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Love is in the air by Rabbi Jonathan B. Freirich
As summer begins, so does wedding season here in Tahoe. A wedding can be a moment of beautiful transformation, not just for a couple, but also for their families. A couple marrying creates a new nuclear family – the two of them change their primary identification from their parents and siblings to their spouse. A wedding brings the engaged couple’s multiple families together in joy. What a great event this can be – when two or more families, many of whom have never met, get together for the right reasons, they become one family through the connection of the couple. The creation of this new entity – “our family” from “your” and “my” families – parallels the creation of community. Community comes into being when people share enough experience to see each other as “extended family.” This kind of feeling permeates Temple Bat Yam, where members have worked together to build and maintain a synagogue that functions as our Jewish community center. Our shared experience of maintaining our synagogue and community has made us family. A wedding in the right spirit can do the same thing. Even two people from different cultures can form this kind of extended family together – after all, everyone, no matter how much of a heritage they share, comes from a different “home” culture. As the facilitator of a wedding ceremony, I try to help people celebrate this combining of families. The bigger picture arises when we see that most human disputes become easier to solve when we have a powerful sense of everyone around us as part of our extended family. While many of us quarrel with our families, we still take pride in their unity, and defending them. When we experience a wedding where two families join together in celebration, becoming one, we see fantastic evidence of the way in which we transform the world when we remember that everyone is truly “related” to everyone else. As we find ourselves attending a few weddings this summer, may we all realize the miracles of joining families and treating all others as the family-members of our human family that they are. When we meet someone new, remembering that they are really family, just might make all of our days better. |