Meet the LGBTQ couples whose queer-positive weddings measure up to Jewish legal standards
When Danya Lagos-Brown and Eliza Lagos-Brown got married in 2018, they knew they wanted a religious Jewish wedding. But instead of the standard ceremony, they crafted a personalized contract of obligations to one another, signed by witnesses, and recited their own Hebrew blessing under the huppah: “In acquisition of these rings, we are hereby partnered in the covenant of love as we agreed in the contract, according to the laws of Moses and Israel.” They then placed both rings in a bowl and lifted it up together.
It was almost like “starting a firm,” Lagos said, “rather than being purchased by one another.”
Overseen by Rabbis Aryeh Bernstein and Michael Schwab, the ceremony was based on a model first proposed by Rachel Adler, a Jewish feminist scholar who began researching legal alternatives to the Jewish ceremony of kiddushin in the 1980s. First used at a gay Jewish wedding in 1986, the brit ahuvim, or lover’s contract, incorporates the structure of a shtar shutafim, or business partnership. It’s a legal framework where the couple together acquires the relationship, rather than having one person acquire the other.
Kiddushin, the Jewish marriage ceremony that has been used for thousands of years, remains a stubbornly gendered ritual. It is the moment where the groom presents his bride with an object of value (usually an unadorned gold ring), and declares before two witnesses that with this ring, she is sanctified to him under the laws of Moses and the people of Israel. Once she accepts, the marriage is considered legal. He is obliged to care for her, and she is forbidden to have sexual relationships with other men. To dissolve the marriage, they would need a writ of divorce. While there are other rituals of legal significance for the Jewish wedding – the contract, the seven blessings, the moment of seclusion – this is when the couple becomes bound to one another under Jewish law.
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