This past Sunday, Jessica and I had our first Skype conversation with the Rabbi who will be officiating at our wedding.  This being the first of such meetings, it made our upcoming wedding feel very close, even though it is only 8 months away!
After covering the basics (our Hebrew names, our parents Hebrew names) we spent some time discussing the timeline for the day. The schedule we had constructed was pretty close but may require some tweaking next year as things come together.
Part of the reason we were discussing our and our parents Hebrew names was related to the topic of the Ketubah, the Jewish marriage document. These names need to be spelled correctly when the Ketubah is ordered. While I had known from my Hebrew school days that the Ketubah was designed to give brides rights under marriage, I did learn some new facts about this ancient document. One thing that was particularly interesting for me was that towards the bottom of Aramaic text (the Ketubah is not in Hebrew, it’s in Aramaic) was a word that was incomplete. Specifically the letter kuf was missing it’s stem (regel, lit. “leg”), so it looked like a malformed lamed. What I learned was that when the document is drawn up before the wedding, there needs to be some element that makes it written especially for us on the day of the wedding. Thus, at the time of signing, the Rabbi will fill in the missing part of the letter so that the Ketubah is technically written on the day of the wedding!
We have our next Skype session in about a month. Stay tuned: cake tasting is up next!
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