A progressive Rabbi’s advice on planning your Jewish wedding, preparing for a happy marriage, and writing your own ketubah
Five years ago, Rabbi Getzel Davis was working at Harvard Hillel full-time, and his phone kept ringing. Former students, friends and acquaintances across the country wanted him to perform their wedding ceremonies and other lifecycle events. He had to turn most of them down.
With an inclusive, meet-you-where-you are approach to spirituality, his perspective was in high demand. Davis saw an opportunity: create a resource for engaged couples across the religious spectrum to find a Rabbi that aligns with their personality and beliefs. Today, his matchmaker-for-officiants, UNORTHODOX Celebrations, receives 2-3 inquiries per day, and has connected nearly 1,000 couples with progressive Rabbis that embrace interfaith, queer and non-traditional weddings.
In working to find couples’ “perfect match” officiant, Davis quickly found that the transition to married life was a challenge for many - and saw a chance for couples to enrich their relationships, strengthen their bond, and in the process, connect to and better understand their spirituality. Building on his Rabbinical education, Davis pursued further training in family and couples counseling at Massachusetts General Hospital, and became certified in Family Systems Therapy, which helps couples see themselves as a unit - two parts of the same whole.
He founded ZIVUG, which offers group classes for engaged couples and those in their first year of marriage (now available virtually to couples around the world!), to provide the support they need as they make the transition from separate to together, forever.
We were lucky to chat with Rabbi Davis about weddings and marriage.
On the significance of planning and holding a wedding, and his favorite part of the Jewish wedding ceremony
All those stressful details, difficult conversations and compromises you have to make as you plan your wedding together? Rabbi Davis counts them as important parts of getting married, “an exercise, or ritual enactment” of how you will continue to weather challenges as a team moving forward.
If it sometimes feels like you’re putting on a show, not a wedding, that’s no accident either. Having a wedding ceremony, Davis says, is all about the witnessing - for a traditional Jewish wedding to take place, you’ll need at least 10 people present to observe. “The wedding is about being viewed as married,” he said, “so that we are able to view ourselves as married.” What makes this performance so unique, and planning a ceremony so rife with sensitive choices, is that much more than your love is on display - after becoming B’nei Mitzvah, the wedding is “the first opportunity that many people get to perform and express their spirituality to others,” he says.
One Jewish tradition he considers especially meaningful is the practice of “Seven Circles,” a liturgic unit in the Jewish ceremony wherein each partner walks around their beloved seven times, symbolizing “making that person the gravitational center” of your life, he explained. Traditionally, only a bride would circle her groom, but Davis is a strong proponent of updating traditions in service of equality, and makes sure the ritual is practiced by both partners symetrically.
On marriage
Though most people come to UNORTHODOX, Davis’ officiant-referral service, looking to check a simple task off their wedding to-do list, he knows: “A lot of people want to have a happy marriage.” ZIVUG, which offers courses like “Activist Couples Preparing for Marriage,” and covers topics like “How to fight better,” offers space for couples to set the foundation for a happy, conscious union.
Citing evidence that premarital counseling begets longer and happier unions, he believes that most couples would benefit from contemplating and nurturing the future of their partnership with the same focus and time commitment they devote to wedding planning. It’s apt that “most people who seek out counseling are in a major lifecycle event,” Davis says, as the transition to marriage (and later, parenthood) are counted among the most stressful phases of life.
Though Davis started performing wedding ceremonies before he was married himself, he’s now a husband and a father. He tells us he’s learned firsthand, “I’m not the center of my own story anymore.” It changed his life and his spirituality. Prior to getting married, he said, “My spirituality was inward-facing.” Making a lifelong commitment to marriage taught him the power of having an “other,” “how we join, and how we’re sometimes unable to join.”
The relationship with your spouse, he says, can be a microcosm of your relationship with One (or G-d, source, spirit).
“My wife is my greatest teacher in the world,” he says,” I call her my Rabbi.”
A great place to start the conversation about the life you’d like to build with your partner, Davis recommends, is to consider what you want to change after you get married. Though engaged couples frequently declare that ‘nothing will change’ in the relationship after the wedding day, marriage is a big transition, inevitably driven by the pursuit of a shared life that is somehow fundamentally distinct from the one you share while dating or engaged. Is it the weight of commitment, a united family, having children, the choice to stop searching for other people or something else that motivates you?
If you feel drawn to considering questions like these in a supportive group, woven with wisdom from Jewish tradition, mysticism, and modern psychology, check out ZIVUG. Davis’ group courses and individual counseling sessions are both available worldwide, virtually, and in-person to couples in the Boston area. They work with engaged couples, couples in their first year of marriage, and new parents.
On writing your own ketubah
The ‘final project’ for ZIVUG couples is to write their own ketubah text, which serves as a “marriage mission statement” and brings together their unique hopes, vision and values for life together. It makes sense for couples to take the time to compose a personal text, Davis says, because “everyone’s marriage is going to be different.”
Find a text (or several) that resonate with you? Mix and match, pulling language from a variety of sources and update them to make them your own, Davis advises the couples he works with.
On their own ketubah, Davis and his wife honored her work as a palliative care doctor with a couple of sentences about how they will support each other through illness and death.
Concerned about breaking tradition by straying from the standard, classic text? Davis reassures - “No one actually does what is said in the traditional ketubah, anyway!
We are great admirers of UNORTHODOX and ZIVUG, and believe strongly in the value of premarital counseling. Enroll in a ZIVUG class and receive 10% off a custom Foreverie Paper ketubah design (reg. $350) to complement your carefully considered ketubah text - just forward us your receipt for a coupon code!