Marriage: The Law in the Custom

For the first time in what seems like a long time, I have a lot of blog posts in mind that don't involve pulling from the Ask Chaviva Anything! log of inquiries and curiosities. A lot of this is probably because of pending nuptials (whoa, getting married in just a few days!), but also because I feel like with the move to Neve Daniel I'm in a more curious and settled head space than I have been for a while now. So where do I begin?

On Friday, Mr. T and I bumped into several people over the course of the morning in Neve Daniel, which I'm sure raised some eyebrows. Why?

Traditionally, the week leading up to a religious Jewish couple's wedding the two don't see neither hide nor hair of their betrothed. On the day of the wedding, there traditionally is fasting and more not seeing, even before the actual chuppah itself. The keyword here is "traditionally."

The first time I got married, my ex and I didn't see each other the week before the wedding, which created a lot of entertaining choreography as we were staying in the same city, and pretty much the same house but on different levels. On the day of the wedding, we didn't see each other up until the point of picture taking, at which time we decided that it made sense to see each other.

Although Mr. T and I have decided that the day of the wedding we won't be seeing each other, we concluded -- after some research and investigation into the whole "not seeing each other thing -- that we're going to let minhagim be minhagim (traditions) and not stress out about avoiding each other during the week before the wedding.

I know what you're thinking: Catastrophe! Disaster! Shanda! But hold your horses. What would you do if I told you that the basis for this tradition is not in halakah (Jewish law)? What about the fact that Sephardim don't even observe this custom?

Yes, friends, shocker time. The whole avoidance pre-wedding is a tradition that has some shady and unclear origins, ranging from medieval fears of bad luck to the fact that most religious people just weren't in the same place the week up to the wedding (and in most cases, the months up to the wedding after the engagement).

You can read the entire megillah on this topic over at the OU, but I'll give you the rundown quickly here.

This custom seems to date back to as early as 1228, but in Jerusalem it was introduced in the early 1700s. The main reasons cited by poskim for why a couple shouldn't see each other in the week leading up to the wedding are that forced separation builds excitement and that it decreases the likelihood of premarital relations (seriously?), but also that it can be a tense period of time in which strife could arise and the wedding could be called off as a result of stress, tension, and arguments (“There is no marriage contract that does not contain a quarrel,” Shabbat 130a). After watching a few episodes of Bridezillas, this makes gobs of sense, but it also doesn't explain why in most religious circles this has become the required "law." Where exactly does it all come from?

Let's start with this interesting morsel.

"In a footnote, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (Made in Heaven, [New York, 1983], p. 67) cites two other works that mention the custom, and then states that the source for the custom may be YD 192:1, the section that deals with dam chimud ... [which is the] concern that meeting the chatan [groom] may cause the kallah [bride]to have a discharge that could invalidate the shivah nekiyim (seven clean days before going to the mikvah)."

Both Rabbi Kaplan and Rabbi Binyomin Forst find this tie suspect at best, because the Talmud requires that upon accepting a marriage proposal or setting a wedding date that she might discharge blood as a result of the excitement (talk about a complete lack of understanding about the female body, am I right?). Even if this were to happen, she's still required to observe seven "clean days" prior to the wedding, so unless she's getting engaged and married seven days later, there's no concern here (also, because, you know, women don't bleed when they get excited). 

In Sefer Minhagim: The Book of Chabad-Lubavitch Customs, the footnote simply cites letters from the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson as the basis for the tradition. However, 

"Nitei Gavriel, a recent, comprehensive source of customs, does not mention this practice, but records that around one hundred years ago, there was a custom in Jerusalem of the bride and groom going together to famous rabbis to get their blessings during the week before the wedding (Hilchot Nisuin, p. 55, in the name of Sdei Chemed, Ma’arechet Chatan Vekallah, 22)."

The reality is that halakah requires that a bride and groom must see each other before the wedding, which makes this custom kind of strange even at its very roots. Even Ravs Moshe Feinstein and Aharon Soloveichik advocated for not letting this custom serve as an inconvenience to couples prior to the wedding. 

So what did you do when getting married, or what do you plan on doing when you get married? Did you realize just how custom-y this was, or have you always assumed it was halakah? 

Terumah: Just a Thought

Before we purchased this couch, we invested in Torah.

This week's parshah (Torah portion) is Terumah, in which HaShem commands us to build the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary and dwelling place, as the Israelites travel through the desert. The Mishkan became the Holy Temple, and after the Second Temple fell in 70 CE, the Jewish home became the central dwelling place for HaShem.

Driving down any street where new construction is going up you'll see the shells of homes under construction. We start with the bones of a building and construct it inward, with the knickknacks, drapes, color combinations, bookshelves, and family photos all coming in at the end stages of construction.

In this week's parshah, however, we see that the first aspect of construction was the ark -- the resting place of Torah -- and then come the various vessels, the walls, and finally the framework.

What does it all mean? Why do we build our homes hafuch? (That's the name of a popular take on coffee in Israel, which just means upside down or inside out.)

When we build a home, we must place Torah at the center of everything before we begin to build anything else. Before we pick out towel colors or bathroom mats, before we pick out a couch or decide on plate patterns, Torah must have been placed at the center of the relationship.

If anything, Mr. T and I placed Torah on the ground floor of our relationship before building or exploring the everyday, seemingly monotonous aspects of our future together. Can you imagine first dates talking seriously and passionately about tzedakah and minhagim (traditions)? With a Torah-based marriage, you're setting yourself up for a dwelling place for the shechinah (the presence of HaShem). Until the Holy Temple is rebuilt, the Jewish home is the best and most important way we can express our dedication to HaShem, Am Yisrael, and, ultimately, each other.

So, what do you think about it?

The Magical Minhag Tour

At the beginning of November, I posted about my curiosity when it comes to divorce and minhagim (customs) -- do you keep 'em? What if you're a convert, do you go back to being able to choose? Does it matter if you have kids? Does the length of the marriage matter?

Basically, I'm trying to figure out what constitutes minhag retention in the "frum" (religious) Jewish community.

In case you were wondering perhaps why traditions are so important. Check it, Proverbs 1:8.

I spoke with a rabbi recently about this question I had, and after some quick conversation, he said that he doesn't understand why I wouldn't be able to go back to choosing my own minhagim. So I'm researching and exploring Sephardic traditions, because for some reason, a lot of them seem to make a whole lot more sense to me. That and they're absolutely fascinating. (One Sephardic tradition has it that when you say havdalah, you are to look into the wine, and if you see your face, you laugh aloud after the bracha!)

But you're probably asking yourself: Wait, why would you choose your customs? Who chooses their own customs? Isn't the point of a custom that it's something that's passed down?

Well, when you grow up in a nominally Jewish family (you know, the kind of family where you know you're Jewish but have no clue what a lulav is) and become a ba'al teshuvah or when you choose to be Jewish and convert, you don't have customs. You don't claim any traditions, and when you do, they're typically the kind of things where you know what Chanukah is and you light the menorah. There are minimal traditional differences in lighting a menorah (right to left? gain candles or lose candles?)

So, in these situations, you're blessed with the opportunity to choose your customs, your minhagim.

Well, what if you're a convert, you practice nominal Ashkenazi traditions throughout your pre-conversion existence, then the moment you convert you get engaged, and then married to someone who also has nominal traditions that no one really practices, and then you get divorced from that person. What happens?

Let's say you grow up without any Jewish customs, you become religious in your early 20s, you meet a nice Satmar fellow and get married. You take on the stringent Satmar customs, and then, just a few years into your marriage, you get divorced. Are you bound to holding to those Satmar traditions until you meet someone new? And then what if that person isn't Satmar?

What if you're married, observing Lubavitch customs, and you get married and have three children. Then, you get divorced when your kids are all under the age of 5-years-old, and marry a Spanish Portuguese Jew. Do you adopt the customs of you new husband? Because your children are under the age of b'nei mitzvah and their father plays no role in their life, do your kids take on your new husband's traditions? Or do you raise them in the Lubavitch tradition of their father?

Is your HEAD exploding now!?

Over Shabbat we were considering all of the variations and complications that come with minhagim and the wide, expansive set of traditions that can vary from community to community and even family to family within that community. The glory of minhagim is that they are not law. As Rabbi Marc Angel says in "Exploring Sephardic Customs and Traditions,"

One needs to always remember that the purpose of observing minhagim is to bring us closer to God, closer to our tradition, and closer to each other. 

Furthermore, Rabbi Angel cites Rabbi Eliezer Papo who says that "God knows what is in a person's heart" and that minhagim are not meant to be oneupmanship. If the observance of a minhag results in presumptuousness, it's a very uncool thing.

So my question to you, readers is: Have you been married and divorced? How did you choose your customs, or did you just stick with what you  knew? Did you even think about it or consult a rabbi or was it just something that you didn't think about? If you did get to choose your customs as a ba'al teshuvah or convert, how did you go about doing so? 

Choosing: Ashkenazic vs. Sephardic

I've been meaning to post this question for quite some time (okay, since the divorce), but after talking it over very briefly with a few friends, here I am finally posting it.

Before I got married, I had the option -- as a convert -- to choose my minhagim or customs. That means that technically, because I didn't grow up with any, I had the option of choosing the lifestyle of the Sephardim. Beans and rice on Passover! And a lot of other really awesome, fascinating, unique customs that would have made me more normal in Israel than here in the U.S.

(Sephardim, oddly enough, are more strict on many things, including bishul akum, which forbids a Jew to eat food prepared by a non-Jew, something I observed when in the conversion process that I had no problem with -- this is where that "Jew turns on the flame" bit comes in handy for a non-Jew at a grocery store bakery or the like).

Then I got married, to someone with nominally Ashkenazic traditions and a strong Ashkenazic genealogy. Although he grew up not always following the no-leavening bit on Passover, he loosely identified with the Eastern European ways, considering his family came from Romania and areas around there. So we took on those customs, despite my pleas and knowing that we technically could choose our customs. We adopted our rabbi's Yekki tradition of washing our hands before both kiddush (blessing over wine) and motzi (blessing over bread), which, by the way, has a very legit and sense-making reason if you're interested.

But now, since I'm divorced, does that take me back to square one? Do I get to choose my customs? Or am I bound to the 16-month commitment to Ashkenazic traditions? I mean, I look like I'm straight-up Eastern European (note: my family hails from England and France and Switzerland), but ... until I get married (please HaShem) again, can I just have a little bit of Sephardic fun?!

VERSUS

I don't like the eggs, but ... 

For those of you interested in the halachos that are out there, they're incredibly confusing, and opinions are incredibly varied, but there's a great response and plenty of contradictory sources cited over at Fifth Avenue Synagogue. According to Rav Schachter, community comes before family, but how often do any of us live in a community anymore where there is a single established minhag? 

Can't wait to hear your thoughts!