Like a queen waiting for her king, Abby Siegel of Kensington sat on a white wicker throne between her mother and future mother-in-law, clutching their hands and straining her neck to catch a glimpse of her groom.
Elie Schochet of Silver Spring was being danced to his bride by a horde of men, cheering, jumping and stamping their feet. He had just watched two witnesses sign the tenaim, the engagement agreement, and the ketubah, the marriage contract, in a nearby hall, made sweet with bottles of rum and chunks of cake. Now, blasts of horns filled the atrium of Potomac's Congregation Beth Shalom synagogue to announce
the arrival of the groom.
Abby and Elie hadn't seen each other in a week, keeping with Orthodox Jewish tradition. It was Aug. 16, time for them to come face to face, to become husband and wife. She started to cry when he came into sight. The atrium went quiet.
Elie placed the veil over Abby's face, then leaned softly into her. He kissed her cheek and whispered last-minute thoughts into her ear. His father did the same, offering her a blessing. It was the bedekin, the veiling ceremony, where Elie "checked" his bride to avoid making the same mistake as the biblical patriarch Jacob, who married the wrong woman.
In an instant, the quiet of the 200 guests became a joyous uproar as Elie was lifted up and carried off on the men's shoulders to await the processional. In a circle of ebullient relatives and college friends, Abby was spun away to the bridal room for her final few moments as a single woman.
She is 22 and he is 23. They are marrying at a young age, going against today's later-in-life marriage trend. It's the fairy-tale ending of a college romance that spanned 3 1/2 years, the happily-ever-after of a love between two people who, at 16, had each watched their own parents' love dissolve into divorce.
Still, young as they are, they are filled with faith and hope, not fear. For this they credit a religious transformation, a spirituality that gives their marriage strength.
Next fall, the couple will move to East Lansing, Mich., where Elie will start medical school at Michigan State and Abby will look for a job in social work. But before that, they will spend a year in Israel, studying Jewish Bible, law, traditions and ethics at yeshivot, places of learning.
"It's going to be a time of personal growth but also a yearlong honeymoon to learn how to live together before the trials and tribulations of medical school," Elie says. "A year to really build a foundation."
"I know that he is the one for me," Abby says. "He is the one God intended for me. He is my b'sheret, my destined."
The first time Elie Schochet met Abby Siegel, he and five other men from a Brandeis University fraternity got on one knee and proposed to her as a joke. He never imagined that three years and two months later, he would be on the same knee, asking the same Abby to be his bride.
But in the blur of what was the first week of college, Abby doesn't remember the joke proposal. Elie and friends were outside her freshman dorm offering women a ride to an off-campus get-together. It was September 1994. When Abby proclaimed she was ready to party, the boys proclaimed their "love" for her.
She does remember meeting Elie the next January in a friend's dorm room. They discovered they were both from Maryland and walked back to her dorm together.
"I finally found someone from my hometown and I wanted to build on this connection," Abby said. "We hung out in my room and ate bagels that I probably stole from the cafeteria. Then we started bumping into each other."
Their first date was to a Boston Celtics basketball game in February. Their anniversary stands as March 3, the night they stayed up talking until morning.
"By April, we knew for sure we were together long term," Elie says. "It did happen very fast. I said I was serious first and we fight over that all the time. But all that means is that I was smarter first."
As their romance developed, so did Abby's questions about Elie's religion. Elie was raised Modern Orthodox, and he was educated primarily at Hebrew day schools. Abby was raised in a Reform Jewish household, went to Hebrew School in the afternoons after public school and spent 11 summers at Reform summer camp.
When Abby first got to college, she thought about becoming a Reform rabbi. Still, she didn't observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, and the laws of kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. She went to religious services at camp every summer but rarely attended during the year.
"I felt strongly about the culture and tradition, about what it meant to be a Jewish person, although I wasn't keeping Shabbat or keeping kosher," Abby says.
Toward the end of freshman year, Abby came to admire Elie's Orthodox lifestyle. It appealed to her desire for strong rituals and sense of community. She began to read about Orthodox practices -- first, the how-tos, then the whys.
"Once I started to look at the observances through an observant set of eyes, they started looking more positive, less restrictive," she says. "It wasn't something I wanted to get out of doing. I wanted to increase it in my life and extend it."
Abby wanted to be part of the tight-knit community she saw surrounding Elie's Orthodox family, a community she felt didn't exist in her Reform upbringing. She envied the social network of Orthodox friends created by Elie's mother, Bobby Schochet, a 53-year-old Washington paralegal. But the transition was slow and difficult. Abby remembers how strange it was to attend her first Orthodox service in March 1995.
The silent, private prayers were different from the communal, responsive ones she was used to. Seating was by sexes. And as someone who had always excelled in Reform Hebrew School, realizing she knew "less than a thimble-full" about the Orthodox service was painful.
"It was one of the most shocking, weirdest experiences of my life," Abby says. "I walked out of the service, walked into a back room with Elie and started to cry. I felt totally uncomfortable, unwanted and out of place."
But she was persistent, and kept kosher and observed Shabbat throughout the summer.
While Abby was on her journey of spiritual discovery, Elie was rediscovering. Elie had dropped some of his Orthodox practices in the name of having fun.
"I never doubted that ultimately I would end up Modern Orthodox," he says. "I was just enjoying myself in college, never making a conscious decision not to be religious anymore." But he watched as she moved deeper into his religion, and joined her. Back at school in the fall, they started eating on the kosher line at the cafeteria and going to Friday night Shabbat services every week. During winter break they took a trip to Israel with other college students. Abby began wearing skirts regularly, keeping with the religious tradition of modesty.
A feminist since middle school, Abby had to reconcile the role of women in the Orthodox culture with her own beliefs: Orthodox women pray separately from men and take on secondary roles in public prayer services.
Abby decided to look beyond the synagogue seating arrangements and religious practices to the home, which Orthodoxy considers a primary focus. There, she and her husband will be equal in all respects. And in synagogue, she believes individual prayer is the most important.
"It doesn't always feel right to me, but prayer is equal in God's eyes," she says.
As she worked through the conflicts, she inched closer to Orthodox Judaism, and Elie.
"I was making some pretty big life changes at this point and I
couldn't have made those changes without knowing that he was going to be a part of my life for a very long time," Abby says.
"She made me interested again," Elie said. "Every commitment she made, I made, too."
The proposal
It was the night before Thanksgiving last year when Elie popped the question at a Washington restaurant. Along with dessert came a plate with a message drizzled in chocolate: "Sorry!!! No Dogs Allowed." Also on the plate was a small box. Abby always said she wanted a dog when she got engaged; she got a ring. Elie got on his knee and Abby accepted.
He then took her on a whirlwind scavenger hunt to eight of their favorite stores and restaurants. At each stop, either Elie or a clerk handed her a card and poem to lead her to the next.
They ended up at Elie's house, where their mothers waited with champagne.
A different pattern
By mainstream American standards, Abby and Elie are on the young side for marriage. The average first marriage age is 25 for women and 27 for men -- the oldest in history, according to David Popenoe, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and co-director of the National Marriage Project, an academic endeavor to study the national state of marriage in America. For college-educated people, the ages increase, to 26 for women and 28 for men.
But for Modern Orthodox Jews, Abby and Elie fall in the "normal" range at 22 and 23. Orthodox Jews tend to get married in the first few years after college, said Steven Bayme, national director of Jewish communal affairs for the American Jewish Committee in New York. More than 90 percent of Orthodox Jews are married by age 30.
And while Popenoe has pegged the current divorce rate at about 40 percent for American first marriages, Bayme said the rate is between 3 percent and 4 percent for Orthodox Jews.
"When we're looking at marriage and family patterns among Orthodox Jews, it's orthodoxy at its finest," Bayme said. "They have the strongest marriages ... stable, wonderful child-rearing skills and no generation gaps. Religion seems to cement the marriage."
Popenoe says children of divorce have an increased chance of divorcing themselves. Abby and Elie don't see the statistic as any indicator of their own union.
To inspire her own relationship, Abby has looked to other marriages for role models -- her maternal grandparents', her friends' parents' and Elie's brother's.
"If you say that children of divorce are more likely to get divorced, then that means we have to work that much harder to make it," Abby says. "We don't think of each other as perfect. We don't come from perfect families. We know that."
Elie adds: "We only saw our parents' relationships and said, 'Let's not do what our parents did or go wrong where they went wrong.' "
The ceremony
Under the chupah, the four-post canopy that represents Abby and Elie's future home, Elie's parents helped him into his kittel, the white robe that symbolizes purity and the fresh start he was about to make. His mother kissed him on the cheek. He stood stiffly, rocking back and forth to the music of the flute and keyboard, hands folded.
Flanked by her mother and grandmother, Abby came down the aisle and took her place beside Elie. He turned to look at her. A shy smile crept onto his face. She was beautiful.
Seven times around him, Abby walked, defining the space for their home and intertwining the seven levels of their souls. The rabbi recited two blessings, the couple drank from the same cup of wine and Elie slipped the wedding ring onto Abby's index finger while reciting the traditional Jewish marriage formula, ending kiddushin, the betrothal ceremony.
During nissuin, the marriage ceremony, rabbis and friends were called to the chupah to say the sheva b'rachot, the seven blessings to remind Abby and Elie of their place in the Orthodox community. The shouted hooray after Elie broke a glass under his foot to remind the crowd of the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews from Jerusalem.
Mr. and Mrs. Elie Schochet faced their guests, then retreated to a private room for yichud, to break their day-long fast and to enjoy their first few moments alone as husband and wife.
Minutes later, in a sea of confetti and silly string, the guests donned hats and grass skirts to entertain the bride and groom. . The women encircled Abby; the men, Elie; everyone dancing, clapping and crying.
Abby and Elie sat side by side bouncing on chairs high above the crowd. An Israeli flag surfaced and they each grabbed a corner, waving it proudly. Like their religion, their devotion to Israel, and their love, it connected them. A minute or two later, they let go of the flag, but it's unlikely they'll ever let go of each other that quickly.
Pub Date: 9/05/98