The Costco Envelope

I have attended weddings where one evening cost more than some families spend at Costco in a lifetime.

The flowers were magnificent.

The music was magnificent.

The food was magnificent.

By midnight, much of it was gone.

And that has left me with an uncomfortable question:

When did we begin spending so much on the first day of a marriage that we risk forgetting what the other eighteen thousand days are for?

I ask this without judgment. I love weddings. I love simcha. I love watching two Jewish souls stand beneath a chuppah surrounded by parents, grandparents, family, friends, dancing, blessings, and tears.

But I remember another kind of wedding.

And sometimes I wonder whether; in gaining so much, we have also forgotten something.

Behind the Carpets

I spent the first seven years of my childhood in Tashkent.

It was still the Soviet Union. People generally had far less, and the differences between families were not displayed with the intensity we see today.

I remember weddings taking place outside.

Carpets and draperies would be hung around the perimeter, transforming an ordinary outdoor space into a celebration. Families worked. People cooked. Kosher food did not simply appear from a caterer's truck; preparing it required effort, coordination, hands.

There was food. There was anticipation. There was music. There was unity.

Most importantly, there was family.

Perhaps someone with more money served another delicacy. Perhaps another family had additional musicians and made a little more noise. But the central attraction was unmistakable:

Two people were getting married.

The wedding existed to celebrate the marriage.

It was a family event par excellence.

Decades later, much of the Bukharian Jewish community has rebuilt itself in Queens, New York. Baruch Hashem, families who arrived with little have built businesses, professions, homes, institutions, synagogues, yeshivot, and extraordinary wealth.

That is a blessing. But prosperity creates its own tests. One of them may be what we have allowed the Jewish wedding to become.

The Price of an Invitation

Several times a year, I am invited to extraordinarily elaborate weddings.

I go happily. I wish the parents mazal tov. I bless the bride and groom that Hashem should give them health, children, shalom bayit, parnasa, and a beautiful Jewish home.

But sometimes an invitation arrives carrying something invisible inside it.

An expectation.

In certain circles, a couple may feel expected to give something approaching $700 as a wedding gift.

Seven hundred dollars.

For some people, perhaps that is insignificant.

For a Jewish family paying tuition, rent or mortgage, groceries, insurance, clothing, utilities, Shabbat expenses and everything else required to raise children, it is not insignificant at all.

Think about what $700 can represent in an ordinary household: a substantial Costco trip with fish, eggs, milk, cheese, yogurt, produce, bread, rice, pasta, cereal, snacks, coffee, drinks, frozen foods, diapers, wipes, paper towels, toilet paper, detergent, cleaning supplies, toiletries, and household necessities.

A cart filled with life.

And suddenly that same amount can become the price a person feels he must place inside an envelope because someone invited him to dinner.

That should make us think.

Not because generosity is wrong. Give generously when you can. Celebrate generously when you can.

But a Jewish invitation should never feel like an invoice.

A person should be able to enter our simcha with $700, $180, $100—or nothing—and feel exactly as wanted.

Because we invited a human being.

Not an envelope.

Four Hundred Chairs

Now reverse the perspective.

If attending the wedding can create pressure, imagine producing one.

Take a large 400-person wedding in New York and begin adding the pieces: venue and catering; music and entertainment; flowers and décor; photography and video; clothing; jewelry; transportation; invitations; beauty services; tips; the celebrations surrounding the wedding; and, in some communities, additional meals and Sheva Berachot extending throughout the week.

Depending on choices and level of luxury, an elaborate celebration can move toward hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So let us use $300,000—not as the price of every wedding, because it certainly is not, but as an illustration of what an all-in luxury wedding cycle can become.

Now place that number beside another one.

Suppose Hashem blesses the young couple with fifty years together.

That is approximately:

18,263 days.

Day 1:

$300,000.

Days remaining:

18,262.

Eighteen thousand two hundred sixty-two mornings to wake up beside each other.

Shabbatot.

Children.

Bills.

Pregnancies.

Tuition.

Jobs.

Lost jobs.

Mortgages.

Doctors.

Parent-teacher conferences.

Yom Tov.

Arguments.

Apologies.

Illnesses.

Vacations.

Aging parents.

Celebrations.

Disappointments.

Thousands of dinners at the same table.

Thousands of ordinary evenings when there is no orchestra, no photographer, no flowers, and nobody applauding.

That is the marriage.

The wedding is one day.

The marriage is everything that follows.

An Everlasting Building

This is why I find the Lubavitcher Rebbe's language about marriage so powerful.

The Rebbe repeatedly emphasized the traditional description of Jewish marriage as a Binyan Adei Ad—an everlasting edifice. Like any building, its endurance depends primarily upon its foundation; for a Jewish home, that foundation is Torah and mitzvot.

And remarkably, the Rebbe addressed wedding expenses directly.

In a 1961 letter, he wrote that there is a misconception that a wedding must involve burdensome expenses. The mitzvah is to increase the joy of the bride and groom; that does not mean excessive spending is necessary. What matters is that the simcha be genuinely happy and heartfelt.

What an extraordinary distinction.

Maximum joy does not require maximum expense.

The goal of a Jewish wedding is not to create one magnificent night.

It is to create a holy home that can illuminate generations.

Husband and wife join to build something larger than either of them individually. When the home is built with holiness, the Shechinah dwells between them. Their home becomes another link in the Jewish people—children and, with Hashem's blessing, grandchildren living lives of Torah and mitzvot. The Rebbe described the Jewish home as an everlasting structure, capable of becoming an abode for the Divine Presence.

That is magnificence.

Flowers are beautiful.

But they are not the foundation.

My $2,000 Rebellion

About ten years ago, when my son Naftali was born, I had an opportunity to test whether I actually believed any of this.

Both sides of the family wanted a large brit milah.

Perhaps 200 people.

A hall.

A live band.

Flowers.

The entire production.

My wife and I listened respectfully.

Then we went first to my parents and later to my in-laws and proposed something very simple.

“If this is the celebration you want, that's fine. Are you willing to pay for the entire event yourselves—and allow us to keep whatever gifts come in, since we will eventually be invited to the celebrations of many of these same people?”

The answer was no.

We respected their answer.

And then essentially said:

Then please allow us to do it our way.

We held the brit at the BJCC Youth Minyan.

We placed three large tables in the hallway.

We spent about $2,000 on breakfast from a bagel store on Main Street. Bagels. Lox. Cream cheese. Fish. Eggs. Plenty of food.

No flowers.

No alcohol.

No orchestra.

No spectacle.

And something remarkable happened.

People loved it.

Not everyone merely tolerated our simplicity. People came over afterward and thanked us.

Some said:

“Cohen, you opened the door for us. Now we can make something like this for our children and grandchildren.”

And then came comments I have never forgotten.

Friends quietly told me they were grateful because that particular day they simply did not have the money for a large envelope.

Think about that.

A person had come to celebrate the entrance of a Jewish child into the covenant of Avraham Avinu—and somewhere in the back of his mind he had been worried about whether he could afford to attend.

Something is wrong with that equation.

Our simple brit did not diminish the mitzvah.

It released people to experience it.

And instead of spending tens of thousands more because convention demanded it, we kept those resources for the family and life that would follow.

That morning taught me something important:

Sometimes someone has to be willing to go first.

Sixteen Years Later

I have now been married for sixteen years.

We have four children.

And our marriage has traveled through years of oncology treatments and circumstances that the young couple standing beneath our chuppah could never have imagined.

Life teaches perspective.

When you are young, the wedding can look enormous because it stands directly in front of you.

After sixteen years, you understand how small it was.

Not unimportant.

Small.

The wedding was the doorway.

Then came the house.

Marriage is what happens when the photographer leaves.

It is who sits beside you in a hospital.

Who raises children with you.

Who carries the family when you cannot.

Who worries with you.

Who forgives you.

Who celebrates the victories nobody else sees.

Who knows the version of you that never appears dressed for a wedding.

Young couples deserve to be shown that horizon.

We should prepare them not merely for the night of their lives, but for the life after that night.

I Am Not Asking for Cheap Weddings

This is not an argument against beauty.

If Hashem has blessed a family abundantly and they wish to make a beautiful wedding without burdening themselves or others, mazal tov. Celebrate. Dance. Feed people generously. Honor the bride and groom.

Nor am I proposing a communal price list.

I am asking for something much simpler.

Sensitivity.

Before we create expectations, ask what those expectations do to other people.

Before we decide that a certain envelope is “normal,” remember the family buying groceries.

Before we add another layer of extravagance because everyone else does it, ask whether it adds joy—or merely cost.

Before parents spend everything on the first day, remember the 18,262 days waiting behind it.

And before judging someone else's smaller celebration, consider that perhaps they have understood something the rest of us have forgotten.

The Empty Envelope

I still remember those outdoor weddings in Tashkent. Carpets hanging around the perimeter. Families preparing food. Children running around. People gathering. A bride. A groom.

A family becoming larger.

They possessed less.

I am not certain the simcha was smaller.

Perhaps we have reached a moment when our community can demonstrate a new form of wealth: the confidence not to prove that we have it.

Make beautiful weddings.

But make room for the person who cannot afford your standard.

Invite him anyway.

Want him anyway.

Seat him with dignity.

Dance with him.

Bless him.

And if his envelope is empty, let his heart be enough.

Because fifty years from now, nobody will remember whether the centerpiece was three feet tall or six.

But the bride and groom may still be sitting across from one another.

Older.

Changed.

Surrounded, with Hashem's blessing, by children and grandchildren.

The orchestra will have been silent for half a century.

The flowers will be gone.

The photographs will have faded.

And the only question that will matter is whether what began beneath that chuppah became what it was always supposed to become:

a Binyan Adei Ad.

An everlasting Jewish home.

Perhaps that is where our communal conversation should begin.

Not:

How magnificent can we make the wedding?

But:

How much dignity, sensitivity, holiness, and strength can we give the marriage that begins when the wedding ends?