Renewing Our Marriage Vows

by Lloyd B. Abrams

August 10, 1987. Mid-afternoon on a sultry, gray Monday. Vivien and I were about to renew our marriage vows on our eighteenth anniversary.

We were sitting with Jonathan and Miriam – our son and daughter – in the Baldwin Jewish Center parking lot, waiting for the rabbi to appear. The temple secretary later reached the rabbi, who never did show up. He subsequently called us to apologize and said that he had been stuck at the DMV. Some rabbi, we thought. He couldn’t keep an appointment as which was so important to us probably because he just forgot.

Well, we forgot all about him except for that miserable feeling of being neglected. Soon after we left that congregation to join a slightly more liberal Freeport congregation – B’nai Israel – which was serendipitously headed by one of the spiritual leaders at the Jewish Marriage Encounter weekend that Vivien and I had been at six months earlier.

That Jewish Marriage Encounter weekend, held, aptly, on the Valentines’s Day weekend, was an awesome, mind-blowing series of soul-opening workshops and way-down-deep communication between Vivien and me. We were so ecstatic and overwhelmed and in love when we left on Sunday evening that it hardly mattered that our new-ish car had been broken into and the radio ripped out – something I would have been apoplectic about on any other day.

And when we got home that evening, and on so many subsequent days, Jonathan and Miriam kept on giving us their magnificent versions of the eye roll when we kept on kissing and holding each other and also hugging and squeezing them whenever they let themselves be caught.

Fast forward to August 10. We had bought new platinum wedding bands at Fortunoff. We had gotten all dressed up. We had all been so psyched, waiting for that f’in rabbi who never appeared.

And on that Monday, we decided to turn a negative into a positive. I don’t think it was one of the JME lessons, but it may as well have been. We went home, changed, and then went to Coney Island. Jonathan and I rode the Cyclone and a couple of other “guy” rides while Vivien and Miriam went on several tamer – but, evidently, not tame enough – baby-ish rides. After, we all felt headachy and nauseous. It was certainly not the smartest choice of activities we ever made.

But the disappointment of that August day brought us to a Jewish congregation of which we are still members – where Miriam had her bat mitzvah, and where Jonathan’s “Abrams Karate Dojo” is now housed.

Although Vivien and I never did officially renew our marriage vows during the intervening 36 years, we have continued to renew our devotion to each other in so many other ways – our idiotic ongoing jokes and silliness and playing with each other, our helping each other and being each other’s best friend, our caring for each other during crises and hard times, our being on the same or on harmonious wave lengths, of being present for and being present with each other.

And just like how this story has expanded, the aftereffects of our Jewish Marriage Encounter experience are still breathing life and love into our deeply committed relationship.

Rev 8 / May 18, 2023

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May 18, 2023 … Copyright © 2023, Lloyd B. Abrams