Celebrating a wedding anniversary and an aliyah love story

Every year in mid-August, my wife, Jody, and I celebrate our wedding anniversary by doing something fun – a night at a hotel, a good meal, a trip abroad. This year, I wanted to mark the occasion in writing, by recounting our story – how we met and fell in love.

The tale begins in 1985 when Jody and I had come to Israel, separately, after completing our undergraduate degrees. I had been a participant on the Livnot U’lehibanot program in Safed the previous year, while Jody was working with seniors, also in Safed, through Sherut La’am, after completing six months of the WUJS ulpan in Arad.

Livnot was holding a seuda shlishit (Shabbat third meal) on its Safed campus; I was visiting as an alumnus, while Jody was invited as a local English speaker.

Jody and I were both signed up to attend the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in the fall, so someone at the meal introduced us.

I was smitten from the moment we met.

“If this is the kind of person who goes to Pardes,” I thought to myself, “I made the right decision!”

Jody, however, had a different reaction.

“If this is the kind of person who goes to Pardes,” she lamented, “maybe I should reconsider.”

I was not, how shall we put this politely, quite as hip as I’d later become.

Or maybe it was that other twist: Jody was there... with her fiancé. And he was not me.

At the end of the meal, we went our separate ways. But we met up again at Pardes, where I promptly asked Jody if she’d be my havruta (study partner) for Mishna class. She declined.

I was persistent. How about the Chumash (five books of Moses)? She already had a havruta. Prayer? Nope. Jewish thought? Got someone there, too.

I finally wore her down, and she agreed to be my partner for one hour a week in Zvi Wolff’s class on Halacha (Jewish law).

Once we had a framework for meeting up regularly, we got to know each other better. We enjoyed each other’s company and started becoming closer.

A few months into the school year, Jody broke off her engagement. It had nothing to do with me. I immediately asked Jody out on a date.

“Let’s just be friends,” she replied.

Ouch. After all this time, I was relegated to the buddy zone. But fast friends we became.

By chance, we wound up living in the same apartment building (on different floors with different roommates) and were together nearly every Shabbat, hosting friends, preparing divrei (words of) Torah, and learning Shabbat zemirot (songs). Within months, we were inseparable.

One day over lunch I shared a thought: Our friendship was bound to change once we started dating other people. What we had could not be sustained. We both subscribed to the belief that it’s nearly impossible to be friends with someone from the opposite sex while in a romantic relationship with someone else.

That was the straw that broke the back of Jody’s resistance. Three weeks later, we were a couple.

Having waited patiently for her to come around, I now had everything I’d dreamed about – the woman I’d fallen for a year earlier. So, of course, I proposed quickly.

Nah.

Instead, I became inexplicably if stereotypically commitment-phobic. We dated for a year and a half before I finally popped the question at Greens, a gourmet vegan restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we had moved in 1987 to pursue secondary degrees.

We’ve been married for 36 years (our anniversary was this Wednesday), although even our anticipated nuptials were nearly sidelined when, instead of a ring, I procured a lacquered pin of a dead butterfly. My reasoning was ostensibly noble: I wanted Jody to be able to pick out her own ring.

But the whole “dead butterfly instead of a ring” became a running gag over the years, until Jody found a way to incorporate it into one of her stunning mosaic art projects.

An Israel love story

THERE’S A second love story embedded in the first: Israel.

We thought we’d be in the US for just a year or two, and then we intended to make aliyah. Instead, we were there for seven.

Friends who knew about our Israel plans began to get impatient. “Why are you still here?” they would ask, especially after the local Israel Aliyah Center ran a series of ads in the Jewish Bulletin featuring staged photos of Jody and me with suitcases plastered with El Al stickers. For the ad copy, we were interviewed – entirely coincidentally – by Jody’s ex-fiancé’s mother! Those ads appeared in print for a good two years before we eventually got up the gumption to go.

There was another wrinkle: During our years in California, I had gotten comfortable in my work life. I had a well-paying job in a then up-and-coming industry (producing multimedia edutainment CD-ROMs).

My commitment phobia had found a new address.

But just like my comment years earlier – that things would undoubtedly change if we stayed where we were – I knew we had to give Israel a chance or we’d be forever second-guessing ourselves.

So, in October 1994, 10 years after we had first arrived in Israel, we were back, this time as formal new immigrants.

And while life in Israel has never been easy – all the more so over the last two years of war and the attempted judicial coup that preceded it – we’re still here and as committed to this country as we are to each other. ■

The writer’s book Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World has been published as an audiobook. Available on Amazon and other online booksellers. brianblum.com