The Modern Ketubah Blog

I recently read a post by the bride Diorable as she described how she was planning her interfaith wedding. She talked about how they were choosing the traditions they would have in her ceremony, to make it fit the personality and beliefs of her and her fiancé. As she described it: “This isn’t a sundown thing with a ketubah. We are absolutely cherry picking.”

I applaude Diorable’s creativity and drive to create a ceremony tailored to them. The whole point of the wedding is that it is a ceremony of two people coming together as one, and it therefore needs to reflect who those two people are.

“Cherry-picking” traditions is a common way to construct an interfaith wedding ceremony. When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we also cherry-picked different aspects of our combined Jewish and Catholic traditions for our wedding. This let us honor our traditions, while defining our own combined values. We had two friends sing a modern version of the Seven Blessings. Another friend read an updating translation that I wrote of the famous Corinthians passage “Love is patient, love is kind”. We stood under a huppah as my cousin the priest and our rabbi both gave their blessings. We lit a unity candle, then stomped a glass. Some might find this kind of ceremony a little crazy or inauthentic, but we loved it — it fit us perfectly. It wasn’t a Jewish wedding, it wasn’t a Catholic wedding — it was our wedding.

And of course, even aspects of a ceremony that are considered “very traditional” can be modernized and updated to fit your personality. The ketubah is a perfect example. Many people might still assume that having a ketubah automatically makes a wedding very Jewish or very traditional (as Diorable described it “a sundown thing”). But not any longer. Most of the ketubahs I create are for interfaith and multicultural couples. They decided to add this tradition to their ceremony, but didn’t want it to feel overly “traditional”. So they made a ketubah that is modern, inclusive, and very personal.

In our wedding, our crazy combined ceremony worked to bring our two families together in a beautiful and special way. Each side could relate to part of the ceremony, and share the experience of something new. We explained the traditions throughout the ceremony, in simple terms, so that everyone could appreciate the parts they weren’t familiar with. We worked carefully with our rabbi to make sure the ceremony came together as a whole, and that no one felt left out, or confused. And in the end, our families loved it as much as we did. It was as much a celebration of our new marriage, as it was of our families and traditions that helped make us who we are.

Update 2010-03-01: On the blog Fifty Percenters, PrincessMax shared the details of the thoughtful wedding program she created for her interfaith wedding. It is a great example of how you can explain all of the elements of your ceremony to your family and guests, so that they all feel a part of the celebration.

I always love it when I hear from a bride and groom I made a ketubah for, and learn why they chose one of my designs. Beth and Jeremy, and interfaith and intercultural couple, just wrote me to tell me why the Horizon Ketubah was “perfect” for them:

We can’t thank you enough for making this amazing piece of art for us. When we began looking for a ketubah, we knew we wanted something different. We are an interfaith and intercultural couple and when we came across your website, we knew your designs were perfect for us. Not only did we fall in love with your photography, but we also felt deeply connected to your texts. We loved that many of your texts included beautiful language about honoring and learning about each other’s traditions. In fact, we love the text we chose so much that we are using some of it in our wedding vows. Thanks again for making this experience so special. We are so grateful that you do what you do!

Beth and Jeremy chose the Horizon Ketubah

One of my customers, Joey, just shared this description of why she chose my ketubah for her wedding:

“I have to be honest, I am not a “traditional” girl and that is why I was very drawn to your ketubah. I am an interior designer and so the way something looks is obviously very important to me. I love the simple nature of your work… it was honestly exactly what I was looking for. Something simple, modern and clean.”

When you are planning an interfaith wedding, it’s a good idea to provide an explanation of the different traditions in your wedding program. This gives everyone the chance to understand the meanings behind the traditions you selected for your wedding. Plus, it makes both sides of the family feel welcome and included in the ceremony. One of my couples shared with me the text they used in their program:

The Ketubah is the Jewish marriage contract, outlining the responsibilities of the bride and the groom. The Ketubah confirms that Andrew and Joanna willingly accept each other and assume obligations to one another. One of the oldest elements of a Jewish wedding, the Ketubah dates back over two thousand years. Today, most Ketubot (plural form of Ketubah) are spiritual, not legal, covenants that the bride and groom make with one another. Prior to the wedding ceremony, Andrew, Joanna and the Rabbi signed the ketubah in the presence of two witnesses, family and friends.

It is important for everyone to do their part to help preserve our environment. As a small business owner, I work hard to make sure that my business’s carbon footprint is as small as possible. Here’s some examples of how I run a green business:

• My studio in based in my home. I only have to go upstairs to get to work. Since I have no commute, I don’t generate any extra carbon emissions.
• My ketubah store is online and my ordering and proofing processes are completely digital. This ensures quality while minimizing paper waste.
• I actively recycle any paper I do use, as well as all of my used ink cartridges.
• I print my ketubahs individually for each customer, instead of printing them in bulk from a large printer company. This means I am not generating huge amounts of paper waste or consuming tons of excess energy.
• I only print my ketubahs on the highest quality 100% cotton-rag paper. Unlike paper made from tree pulp, cotton is an easily renewable resource. I also only select paper that does not use any artificial brighteners or chemicals. These chemicals not only pollute the environment, they can harm the archival quality of the paper.

I also hope that my artwork, which celebrates the beauty of nature, helps encourage people to respect and protect our natural environment. If you have any questions about my green business policies, please let me know.

I’d like to introduce to you two new ketubah designs I have created: the Evergreen Ketubah and the Sun Daisy Ketubah. Both of these modern ketubah designs are available in two sizes, and can be fully customized with any combination of my English and Hebrew texts and design options.

I created the Evergreen Ketubah from an abstract photograph I took of the needles on a pine branch. The soft green colors and patterns makes for a wonderfully modern, yet natural design, perfect for fall or winter weddings.

I created the Sun Daisy Ketubah from a macro photograph I took of a gerbera daisy. This photograph was one of my first experiments in macro floral photography, and is still one of my favorites. The petals of the flower gracefully open upwards, catching the light.

Sometimes, my best designs are directly inspired by my customers. Marissa and Robert were browsing my fine art photography website, and had fallen in love with this photograph. Marissa really wanted it for her ketubah: “I absolutely love it and those are actually going to be the colors of our wedding,” she told me. That was all the inspiration I needed! I was glad to be able to create a very special ketubah for her, and also have a new design I could offer everyone else.

Lindsey, a new customer, was just telling me why she and her fiancé chose my Center Ketubah, based on a photograph I took of a rose:

My future husband has a thing for roses. He has about 12 different rose bushes growing at our house in Denver. So when we saw your rose ketubahs, we knew we had to get it!

I love this! First of all, it’s an honor to have one of my photographs of a rose selected by a true rosarian. But their story also reminded me of my own:

The rose in the ketubah they chose is actually the same rose that I photographed for my own ketubah that I made for my (then) fiancée and I. We had just moved into an old bungalow in the suburbs of San Francisco. Most of the landscaping was a mess, but on the side of the house was this craggy, ancient rose bush. It had definitely seen better days, and was looking rather bedraggled. But we thought we’d give it a shot. We cleaned up the garden around it, pruned it way back, and hoped for the best. The next spring, we were amazed. The old bush began sprouting the largest and most fragrant roses we had ever seen! The flowers were gorgeous, picture-perfect roses. The biggest blooms could fill your hand, as my fiancée is demonstrating in this photo. For the next week, I would bring out my camera and photograph many of these flowers, preserving them, exploring them, getting to know them.

Shortly afterwards, we were doing research for our ketubah. As you might already know, we weren’t happy with the ones we found, so I had decided to make one myself. After exploring a number of options, I chose a photograph of this exact rose, and created my first ketubah from it. We loved the living symbolism of this flower: how a tough and resilient vine, tended with a little care, could create flowers of such beauty and grace. This said more to us about what it means to be married than any of the more traditional ketubahs we had seen.

Once I started Modern Ketubah, I went on to make a couple more ketubah designs, Center Ketubah and Opening Ketubah, from photographs I took of that same rose. These designs have become some of my most popular. And every time I make a new ketubah from one of them, I smile and think of that old vine by our old house, still blooming, still growing.

The Center Ketubah by Daniel Sroka

If you want the most personal ketubah, you should consider writing your own words. Or, if you are like Lori and Seth, you can mix and match, combining your own words, with the words of others, and even some traditional texts. For their ketubah, Lori and Seth wanted to combine their own text, with the tradition Conservative Hebrew text, and used a favorite song lyric for a custom poetic verse.

It was a lot of text to work with, and at first we weren’t sure it would work! The challenge with putting a lot of text in a ketubah is that it can quickly feel overly crowded, more like a legal document than a work of art. But Lori and I worked closely together, trading emails and phone calls, and I was able to create a ketubah for them that is very personal while still being classy and beautiful.

Lori and Seth customized the Horizon Ketubah

My photography has been nominated in the prestigious international competition The Photography Masters Cup. It is always an honor to be recognized like this, especially when the other nominees are such amazing artists from all over the world. There is some wonderful inspiring art here, and browsing this collection will fuel my creative fire for a while! If you’d like to learn more about the photograph that was nominated, and how I created it from a dried autumn leaf, check out my other blog Daniel Sroka Open Studio.

When my wife and I got married, we were still living in San Francisco, but our wedding was closer to our family in New Jersey. Let me tell you, planning a long distance wedding has its challenges! One of which is how to safely bring your ketubah on the plane with you. I get asked this a lot, so I thought I’d share some advice. First, have me ship your ketubah to you, not to the wedding site. It is really important that you see your ketubah in person, well before the ceremony. This will let you look it over carefully, and make sure that it is exactly what you ordered. And if it got accidentally damaged in shipment, this will give me a chance to replace it for you.

Traveling with your ketubah

I ship your ketubah rolled between sheets of acid-free tissue paper, and placed in an extra-strong shipping tube. Experience has shown that this is the safest way to ship unframed fine art. (Shipping it flat is both more expensive, and results in more damage.) So the best way to travel with a ketubah is to reuse this shipping tube. Place your ketubah between the tissue paper I provided, and carefully reroll in and place it in the tube. You now have a safe and portable package to carry with you. Be sure to bring it with you in carry-on, or stash it safely deep in the middle of your suitcase, surrounded on all sides by clothes.

When you arrive

When you get to the location of your wedding, take your ketubah out of the tube, and let it unroll. The paper will keep its curl for a while, but don’t worry. The paper of your ketubah is 100% cotton-rag, so it will easily “forget” the curl over time. When you remove it, you could gently use the tube to roll it in the opposite direction to remove the curl more quickly. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, just lay it flat like I suggested for a day or so to get rid of the worst of the curl. For my own wedding, I used an inexpensive poster frame to flatten the ketubah, and then protect it throughout the wedding and reception. When you are ready to have it framed, your framer can make sure that any remaining curl is removed.