Category: Weddings & Commitment Ceremonies

Meet Betsy Teutsch, ketubah artist and calligrapher extraordinaire!

Ritual helps us pay attention. From the joy of a recovery to the grief of a funeral, ritual helps us inhabit the breadth of human experience.

When my friends Ella and Natasha were getting married, I wanted to offer them music for their wedding based on traditional biblical text. The challenge was that there was, of course, no explicit biblical narrative of a same-sex marriage. 

I believe that the heart of Pride has to do with love. In the midst of the book of Leviticus we find the three words: “v’ahavtah l’re’akha camokha”—You shall love your fellow as yourself.

I was, and remain, confident that my connection to Judaism is strong enough to share with my husband who is not Jewish and our future children.

I hope that all couples I work with, especially interfaith couples, will be empowered to make Jewish rituals and practices their own.

I am a “planner” and I am an English major obsessed with layers of meaning, symbolism, and subtext. Thus, my wedding, like so many ceremonies, was made up of countless intentional decisions that reaffirmed me and our relationship. And true to the nature of religious ceremony, it also challenged us. The most obvious example was our ritual gone wrong—but ultimately “gone right”—the story of our

Ritualwell is excited to partner with G-dcast on their new Lifecycle Series: a collection of animated shorts and personal stories about milestones in the Jewish tradition. From giving birth, to naming a child, from designing a 

I was staring at my computer screen and trying to decide what in the Jewish wedding I think is particularly Jewish and what might be universal ...

We wanted a traditional Jewish wedding, but, as two women, we weren’t a traditional Jewish couple.