The rushing sound of Kinderhook Creek along the Rensselaer Plateau sings a gracious love song about how God put beauty into the world. My wife and I have hiked the creek several times over the past few years, stopping intermittently to listen to its fugal melodies formed by the movement of water, the leaves rustling in the wind, and the birds chanting chorales from their nests. I once explained to my middle child that hiking with her mother is a romantic experience. I find there is almost nothing more gratifying than luxuriating in the diversity of nature with my partner who, with me, gave life to our three children.
One Sunday morning last May, that same middle child, together with her partner, climbed up and down the plateau with us. The four of us ran, slid, and roped our way down a rather steep hill, at the bottom of which we found the trail to the creek. We meandered toward the water, enjoying the cool provided to us by a mix of mature trees whose high crowns threw down a wonderful light-and-dark mix of sun and shade. While my wife and I stood quietly along the bank, her partner, an agile and athletic young man, effortlessly scrambled up onto a large boulder and stood somewhat precariously over its edge to stare into the stream. Ever the willing hiker, our daughter climbed up and stood alongside him. Soon, it was time to head home, and he came down off the huge stone as quickly as he had gotten onto it. Following him, our daughter hesitated. “I’m not really sure how to get down from here,” she called to him. He walked over to the stone, and he began to calmly direct her feet to the nearest toe-holds in the rock face. Seeing this, I called my wife over. “Take a look at this,” I said gently. For the next minute or two, we watched in hushed, delighted silence as they performed an elegant, focused dance, his instructions met by her movements whose initial hesitancy quickly became sure-footed. As she stepped back onto the ground by his side, I whispered to my wife, “That’s why they’ll make a great team if they get married.”
A year later, the young man is about to become our son-in-law and we’re eagerly anticipating their wedding this summer. They are indeed a great team that makes their life as a couple appear as effortless as their trek up and down that big rock at the creek. Yet as any skilled artist or athlete will tell you, underlying the gossamer lightness of effortless romance are the plodding daily efforts at love. My daughter and her fiancée have mastered this work.
There is an ancient Jewish story about a noblewoman who came to a rabbi with an interesting challenge. She asked him, “What has your God been doing since the creation of the world?” “God has been pairing people together as married couples,” he replied. Unimpressed, the woman responded, “That’s it? I can take a thousand of my slaves and do that in one night!” The rabbi retorted, “You may think this is easy to do, but for God it is as hard as it was to divide the Red Sea during the Exodus from Egypt.” The woman paired off all her slaves, yet the next day, each couple came back to her utterly miserable. She went to the rabbi to acknowledge her defeat. He told her, “I warned you that, for God, bringing two people together as a couple is as hard as it was to split the Sea.”
One need not take this story literally to contemplate its very serious spiritual message: the work of being married successfully can be as hard as it is holy. And yet, we’ve persisted at it since our mythic beginnings in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve became the first couple and the progenitors of humanity. Though not the only legitimate way to express love, marriage continues to draw lovers young and old into its embrace. Perhaps this is because it provides us with a sacred communal structure for supporting a couple in that very private work of walking through life together. That’s why Jewish tradition imagines God standing under the wedding canopy amid the assembled guests, reminding the new spouses, “Don’t worry, you’ve got this, and these people and I have got your backs.”
Soon, under the canopy, my wife, family, friends and I will stand proudly with our children. I’ll weep with gratitude, joy and hope for their journeys, past, present and future. Once again, I’ll watch them in hushed, delighted silence as they bring their most loving effort and intention to moving effortlessly into the next part of their lives. And as we dance the night away in celebration, I’ll thank God for taking their hands and helping them to help each other as they continue to climb.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. He is the author of Cain v Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama (2020, The Jewish Publication Society.) Check out his writings at danornstein.com
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