As we celebrate the ten year anniversary of legal same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, we’ve invited members of the community to share their reflections. Today’s post comes from Rabbi Toba Spitzer of
Congregation Dorshei Tzedek
, a Reconstructionist rabbi who performed same-sex religious weddings before the verdict—but was finally able to legally marry Massachusetts same-sex couples 10 years ago.
I performed a number of weddings while still a rabbinical student, in the mid-1990s, as my friends began to make lifetime commitments and, being unaffiliated, turned to me—clergy in training!—to help them with their ceremonies. It was somewhat ironic that so many of my (straight) friends and acquaintances turned to me for this particular lifecycle event, as I had never been a huge fan of marriage. That may have been due to my own inklings as a kid that heterosexual white-wedding fantasies were not for me, or due to many years of being single and having to sit through other people’s weddings, or to my feminist and lesbian questioning of an institution that had historically been far from progressive.
Yet with all of that, I was happy to help my friends take this first step in creating a Jewish household together. My movement, Reconstructionism, was the first to officially sanction same-sex religious ceremonies, and so I had no qualms about helping anyone, gay or straight, craft a Jewish ceremony that reflected their sensibilities and values.
What I realized, however, soon after I began to do weddings, was that I had no interest in being an agent of the state for an institution that discriminated against me. Once I became a rabbi, I concluded that to sign a marriage license for a heterosexual couple would be somewhat akin to driving a bus that I was forced to sit at the back of. If I couldn’t get legally married, then how in the world could I participate in legally sanctioning the marriages of others?
And so, my policy for doing (heterosexual) weddings was that the couple would need to take care of the civil piece themselves, and further, that somewhere in the ceremony we would need to mention that legal marriage remained a privilege not accessible to everyone. With these two stipulations in place, I found myself able to stand under the chuppah with couples with a sense of integrity and wholeheartedness.
When the SJC (Supreme Judicial Court) handed down its landmark decision in 2003, I realized that my policy would soon be up for revision. As it happened, the first wedding I had scheduled for the spring of 2004, once the new marriage laws were in place, involved a lesbian couple. Not only that, but they had decided—for reasons of their own—to hold the ceremony in a restaurant with a bowling alley.
I had decided before rabbinical school that my achievable lifetime goal would be to bowl in every state of the U.S. (My unachievable goal would be world peace). So to officiate at my first civilly-sanctioned same-sex marriage in a bowling alley was too good to be true! And indeed, it was a marvelous moment when I signed the civil document, and under the chuppah pronounced the couple, by the power invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, legally married.” Mazel tov!
