At first glance you might think, "isn't this great, these fantastic religious traditions coming together? We all have more in common than we know. It's a beautiful thing." Well that would be WRONG! We have been fighting and dying over our religious distinctions for centuries to straighten this out, and now that we have established these vital separations, we are going to muck things up all over again? Noting that this would appear to be a one way street. You are not going to see any Jews vaulting over the fence and eating bacon, changing light bulbs, or singing in choirs, all traditional Christian activities. No, they know they are fine the way they are. But it's the Christians here that are messing around with wedding contracts and even saying, "this document is more valid than a state license." Not in this house it isn't!
Noting also that this was published in the New York Times, which like most of the remaining high quality media outlets is controlled by Jews, so in a way they are crowing about this, like "we are taking over babe oh yeah, in your FACE Christians!" And what is wrong with CHRISTIAN history anyway? They've got a long tradition of going all over the world and forcing others to go along with them, and plenty of these people end up liking it and making splendid jewelery and beautiful crosses and stuff like that. And let's not forget how they settled that mess with Gallileo. Lots to be proud of there, and no reason at all to start preferring Jewish history, because even if Jesus was a Jew (probably true), they really didn't get what he was saying.
In my opinion, these weddings shouldn't count. This happens all the time. Years ago I had a wife and the doorbell rang and a man in a suit told me the priest who married us wasn't a priest so the wedding was invalid. "Good day sir," he said as he left. "And good day to you too dear," I said to...that woman, going out right behind.
In a San Antonio chapel last August, after reciting their wedding vows and exchanging their rings, Sally and Mark Austin prepared to receive communion for the first time as husband and wife. Just before they did, their minister asked them to sign a document. It was a ketubah, a traditional Jewish marriage contract.
The Austins’ was not an interfaith marriage. Nor was their ceremony some sort of multicultural mashup. Both Sally and Mark are evangelical Christians, members of Oak Hills Church, a nationally known megachurch. They were using the ketubah as a way of affirming the Jewish roots of their faith.
In so doing, the Austins are part of a growing phenomenon of non-Jews incorporating the ketubah, a document with millennia-old origins and a rich artistic history, into their weddings. Mrs. Austin, in fact, first learned about the ketubah from her older sister, also an evangelical Christian, who had been married five years earlier with not only a ketubah but the Judaic wedding canopy, the huppah.
“Embracing this Jewish tradition just brings a richness that we miss out on sometimes as Christians when we don’t know the history,” said Mrs. Austin, 28, a business manager for AT&T. “Jesus was Jewish, and we appreciate his culture, where he came from.”
Beyond its specific basis in Judaism, the ketubah represented to the Austins a broader concept of holiness, of consecration. “We wanted a permanent reminder of the covenant we made with God,” Mrs. Austin said. “We see this document superseding the marriage license of a state or a court.”
[The New York Times]
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