Controversial Modern Ketubahs?

Today was a first for This Is Not a Ketubah: someone sent us an email angry that we have modernized the Ketubot.

We are soon going to respond to her via a private email and begin a dialogue with her, but we first wanted to share some of our preliminary thoughts with everyone about the challenges we face in trying to keep to our sacred traditions while simultaneously modernizing and making contemporary and new the art, artwork, and design of the Ketubah.

The first and most obvious question is: what could someone possibly be unhappy with?

The answer is, a well-intentioned woman believes that it is disrespectful to use modern art on a Ketubah

Is it?

We have a few responses:

First, all of our Ketubot keep within the traditional requirements of the Ketubah: the text, the clarity of the writing, the positioning of the signatures in relation to the text.

Secondly, we do not put anything offensive onto a Ketubah: we believe it would be disrespectful to create a Ketubah with, say, pornography or sex. Ours, instead, are filled with high-quality modern and contemporary artwork and just awesome designs.

Third, we take Ketubot very seriously – but we are creative artists and come up with lots of creative ideas and openly share them here. Not all of our ideas are going to be amazing, and not all will be even pretty or high qualitiy. Some will be wacky, ridiculous, fun — and we just share the ideas here openly. If you like them, great; if not, we’ll have better ones. We just constantly feel inspired and we want to share our modern ideas with you all at all times!

We believe that, you can’t make everyone happy: some people believe that we should still follow the rituals of Judaism as they were before the second temple was destroyed. Others believe that, once the template was destroyed, we needed to change our rituals, to update them for the more-modern world — but keep their most important fundamentals: the letter of the law, their spirit, their intentions, their clarity and strength. We’ve done that.

But we do that with a smile, no matter how serious. This is an important point: we love what we do, and we laugh every moment of it. Many of our more edgy Ketubot are on the site but are not even for sale — look at our Starbucks Ketubah, you just can’t buy it! This is because many are not meant to be for sale, and they’re not and never were. Instead, they’re just the fun products of our imagination. We spend all of our days and nights thinking about new, amazing, awesome ways to create and update the modern Ketubah world — and, when we’re working late into the night, some of our ideas are wacky. We just create and design fun work and put them out there. We’re loving what we’re doing — and we want you to love it, too!

And remember, a custom Ketubah is all about YOU — what you want for your Jewish Wedding Contract. We can be as silly and ridiculous, or as solemn and serious as you want. We love it all — as long as it’s promoting and following the traditions of Judaism.