Wedding

This past weekend, I attended my first Jewish wedding. It was wonderful! It was a perfect blending of setting and people.

The setting was the Whispering Pines Conference Center in Rhode Island. The wedding day, Saturday, was awash in perfect May sunshine. It seemed as if the bride and groom had supernatural connections since the day was sandwiched between two rainy storms. Nature itself blessed the day.

The people were all very friendly to me even though I was a stranger among them. That is, Mary is the ex-girlfriend of the father, Ilan, of the bride. I was with Mary, of course. Though I was a stranger, I felt right at home.

While I've always liked Ilan, I like him all the more now. I enjoyed watching him revel in his role as grandfather as well as father of the bride. The genuine affection returned to him spoke volumes about him—all good.

In that lives one of my measures of a man—how good he acts toward those he professes to love speaks far more to me than his explicit ideas. This is consistent with my comments earlier about excellence.

Speaking of excellence, Ilan's toast to the new couple after the ceremony was both outrageously funny and touching at the same time. When he sat down, he positively beamed with happiness. I turned to Mary and told her that I liked him before and liked him all the more now, adding playfully: "What did you ever see in this guy!?"