Why my wife and I decided to extend our honeymoon by another 44 years
MY feature story this week on three generations of the Sklare family (“Twists, Turns, and Truth” in the Longreads section) brought me back to one of those decisive moments in my life and my wife’s when our entire future trajectory flipped. That is what attracted me to the topic of the feature in the first place.
The two decisive figures in that change of direction were Rav Nachman Bulman ztz”l, who figuratively held our hands during the summer of 1979, and, in a strange way, Marshall Sklare, whom we never met.
My wife and I came to Israel on our honeymoon in late June 1979. After practicing law for two years, I was headed to a rabbinical program at the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) that fall. I was supposed to spend the summer in Israel in a preparatory program, but I did not find the program serious enough, and my wife and I soon decamped for Ohr Somayach, which in those days had both men’s and women’s branches.
One of my wife’s teachers was Rabbi Beryl Gershenfeld, who had been scheduled to begin law school with me, but had spent the intervening six years in Jerusalem finishing half of Shas instead. I, by contrast, had still never opened a Gemara.
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