The Courage to Climb Again Celebrating David and Rachel and the blessing of choosing love again

David and Rachel, standing with you underneath the chuppah today is an extraordinary privilege and a profound joy.

We read in this past week’s parsha, Re’eh: “Re’eh anochi notein lifneichem hayom bracha u’klalah”—“See, I place before you today blessing and curse.”

The Torah then gives us an extraordinary image: Har Gerizim, the mountain of blessing, and Har Eival, the mountain associated with the curse. Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch points out that these two mountains stand right next to each other. They experience the same sun, the same rain, the same winds—and yet one flourishes while the other is barren.

Perhaps the Torah is teaching us something essential about life: we don’t always get to choose what happens to us. But we do get to choose how we meet the moment—and whether we continue to choose life and blessing.

David and Rachel, in many ways, that is what makes this moment so powerful.

Both of you have known extraordinary blessing in your lives. You were blessed with beautiful marriages, with love, with children and families, and with memories that helped make each of you who you are today. And both of you have also experienced profound loss—moments you never would have chosen, when life looked very different from the way you imagined it would.

Judaism never asks us to deny that reality. Loss is real. Grief is real. And the love that preceded the loss is real and enduring.

And yet, Judaism asks us to continue choosing life and blessing—to believe that even after profound loss, there are still blessings to discover and a future to embrace.

Toward the end of Re’eh, the Torah tells us: “Ish k’matnat yado, k’virkat Hashem Elokecha asher natan lach.” Each person according to what he has been given, according to the blessing God has given him.

Every one of us is given a different journey, a different story. Our sacred task is to take the life we have been given and continue to discover the birkat Hashem within it.

But sometimes discovering that blessing requires the courage to climb again.

And that brings me to another mountain—Har Sinai.

Moshe climbs the mountain and receives the luchot. It is a moment of extraordinary revelation and hope. And then the luchot are shattered.

But the story doesn’t end there.

God tells Moshe: Climb the mountain again.

I often wonder what that second climb must have felt like. The first ascent was filled with the anticipation of something new. The second came after Moshe knew what it meant to experience loss.

And yet, he climbed again.

Perhaps that second climb required an even deeper kind of courage—the courage to believe that after loss there can still be love, after grief there can still be joy, and after one chapter ends, God may still be writing another.

And our Sages teach something remarkable: Luchot v’shivrei luchot munachim ba’Aron. The whole tablets and the broken tablets were carried together in the Aron. The first luchot were broken, but they were never forgotten. What was sacred remained sacred.

Because in Judaism, moving forward does not mean leaving behind.

And David and Rachel, I have seen that spirit in the way you have approached this wedding.

I have been deeply moved by the sensitivity and intentionality with which you have thought about every step—not simply what you want this day to look like, but your children, your parents, your families, the people you love, and how this moment will feel to them.

That says so much about who you are and the home you will build together.

Because you understand something very important: the love you celebrate today does not replace the love that came before it. It grows alongside everything that love created—the children, the families, the memories, and the people each of you became because of it.

We don’t need to diminish yesterday in order to embrace tomorrow.

As you yourselves said so beautifully, you are not leaving anything behind. You are moving forward together.

And perhaps there is something profoundly meaningful about how this new chapter began.

Rachel, it was Ritchie’s third yahrzeit. You didn’t want to spend that Friday night alone, so you invited friends to your home. And one of those friends was David.

Apparently, some friends in the community had already noticed the two of you talking at Kiddush. In fact, someone noticed something very simple: David smiled when he saw you. And they suggested—with perhaps a little insistence—that David should be invited to dinner.

Maybe our community saw something before the two of you were quite ready to see it yourselves.

And maybe that, too, is part of Re’eh. Re’eh means to see. Sometimes a blessing is already standing in front of us—we just need the openness, the courage, and occasionally some good friends at Kiddush to help us see it.

And I find the timing of that dinner especially moving. Your new story began not by forgetting the past, but in the very act of remembering it.

On that Friday night, memory and possibility sat at the same table.

Perhaps you recognized in one another someone who understood something about the journey the other had traveled—someone with whom you could speak honestly about the past while beginning to imagine a future.

From there came another invitation. Coffee became dinner, and dinner became a six-hour first date.

But what struck me most wasn’t that you talked for six hours. It was that you talked and listened.

Rachel, you shared that at one point, after you had been speaking, David said, “I’d like to go back to something you said.” And you remember thinking, “Wow. You really were paying attention.”

Six hours of talking and listening—and, thank God, you’ve been talking ever since.

There is a wonderful blessing for marriage right there: never stop listening.

Listen not only to each other’s words, but to what lies beneath them—to each other’s memories and hopes, dreams and souls.

This chuppah represents today: the Jewish courage to carry what is sacred from yesterday, to climb the mountain again, and to choose blessing today.

May you be blessed with shefa brachot—an abundance of blessing from Hashem. May the families you bring together be an ever-expanding source of love and joy. May the memories you carry give you strength, and may the new memories you create bring you extraordinary happiness.

May your home be filled with friendship and love, laughter and listening, Torah and kindness. And may the new light you create illuminate your families, our community, and the Jewish people.

May you continue to climb together, choose blessing together, and increase the light together, in good health and happiness for many, many years to come.

Mazal tov.