It is graduation season. It is wedding season. This time of year arrives each June with an almost ceremonial insistence, filling our calendars with occasions that mark the passages of life. Two months ago, I officiated at my nephew’s wedding. Last month, my daughter crossed a stage and received her diploma, and last week, my son got engaged! I have cried more than once, with what I can only describe as a feeling that has no single name.
This article is not really about my daughter’s graduation, the wedding I officiated, or the upcoming marriage of my son. It is about what happens to all of us when we live inside other people’s life cycle events. Which is, whether we choose it or not, something everyone of us does.
I sit at a friend’s wedding and feel the full warmth of their joy, and also, if I am honest, something else: a longing, perhaps, or a memory, or a question about my own life that I was not planning to answer that day. I watch a friend’s child graduate and cheer genuinely, and somewhere underneath the cheer is an awareness of my own child’s struggle, or my own unfinished becoming, or simply the passage of time made suddenly, uncomfortably visible. We do not always talk about this. We are good at showing up and celebrating. We are less practiced at acknowledging the complexity of what we carry when we do.
The tradition has always known that joy and sorrow are not opposites that cancel each other out. They are, more often, companions. At a Jewish wedding, we break a glass, in the midst of the greatest celebration, to remember destruction and loss. The Talmud teaches that when the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, and the angels began to sing, God silenced them: Ma’aseh yadai tov’im bayam v’atem omrim shirah, “My creatures are drowning in the sea and you are singing songs?” (Tractate Megillah 10b). Even at the moment of liberation, loss was woven into the joy. The tradition does not ask us to pretend otherwise. It asks us to hold both.
If you are in a season of struggle, other people’s milestones can feel like a mirror held up to your own life at an angle you did not choose. The friend whose child is thriving when yours is not. The colleague is celebrating a marriage when your own relationship is strained. Jewish tradition does not shame us for these feelings. It simply asks us to stay in the room. To let other people’s joy be real, even when it is hard. To trust that the capacity to celebrate someone else, even from a place of personal pain, is itself a form of love and a form of strength.
Ecclesiastes reminds us: L’chol zman v’et l’chol cheifetz tachat hashamayim, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven” (3:1). The seasons do not always arrive when we are ready. And sometimes we are asked to honor someone else’s season while quietly waiting for our own.
Gratitude is the practice I return to most reliably in those moments. Not a gratitude that papers over difficulty, but the kind the mystics had in mind with modeh ani, spoken as the very first words upon waking each morning. Before we have taken stock of what the day holds, we say thank you. Gratitude, in this framing, is not a response to good circumstances. It is an orientation toward life itself.
What life cycle events do, when we live through them with full attention, whether they are ours or someone else’s, is insist on presence. They will not let you be elsewhere. A daughter walking across a stage, a couple standing under a chuppah, a parent being mourned: these moments are entirely themselves. They arrive, they are integrated, and they leave something in you that was not there before.
We are, all of us, living through each other’s lives. This is the life we are given together. It is full of each other’s moments, which become, over time, part of our own story as well. For that, in all its complexity, I am more grateful than I know how to say.
Rabbi Jodie
