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    • A wedding anniversary and an aliyah success story
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    A wedding anniversary and an aliyah success story

    Caradoc Wyn Posted on

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

    The story begins in 1985, when Jody and I came to Israel separately after completing our undergraduate studies. I had participated in the Livnot U’lehibanot program in Safed the year before, while Jody, also in Safed, was working with seniors through Sherut La’am after completing six months of WUJS ulpan in Arad.

    Livnot held a Seuda Shlishit (third meal of Shabbat) on its campus in Safed; I was visiting as an alumnus, while Jody was invited as a local English speaker.

    Jody and I had both signed up for the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies that fall, so someone introduced us over dinner.

    I was blown away from the first moment.

    French Jews arrive in Israel for Aliyah on August 1, 2024. (Source: CHEN SCHIMMEL)

    “If such people go to Pardes,” I thought to myself, “then I have made the right decision!”

    Jody, however, reacted differently.

    “If people like that go to Pardes,” she complained, “maybe I should reconsider.”

    I was, how can I put it politely, not quite as hip as I later became.

    Or maybe it was this other twist: Jody was there… with her fiancé. And he wasn’t me.

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    At the end of the meal we went our separate ways. But we met again in Pardes, where I immediately asked Jody if she wanted to be my Havruta (study partner) for the Mishnah class. She declined.

    I persisted. How about the Chumash (Five Books of Moses)? She already had a Havruta. Prayer? No. Jewish thought? I have someone there too.

    Eventually I got her to open up and agree to be my partner in Zvi Wolff’s Halacha (Jewish law) class for one hour a week.

    Once we established a framework for regular meetings, we got to know each other better. We enjoyed each other’s company and became closer.

    A few months into school, 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 we quickly became friends.

    By chance, we ended up in the same apartment building (on different floors with different roommates) and spent almost every Shabbat together, entertaining friends, preparing divrei (words of Torah), and learning Shabbat zemirot (songs). Within a few 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 couldn’t be sustained. We both believed that it was nearly impossible to be friends with someone of the opposite sex while being romantically involved with someone else.

    That was the last straw and Jody’s resistance came to an end. Three weeks later, we were a couple.

    After patiently waiting for her to finally come to me, I now had everything I had dreamed of – the woman I had fallen in love with a year earlier. So of course I quickly proposed to her.

    No.

    Instead, I developed an inexplicable, if stereotypical, fear of commitment. We dated for a year and a half before I finally proposed at Greens, a vegan fine-dining restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we had moved to college in 1987.

    We’ve been married for 36 years (our anniversary was this Wednesday), but even our planned wedding was almost derailed when I got a lacquered pin with a dead butterfly on it instead of a ring. My reasoning was seemingly noble: I wanted Jody to be able to choose her own ring.

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

    An Israeli love story

    Embedded in the first love story is a second one: Israel.

    We thought we would only stay in the US for a year or two and then make aliyah. Instead, we stayed there for seven years.

    Friends who knew about our plans to go to Israel began to get impatient. “Why are you still here?” they asked, especially after the local Israel Aliyah Center took out a series of ads in the Jewish Bulletin showing staged photos of Jody and me with suitcases covered in El Al stickers. For the ad copy, we were – purely by chance – interviewed by the mother of Jody’s ex-fiancé! These ads remained in the press for a good two years before we finally worked up the courage to go.

    And then there was another problem: During our years in California, I had become accustomed to my professional life. I had a well-paying job in what was then an emerging industry (production of multimedia edutainment CD-ROMs).

    My fear of commitment had found a new address.

    But as I said years ago – that things would undoubtedly change if we stayed where we were – I knew we had to give Israel a chance, or we would constantly be questioning ourselves.

    In October 1994, ten years after our arrival in Israel, we were back, this time as official new immigrants.

    And although life in Israel has never been easy – especially during the last two years of war and the coup attempt that preceded it – we are still here and we feel as committed to this country as we do to each other. ■

    The writer’s book Total loss: The billion-dollar crash of the startup that took on the auto industry, the oil industry and the world was released as an audiobook. Available from Amazon and other online booksellers. brianblum.com



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