It was the end of 1985, and our journey down the road to matrimony and to Yiddishkeit had barely begun. Noah and I decided to get married, and since we are both from the East Coast, looked for a date on a long weekend to accommodate the travel plans of our relatives and friends.
Memorial Day weekend, we decided, was the perfect choice. The weather would be beautiful, no chance of rain, and our out-of-town guests would have a fine time in California. At the time that we met, Noah had just sold a business in Massachusetts and was taking a year off from working to relocate to the West Coast. He had traveled to Israel in the fall of 1984, became reconnected with Judaism and upon moving to California was devoting some of his free time to Jewish study. He began to study with Rabbi Yehuda Ferris of Chabad in Berkeley.
My Jewish identity at this point was a product of my Brooklyn, N.Y., upbringing where “everyone was Jewish” or at least seemed that way. For me, it was a cultural thing, having grown up in a Reform household with no congregational affiliation until my brother became old enough to attend Hebrew school. So between Noah and myself, our knowledge of Jewish laws regarding marriage was minimal.
We contacted Rabbi Ferris, asked him to officiate at our wedding, gave him the date, and then proceeded to find the place for the wedding. We were to hold our ceremony outdoors at the Berkeley Marina and then have a party outdoors at the marina, followed by a bay cruise.
Everything was going along fine until one day about six weeks before the wedding when we received a call from Rabbi Ferris informing us that he could not marry us. When we asked why, he told us that the date we selected was during the time between Pesach and Shavuot, when Orthodox are forbidden to get married.
We were in a panic, six weeks before the wedding without a rabbi in sight. I began to call rabbis from the Yellow Pages. We interviewed several candidates: One was in the process of a divorce himself, so we felt that was not a good omen; another was booked. We finally found a rabbi who was available to marry us. We were happy that the wedding could proceed as planned but saddened that we were being married by a stranger, not the charming and friendly Rabbi Ferris.
A few months later, Noah and I got “an upgrade.” The two of us went over to Chabad House, and Rabbi Ferris performed a “kosher” ceremony up on the roof. It was an omen, perhaps, of our lives together and the role that Judaism has played in our family over the past 10 years. Noah went on to found Noah’s Bagels, I went on to become the PR director of the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, and this year our family will be spending a year in Israel.