What you can learn by writing your own interfaith ketubah text
I get asked by a lot of interfaith couples how they can make their ketubah reflect both of their traditions. Often the best way is to write your own text. Writing your own words gives you the chance to have your ketubah express a very personal statement about who you are, and what your wedding represents to you. My wife and I did this for our own ketubah. We began by doing a lot of research, examining the traditions of our religions and reading books on other wedding vows and blessings. We collected everything that “resonated” with us, and expressed what we believed. We then worked together to combine these into one very personal and unified statement.
By going through this process, we learned a lot about each other and about ourselves. This was one of our first tasks as an interfaith couple, were we really had to think about what being “interfaith” would mean. Since we came from different religions, we couldn’t casually rely on our traditions, safely assuming that we both had a similar understand about marriage. Instead, we actually had to think hard about what marriage meant to us. We had to learn what our different traditions said about love and marriage, and discuss how they were similar and how they were different. By having to explain our own traditions, I believe we learned more about what they actually meant to us. We learned about what was important, and what didn’t really matter. We often discovered that some traditions we had never though of before actually held great meaning for us, while others just didn’t matter. We learned how to listen to the other, learn from each other, and see both the similarities and the differences. It made us stronger as a couple, and more prepared for our wedding.
