Dear Friends,
I keep thinking about Eli’s chasunah. He is my grandson, and watching the wedding was something I wish for all of you. Even the trip was great. El Al now announces their times for Minchah and Maariv, and tells their passengers to head to the back gally for minyan 1, then 2, then 3.
It was especially moving because a wedding has a strange way of compressing time. You can look at a person standing under the chuppah and, in the same instant, see the child he was, the young man he became, and the person he is about to become. There was Eli, surrounded by the people who have known him at different stages of his life, about to create something that had never existed before.
It made me think about Rosh Hashanah, the day Hashem made the first human. "– it is not good for man to be alone.” The words are jarring. Hashem had created light and said it was good, the heavens and earth and said they were good, the plants and animals and said they were good, and now there is one thing that is specifically described as not good. Chazal take that "not good" much further than simply saying that a person gets lonely. Bereishit Rabbah says that someone without a wife is without tovah, ezer, simchah, berachah, kapparah, and, according to the later opinions in the Midrash, even shalom and chayim. And then comes perhaps the most striking statement: "שניהם כאחד קרויים אדם" – the two together are called Adam.
Hashem first created Adam as an individual and then tells us that remaining in that condition is lo tov. There is a dimension of humanity that can only emerge when another person becomes part of one's life at that depth. In other words, marriage doesn't just give a person someone to love. It gives him someone for whom he becomes responsible, someone who sees him, someone who needs him, someone who can change him, and eventually a home that exists because the two of them decided to build it.
And then the Torah gives us the phrase "עזר כנגדו". Help opposite him. It is a wonderfully strange expression. If the point were simply companionship, why kenegdo? Rashi, following Chazal, says: "זכה — עזר; לא זכה — כנגדו". If he is worthy, she is a help; if not, don't think the second half should be reduced to the familiar joke that a wife is there to tell her husband when he is wrong. The idea is much more serious. The person closest to you becomes kenegdo because another human being can occupy a position that you cannot occupy by yourself.
There is a wonderful irony here. We spend much of our lives trying to find people who understand us, and then we get married and discover that we have found somebody who understands us too well. That is both the challenge and the gift. The people we meet socially can usually see the version of ourselves that we are prepared to show. The person living with us sees the unedited version. That can be uncomfortable. But it is also one of the greatest opportunities a human being can have. If the relationship has trust, the person who knows where you fall short can also be the person who helps you stand taller.
The Gemara in Yevamot makes ezer almost comically concrete. Rabbi Yosi asks how a woman helps a man: if he brings wheat, does he eat wheat? If he brings flax, does he wear flax? His wife takes what he brings and turns raw material into something usable. The Gemara ends with the beautiful description that she "מאירה עיניו ומעמידתו על רגליו" – she enlightens his eyes and establishes him on his feet.
That may be one of the reasons that marriage can change a person so dramatically. Before marriage, many of us can live largely according to our own internal economy. If we are tired, we rest. If we want something, we pursue it. If we are annoyed, we can walk away. Marriage introduces another person's reality into every one of those calculations. Suddenly the question isn't only, "What do I want?" It becomes, "What does this do to us?" That small change in pronoun is enormous.
And the really remarkable thing is that you don't necessarily notice yourself changing. Nobody wakes up one morning and announces, "Today I have become more patient." It happens because there is a person in the kitchen who needs something. Eventually, the person who entered marriage with a certain set of habits becomes somebody different. Not because marriage magically fixes people, but because living closely with another human being makes it impossible to remain entirely self-contained. They have to learn how to become one household without ceasing to be two people.
And that is a much greater achievement than simply agreeing with one another.
There is a reason the Gemara says "זכה – עזר; לא זכה – כנגדו." The ideal marriage isn't one in which nobody ever challenges anybody. It is one in which the challenge itself can become part of the help. A spouse may be the person who says, "You're capable of more." Or, "You are looking at this the wrong way." Or, "You are being unfair." Or sometimes simply, "You are exhausted and don't realize it." If there is enough love, kenegdo does not have to mean opposition in the destructive sense. It can mean that two people are willing to hold different angles on the same life until together they can see more than either one could have seen alone.
The story of Rabbi Akiva and Rachel is familiar to all of us, so I don't want to retell it. What I find more interesting about it is the question of what Rachel was actually doing when she believed in Akiva. She wasn't marrying the Rabbi Akiva we know. She was making a commitment to a possibility. She saw a person whose present circumstances did not yet reveal his future. That is an extraordinary thing to do for another human being: to look at someone and see potential as well as actuality.
This is true in a completely different way with parents and children. A parent spends years pouring things into a child without knowing exactly what will remain. You teach, repeat, remind, worry, pay, drive, listen, explain, lose patience, apologize, try again, and then one day the child is standing under a chuppah. What is so extraordinary about parenting is that the child eventually takes all of those things and turns them into something that belongs to him. You can give a child a foundation, but you cannot live his life for him.
There is also a painful paradox in successful parenting: the job is to make yourself less necessary. When a child is little, being needed is constant. Then the child begins to do things alone. The way it says in Tehillim – children are like arrows, meant to fly in their own direction.
I think that is a beautiful way to understand what happens at a wedding. We sometimes talk about the old family and the new family as though one ends and the other begins. In reality, the family gets larger. Eli doesn't stop being our Eli. His parents don't stop being his parents. His siblings don't stop being his siblings. But a new relationship has been added that changes the shape of all the existing relationships.
Much of what a child learns about life is never taught to him. He simply watches.
A child watches what happens after his parents disagree. He watches whether an apology is possible. He watches whether people can laugh at themselves. He watches whether Torah belongs only in a sefer or whether it changes the way people behave. He watches whether a person can be exhausted and still be kind. He watches what his parents do for people who cannot do anything for them in return.
Perhaps that is why the phrase "בית נאמן בישראל" is used.
That brings me back to Rosh Hashanah.
So there is something very fitting about entering Rosh Hashanah just after witnessing a wedding. On Rosh Hashanah we return to the beginning of the human story; at a wedding we watch another beginning. We watch another human being take his place in the chain.
And then we hear the shofar.
The shofar doesn't care about any of that.
It is a sound before explanation.
And the Gemara gives us another remarkable connection. We say Malchuyot, Zichronot and Shofarot: we proclaim Hashem as King, we ask that we be remembered for good, and the remembrance is brought through the shofar. Rabbi Abahu then explains why we use a ram's horn: ""כדי שאזכור לכם עקידת יצחק בן אברהם so that the Akedah of Yitzchak will be remembered. His dedication and mesiras nefesh is what drives Jewish people to build a bayit ne’eman.
At Eli's chasunah, I looked backward and forward at the same time.
And perhaps that is why the shofar's wordlessness is so powerful. It doesn't explain the past. It doesn't predict the future. It simply calls us into the present and asks us to remember who we are.
We were created not to remain alone.
We were created to build.
To be ezer and kenegdo.
To be someone's child and eventually someone's parent.
To enter a home and, with Hashem's help, leave it better than we found it.
To take whatever raw material we have been given – our personalities, our families, our strengths, our weaknesses, our opportunities – and somehow turn it into a life.
No words. No explanations. Just the sound of a new beginning.
May Hashem give all of us a year in which we hear that call clearly – and may we be worthy of answering it with the lives we build, the people we love, and the homes we create.
כתיבה וחתימה טובה לכולנו.
With much love,
Tziporah
