Thursday, February 17, 2005

Helping a friend with his wedding...

I just spent some quality time helping a close friend with the details of getting married. There is just so much to take care of when it comes to the religious requirements. No man is an island, everyone needs help.

I would say that the wedding is one of the most important part of a person's life. Marriage is not about saving on the rent or merging bank accounts. It is about starting a *new* life with another person. This doesn't only happen on the physical level -- on a spiritual level, from what I think I understand, a new being is created -- a new soul. Marriage is the completion of both the husband and the wife to form a new and complete entity from which children will issue. This is a beautiful thing.

A wedding between a man and a woman is the physical re-creation of the wedding between the Jews and G-d when we received the Torah, the biggest event in history. What we do down here in the physical world corresponds to what happens in the spiritual world, and vice versa. When we marry, we re-create the relationship in our world between G-d and man, and the world continues. This is not a story, this is what happens on a spiritual level. This is so big that I can't even grasp the gravity of the concept, but you get the point.

This reminds me of a story from "Hayom Yom" that moved me. The Lubavicher Rebbe's wife was once talking to her friends and she related something said by her husband (the Rebbe). He said "With one mitzvah I acquired you as a wife. How much moreso with all of the mitzvas does G-d acquire us?"

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