This past weekend I was Out & About to a wedding up in Brookline. Weddings are lovely things and can even make a cynic like me feel a sense of hope and belief in humankind.
This one involved two families who are deeply involved in traditional Jewish life as well as family tradition and connection. The ceremony was one that has been performed for millennium. The officiating rabbi had officiated at the groom's parent's wedding 38 years before.
The Ketubah was a beautiful work of art, prepared by a friend. A ketubah is the Jewish wedding contract, written in Aramaic. Talk about long roots! Aramaic was the international trade language across the Mediterranean to the borders of India ... around 1000 to 600 BCE.
And yet, and yet, the 2000+-year-old document was a groundbreaking document; it was among the first documents conferring legal status and financial rights to women. Traditional now, but a reminder that our notions of tradition and new might not be quite so clear-cut.
The happy event last weekend celebrated the traditional binding of two people whose lives are also highly digital. In fact, they met in the most technology-enabled of ways, online. On JDate, specifically. A fact that was also mentioned in the midst of this very traditional ceremony - in one sentence we jumped from Aramaic to .com, in a smooth continuum.
JDate labels itself a community of Jewish singles. Like its cousins match.com and eharmony and a multitude of others, it helps the marriage-minded ... or the dating-inclined ... find each other.
And yet, and yet, this most digital of connections, this "killer app" of our e-age, is less ground breaking than the ketubah. It is merely a reconfiguration of one of the oldest trades, the matchmaker.
Using a silicon-based database, rather than the carbon-based one of yore, it makes connections using interests and sensibilities and a host of other factors. Your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother knew about this. And so did her great-great-great-great-great-great aunt. Nothing new, just a new tool for accomplishing the same end.
Throughout the day, this fascinating juxtaposition of deep roots intertwined over and over with shades of technology was an unintentional theme. Klezmer band. Digital mixing. Web page with online wedding registry. China and silverware in boxes on the gift table. And at some point, the two started to look very much alike.
And maybe that's because they are. As a creation of ourselves, digital tools can only serve the same needs, the ones that are part of us. And our technology is -- for better and worse -- only a mirror of ourselves.
The circle of life, as they say, goes on and on. So I toast this - in all its endless array of both analog and digital forms. L'Chaim - To Life.
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