We step out of our comfort zones, leave the familiar behind — and discover inner strengths.
T
Avigail Rubin
It’s important for her to look good today. Not just because it’s a wedding a close relative and a long-awaited celebration. But also because everyone will be there and everyone includes a family she loves and cherishes but differs from fundamentally.
It’s a spectrum of course religious nonreligious and traditional but her little branch of the extended family is the only one boasting black hats and sheitels and skirts past the knee tights year-round and kashrus stringencies that no one else has heard of. The classic “black” family against a multicolored backdrop.
For years now it’s been her goal to bring them closer without lowering her standards to find the common thread. She wants to demonstrate how more unites them than divides them that they are one family in one nation with One G-d and though paths diverge they can still walk together.
Until they can’t.
There’s an extra place laid on the family table at this wedding for a relative’s almost-fiancé. Tall dark and decidedly non-Jewish. The rest of her family the shades of gray and white and in-between have come to resignation and an acceptance of sorts. No they’re not happy but look she’s an adult she’s had a painful life and we have to respect her choices.
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