, because there is no room for irony or cynicism, which make for much better reading, but here it goes. I guess that can be said for this site as well as this post...

A quick post before Shabbat -

We had a friend over last night. We spent a lot of time talking about her upcoming wedding and our recent one. It got me thinking about those weeks last year leading up to our wedding. I'm not speaking hyperbolically when I say it was a turning point for me in the way I think about the world.

I was floored by the outpouring of love directed at us leading up to and including our wedding day. It was like nothing else I've ever encoutered. I had normally gruff men admit to me that their wives were their best friends, and that marriage had been the best thing that ever happened to them. Friends and family from near and far went out of their way to express their joy at our union. The Aufruf we received at shul was overwhelming. On our way home from the big day in our decorated car, a Berkeley woman stopped in the crosswalk, flashed us a great big smile and mouthed, "35 years." That image still makes me well up.

The tradition is that a married couple can confer special blessings in their first year of marriage. I didn't fully understand the significance of that. After having experienced ours, I know: there is so much love directed toward you in those weeks and months, you have a very special reservoir of it to pass on to others. I still feel it to this day (2 weeks away from our first anniversary), and it STILL blows me away.

That is the power of love (this is where the difficult part happens - whatever you do, don't think of Huey Lewis & The News). The rabbi is always talking about YHVH as the transformative power of the universe. That is love. I really got it. The love that we were blessed with was nothing less than proof of God's existence. Even as I'm writing this, I feel incapable of fully expressing what I mean. There is something that happens when you open yourself up to love someone and take them as part of yourself, and in turn opening it up for the whole world to be a part of. It makes me ever hopeful for humanity. When I begin to despair about all the messed up things in this world, I think of my experience of love, and how it is universal. Everybody can love, it's what makes us human. Ok, that's all - if you got it you got it, if not, then I don't have anything better to say.

We are going away this weekend for an early celebration of our anniversary. Shabbat shalom and have a good long weekend...