Weekend Update - Part 1

Let's see the past four days of July I've seen the temperature vary from 73 and sunny to 81 and sunny. I've seen almost 180 degrees of views of Mount Rainier's dominant visage that without severely spraining my foot and ankle last Thursday would have required a more up-close exploration. I choked down the rage at seeing a perfectly good building facade pocked by misguided militant hippie activism and managed to hold down my lunch while deep behind enemy lines within Greener/hipster central at Darby's Cafe (it would've been even harder had we waited for a table at Sage's). That's right, you guessed it, I was in the great Pacific Northwest for The Fourth and it could not have been nicer (except for maybe without the sprain and the general degradation of my once proud Tree City USA to a Mos Eisley-esque hive of scum and hippie-y).

Anyway, you can't go home again, blah, blah, blah. Like any good Jewish boy from the Northwest, I spent this past Shabbos at the Christian wedding of two of my high school friends. It was both far more religious and far more meaningful than I had previously expected of a couple that's been dating for over 10 years already. For all the time during and since high school that we hung out together, I had completely forgotten that their families were relatively religious. If not their specific families, when the program called for the Lord's Prayer, their extended family and almost everyone invited, without skipping a beat, bowed their heads and recited it from memory in eerily perfect unison. (Though I guess, I could probably do a snap rendition of the Shema, the Shechechiyanu, the Kaddish and a few select others with a big group.)

As isolated and exposed as the Lord's Prayer made me feel, my heart's cockles were warmed by the recitation of a short snip-it of Shir haShirim (2:10 - 13, to be exact). My own wedding featured Shir haShirim heavily, with my kesubah featuring the entire book in micro-calligraphy as ornamentation. Meaning "Song of Songs"(though some English Bibles, including Toni Morrison's, call it "Song of Solomon" instead), Shir haShirim is considered the holiest book in the Tanakh; Rabbi Akiva is famously quoted as saying in Megilla 7a that "If the Torah is Holy, then Shir haShirim is the Holy of Holies." The Commentators indicate that the book, which is read each year during the intermediate days of Pesach (or every Friday night, by Sephardic Jews), is really a mystical love song between G-d and the Jewish people.

The particular portion of Shir haShirim promised that the darkness of winter and its accompanying rain are gone (which pleasantly enough was true in this case) and spoke of the beauties of springtime (birds chirping - check!; sun shining - check!; flowers blooming - check!). Sure Shir haShirim is allegorically speaking of the Exodus from Egypt, but in the Pacific Northwest we'll take nice sunny days on their face value any day.

I think the couple chose not to go for the Shir haShirim mainstay of "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine" (6:3), since modern couples tend to shy away from the more contractual, property-like vestiges of the marriage ceremony which form the basis of the Jewish wedding. But any shout out to the Tanakh, even side-by-side with the ever present Corinthian "Love is patient . . . " quote, is great. This was an especially nice sentiment since Christianity generally maligns HASHEM as a deity of austere punishment in comparison to Jesus's love-based message. Further, the minister tinkered with the "standard" vows to make sure that both bride and groom "choose" their counterpart not just on that day, but every day, as G-d and the Jewish people affirm in daily prayer.

(more later today)