sam and dave: the culture

Greetings from Montreal. Welcome back from Thanksgiving!
The death of a loved one is always a surprise, no matter how prepared you are. Unfortunately, we have been surprised by a death in the family. We celebrated Thanksgiving in Connecticut, but were called away for a funeral mid-vacation, and are now in Montreal until Tuesday. As always, I'm grateful to have friends in this case who can fill my shoes and post something relevant. Having said that, I'm going to pass you all over to Samantha for her regular Monday morning post:


This wedding is such a dichotomy for me. Dave is my perfect match in so many ways including our cultural upbringing and current views on religion. We are both agnostic yet were raised in the Jewish culture. His grandparents had a great role in raising him and were Holocaust survivors. Mine were both raised in Jewish communities and in families that celebrated their culture by observing with friends and family (in a reform and festive way). I was raised within a relaxed cultural context. Dave’s upbringing was a little more stringent, but not much. We chose to favor the cultural components of faith instead of the religious, for us it’s primarily about family not personal faith.
We can’t imagine eloping like my folks did because we want to share our experience and set our cornerstone with the friends and family. Nor do we want a stranger marrying us. A close family friend of my family (whose son I grew up with) is a rabbi. We would like to have him marry us but don’t particularly want a religious ceremony, yet we don’t want to deny the culture of our families or ancestors. It’s quite complex to explain that to us there’s a line between culture and religion without insulting family, but that we don’t feel that a marriage is necessarily a religious event.