If you want me to appreciate my ancestors, it’s going to take some time.
My wife and I attended the wedding of a good friend today. A thoughtful and sometimes light-hearted rabbi presided over the ceremony.
This ceremony was quite a change of pace from most of the religious weddings I’ve attended. There was no somber talk about the heavy guilt we bear for being human or how small and pathetically helpless we are, or how we are at the mercy of a God who could crush us for no reason if He wanted. Instead, the ceremony focused on the interrelationships of the people attending the ceremony. We were all there to celebrate and support the new marriage as a newly bonded community. I was really getting into the ceremony, which is unusual for me (I generally prefer empty churches).
Toward the end of the ceremony, the rabbi invited each of us to take a moment to appreciate the sacrifices of our ancestors, to consider all those things our ancestors had done to enable each of us to be standing there today. Like most people, I started considering the sacrifices made by my parents and grandparents, but that got me thinking about the overwhelming odds that I shouldn’t actually exist at all.
I shouldn’t exist? Why would I think that? Because if my mother had not met my father at the right point in time, and if they had not been amorous at the right time of the right day, the sperm and the egg that became “me” would never have met …
