Weddings, Brides and Grooms: Marc Gafni

Dedicated to Groom Jim and Bride Sonia Sonia,

newly wed this past time, may you always be bride and groom

and to Bruce and Mary married for years modeling for us all how to be

bride and groom every day

What a Weddings Should Be..

Revealers of the Divine

Ever been to a wedding? They can be pretty beautiful. There is a moment when the bride and groom walk down the aisle or look at each other for the first time under the wedding canopy where you just gasp and quietly say, “Oh my God — this is gorgeous!”

It is in the image of this moment that we will understand the enigmatic Kabbalistic koan, “The bride and the groom are revealers of the divine.” We all know that special and wonderful feeling we have as we sit in the audience witnessing the vows of the bride and groom on their wedding day. Something different, other, something divine, is in the air. God, holiness, the force, the Numinous, all of these become felt presences at a wedding.

What evokes their revelation — from what previously veiled corner do these higher presences spring? Teach the Kabbalists, they spring from the hearts of the bride and the groom!
Now you may ask, what is so special about the bride and the groom that their hearts are able to uniquely reveal the divine forces of beauty and goodness in the world? The Kabbalists explain magniifcently: On their wedding day, the bride and groom reveal God by revealing the divine in each other.

The bride sees something in the groom — a glimpse of his infinite specialness, his divinity — that no one has previously been privileged to witness. And the groom likewise perceives something in the infinite specialness of his bride, something that no one — not her parents, not her best friends — have been able to fully grasp. We stand moved, humbled and quietly ecstatic as we witness the revelation of divinity — of the Gods who walk among us. The highest truth and the highest potential in each other is revealed through the prism of love’s light that is the nuptials.

To say then, for example, that the bride loves the groom is consequently to say that the bride perceives the infinite specialness, the divinity, in the groom. In that perceptive experience, she is pleasured and feels the grand rapture and beauty of loving.

Deeper still, we become revealers of the divine, in each other. God sees God.

And we are all brides in grooms to each other. And every day, our wedding.