When You Know It Is Real

So the beloved and I, and plenty of friends (you know who you are) all attended a wedding this weekend, a Traditional Jewish Same Sex wedding held in a Conservative shul.  Now of course the historical and social significance of it all had me reeling and giddy, but so did the reverence and joy.  The grooms were two of the finest upstanding robust flowers of Jewish manhood as you would ever wish to meet, religious specialists both.  All the details were liturgically impeccable.  And, as tradition commands, we all drank and danced and feasted and rejoiced and everything came off, as far as I could tell, in just the sort of rich happy golden glow one likes to have a wedding go off in, the kind of glow one looks forward to seeing deepen by the fiftieth anniversary.

The table we sat at was full of friends, one of whom was a young rabbi, and she said "This whole wedding is very haimish."  Now the word she used sounded like the Scottish man's name, and I'd not heard it before, so she went on the explain it as a sort of "family coziness feel" which sounded to me like about the best way to have a wedding.  All the parents and grandparents had participated.

But what really touched the whole thing into utter seriousness, what marked the event as true in heaven as on earth, politics and religion and ritual and society and even love and commitment aside, was when I saw the old women dance.  Grandmothers hooking canes over their elbows to dance, one woman getting out of her wheelchair to dance at this wedding, middle aged women circling gently with her as the young men went careening around in their long chains, never endangering her.

What could make God's will for these two young men more clear than this?