My Jewish Hats

(PICTURE: My dad and me wearing Jewish hats.)

In case it wasn't 1,000% apparent, Huyen isn't Jewish. This fact struck home in a comical way right before we got married. You see, before my parents flew to Vietnam they had asked me if I wanted to wear my bar mitzvah kippah at the wedding. When they asked me this, I was sort of taken aback since I hadn't even thought about wearing a kippah. I think I told them I'd think about it. Well, right before we were to walk into the wedding, I said to my parents, "Did you bring the kippah?" They had in fact brought about ten. All of my wedding guests (the ones who were on my bus -- Jews and non Jews) put the kippahs on. I thought that I should give Huyen a heads up (no pun intended) about our skullcaps and wrote her a text message. The text message said this, "We're wearing our Jewish hats." I wrote this because clearly Huyen would have no idea what I was talking about if I wrote, "We're wearing kippahs." I smiled as I hit send and then turned to Hannah and said, "You know that you're marrying a non Jew when you have to call a kippah Jewish hats in a text message."

The kippah ended up being a big hit. In fact, some of the wedding guests from the other bus asked me if they could wear one too. Unfortunately though we didn't have enough to go around. Then at the actual wedding, all the Vietnamese were extremely perplexed by the kippahs. Clealry they had never seen any before. Everyone kept asking me what they were. In the weeks since the wedding, many people have written comments on Facebook that have asked, "What is on Ben's head?"

Looking back, I'm really glad that I wore the keepah. It definitely helped bring a traditional Jewish element to this very non traditional Jewish wedding. But as you'll see soon, that was just one Jewish part of the wedding...