At my Bat Mitzvah, my guests signed a photo poster of me. Some 17 years later, I still love to sit on the floor of my closet at my parents’ house, where the poster sits, and read what my guests wrote. The vast majority, of course, are just signatures or perfunctory statements such as “Congratulations!” or “You did great!” But that’s beside the point: I look back at those signatures and remember the people who were in might life at that time. Many of them won’t be at my wedding—some, like my grandparents, because they have died; others because we grew apart years ago.

Likewise, many of the people who attend our wedding won’t be around for the next simcha. So I wanted our wedding guests to sign something that we’d look at often, something that would remind us of all the people who were present at our wedding.

I  didn’t want a traditional ivory guest book—or even one of the pretty blue or green one—that would probably end up collecting dust in a box after the wedding. I wanted something that would have a place in our home.

So I decided to borrow an idea used by two friends who recently married. They had guests sign the blank beginning and ending pages of a coffee table book. “Yearbook-style,” a friend described it. Inside the book were pictures of Chicago, the city where the couple met. Since my fiancé and I are both book collectors, this seemed like the perfect alternative to the classic guest book.

But what kind of coffee table book would we get? As with most wedding details, the decision wasn’t easy. There were plenty of attractive coffee table books at the bookstore, but none screamed us. So we considered some mutual interests:

• Basketball. It was a possibility, but only a few people at the wedding will know that we’re both big basketball fans.

• Food. My fiancé, after all, loves to cook gourmet meals, and I love to eat his cooking. But after giving it a little thought, we decided that it was a bad idea to have our guests sign a pretty cookbook. Inevitably, we’d use the book in the kitchen, and it would get dirty, potentially ruining some of the signatures.

• Books. Now here was an option for two avid readers. But a coffee table book about books? There aren’t actually all that many. After some serious searching on Amazon.com, though, I came across The Writer’s Brush—a coffee table book with paintings, sculptures, and drawings by famous authors.

Our guest book

Without looking at more than a couple of pages, I knew we’d found our guest book. It was unique, and it happened to appeal to a shared interest we hadn’t considered: art. It also had the potential to be a conversation piece for years to come. Best of all, it would—will—give our guests’ signatures and well wishes a permanent place in our home and our lives, with a little decorative flair to boot.

“Well, we’ll have to see if we can find someone who will officiate,” my mom said when I told her Rick and I planned to have a Jewish wedding. I knew this, of course: Most rabbis, including those at the temple to which my mother and stepfather belong, won’t perform interfaith weddings. But hearing my mother say this worried me a little. What if we couldn’t find someone to perform a Jewish wedding? What if we had to be married by a judge?

Luckily, I didn’t have to entertain these possibilities for very long. As soon as my parents began talking to people, it became apparent that we had options: a cousin who performed wedding ceremonies and could add some Jewish flavor, a Jewish educator who’d wowed guests with the ceremony he performed at my mom’s boss’ daughter’s wedding, a rabbi we knew from Chicago who we might be able to coax to fly to Houston to perform the ceremony, the cantor at the other major reform congregation in Houston. All decent possibilities, but none that made us say, “That’s the one!” We decided to go with the cantor.

That is, until my mother spoke with our temple’s head rabbi, who mentioned that one of the temple’s former assistant rabbis still lived in town and officiated interfaith weddings. We remembered the rabbi well: She had a beautiful voice and gave wonderful sermons. She was very personable. Just the kind of person we wanted to officiate our wedding. A couple of phone calls and emails later, we had ourselves a rabbi.

Last month, we had lunch with our rabbi. She went through all of the Jewish wedding rituals with us to help determine which ones we wanted to incorporate into our wedding. “This ceremony should be something you’re both comfortable with, something that reflects the two of you,” she said.

While we’re incorporating almost all of the elements we discussed that day, we’ve since come up with a few twists of our own, after reading Anita Diamant’s wonderful book The New Jewish Wedding.

Photo credit: Mixed Blessing

Five years. That’s how long Rick and I have been together. Four-and-a-half years. That’s how long we have been living together. In other words, people have been asking us when we’re getting married for a long time. Now we finally have an answer: this December.

Rick and I last Thanksgiving.
Getting him to smile for the camera is on our wedding to-do list.

Rick and I first met back when we were in college, about nine years ago. We both debated for our respective universities and were competing against each other at a debate tournament. “Was there a spark then? Could you see the chemistry?” people often ask, hoping for an exciting story. There was, in fact, none of that. We debated, he and his partner won, and we went our separate ways.

Three years later, our paths crossed again when we both taught at a summer debate workshop for high school students at my alma matter. Another year passed before we started dating.

By then, the chemistry was obvious. He was funny. He was handsome. He was smart. He cooked. But he wasn’t Jewish. I’d always been one of just a handful of Jews in my class until college, though, so I was used to having to explain my customs and holidays.

A year after we started dating, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program some seven-plus hours from the apartment we shared in Brooklyn, and I followed him to Buffalo, New York. We knew we wanted the same things for our future, but decided to table the discussion on the whens and hows of the future until closer to the time he completed his Ph.D. program.

We re-kindled that discussion about a year ago after a three-year hiatus. Most of our conversations started with how we’d raise our children. Despite being raised Baptist, Rick didn’t identify with a religion and was perfectly happy to raise them Jewish. He liked the sermons he had heard when he went with me to services during the High Holidays. He liked the Jewish emphasis on tikkun olam, the concept of healing the world. [Read more →]