It was a first-ever, unmatched happening in Bay Area history: same-sex couples tying the knot in San Francisco City Hall. From Feb. 12 to March 11, more than 4,000 couples — including many Jewish ones — obtained city-sanctioned marriage licenses.
And how are local rabbis keeping up with the times? One might imagine them scurrying to make changes to their prenuptial texts in order to accommodate gay couples.
Well, that’s not the case, say several Bay Area Reform rabbis.
“We’ve had to make some language adjustments, but that’s a no-brainer,” says Rabbi Allen Bennett of Temple Israel in Alameda. “The scenario is no different for a mixed-gender couple. If I’m doing a wedding for any couple — it doesn’t matter what their gender is — we go through a series of pre-wedding meetings, about four to six hours, in which we’re primarily dealing with issues around the ceremony.”
In fact, Bennett’s belief that “ceremonies are ceremonies, period” is so definite he has no record of how many same-sex vs. gender-mixed ceremonies he has led in the last 30 years.
“I take each couple as they come, and deal with them on their level,” the Reform rabbi explains. “I infuse the situation with as much Jewishness as possible. That’s the goal.”
The Reform movement has called for civil same-sex marriage for many years. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional association of some 1,800 Reform rabbis, passed a resolution in 1996 opposing “governmental efforts to ban gay and lesbian marriage.”
The Reform movement’s congregational arm, recently named the Union of Reform Judaism, followed suit in 1997, resolving to “support secular efforts to promote legislation which would provide civil marriage equal opportunity for gay men and lesbians.”
Same-sex marriage is not condoned by the Orthodox movement. And while the Conservative movement does not sanction such unions, most Conservative rabbis in the Bay Area will officiate at same-sex ceremonies.
Rabbi Ted Alexander, spiritual leader of the Conservative Congregation B’nai Emunah in San Francisco, performed his latest same-sex marriage earlier this month in his own back yard in Danville.
“As a Conservative rabbi, I see no difference” between same-sex and mixed-gender marriages. “Most of my conservative colleagues are doing same-sex ceremonies, too,” he says. “It’s high time that we do!”
Asked if his premarital counseling differs between same-sex and mixed-gender couples, Alexander says: “What it depends on is the couple. I’m dealing with human beings, and the psyche of every human being is different. I counsel them to have the whole ceremony, and to have a family, using either a sperm donor or by adoption. … I also advise them that they’ll have to deal with some discrimination, just as Jews have had to deal with anti-Semitic remarks.”
When she counsels engaged couples, Rabbi Janet Marder of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills asks all, regardless of gender, to take the same relationship survey. She poses questions such as:
• As our wedding approaches, I feel …
• My main concern about getting married is …
• What I admire most about my fiancé(e) is …
• My least favorite household chore is …
Congregants Lisa Rauchwerger and Kaila Schwartz began meeting with Marder earlier this spring to prepare for their August wedding. “We took this survey and then Rabbi Marder read the answers to us,” Rauchwerger says. “We compared how we’d answered each question. It was like ‘The Dating Game.'”
The questions were not gender-focused, but rather sparked conversation about important relationship issues, Rauchwerger said. “We were able to talk about how we each deal with anger, for example. Rabbi Marder said that arguing is OK, but you have to learn how to do it so you don’t hurt the other person.”
Rauchwerger, a freelance author, artist and graphic designer, is the daughter of the congregation’s librarian, Diane Rauchwerger. She met Schwartz, 36, at a gay-oriented synagogue in Cleveland. Returning to the Bay Area together, they registered as domestic partners during the San Francisco Pride celebrations of 2002.
“The reason we joined Congregation Beth Am was that we could join as a couple and we didn’t have to put up a fight,” Rauchwerger, 39, says. “It’s going to be a traditional Jewish wedding; it just happens to be between two women.”
Rabbi Yoel Kahn, director of the Taube Center for Jewish Life at the JCCSF, wed his longtime partner under a chuppah 13 years ago, but earlier this year they secured a marriage license from San Francisco City Hall.
“We thought about it as the state catching up with where we’ve been,” Kahn said with respect to his marriage to Dan Dellm, his partner of 22 years.
Still, some rabbis, like Kahn, acknowledge that at times, issues specific to same-gender couples might arise before a wedding.
Recalling a talk that Marder gave years ago, Kahn paraphrased her, saying, “On the one hand, gay and lesbian couples deserve no less than anyone else. We should bring the same experience and responsibilities into marriage. On the other hand, they need not be identical, because they are not identical.
“Having the wedding may be celebratory, but it might bring up feelings for the family,” says Kahn. “Some couples might experience alienation. Some couples might experience rejection from their family, or from the rabbi they grew up with.”
Rabbi Nancy H. Wiener of New York City, the author of “Beyond Breaking the Glass: A Spiritual Guide to Your Jewish Wedding,” writes on the Shalom Center Web site, www.shalomctr.org, about meeting with a rabbi before marrying her partner in 1991:
“During our meetings it became clear that we were teaching her more about our lives, as lesbian Jews preparing for a wedding, than she was teaching us about marriage or ourselves. Our wedding was wonderful. But we wondered how it might have been different if she had been able to anticipate some of our specific needs.”
Wiener stresses: “When it comes to working with same-sex couples, we must recognize that we are all products of a Jewish world that, for millennia, said: Jewish weddings are for men and women only. We are products of a Jewish world that could not even conceive of a same-sex Jewish wedding. Only in recent decades have some of our communities begun to learn, and perhaps teach others, that people of all sexual orientations can have loving, committed and enduring relationships.”
And that’s exactly what Temple Israel’s Bennett wants to stress here in the Bay Area. “I’ve been doing weddings for 30 years, and there have never been two weddings that have ever been the same. Weddings are some of the most emotional things that happen in someone’s life. It’s not any better or worse for two people who are of the same gender.”