A couple wrote to us yesterday ecstatic about finding out our awesome modern art Ketubahs, but with a question about their longevity: sure they look great, but can we count on how long they will last?  The answer is over 200 years!

Our ketubahs are printed on high-quality archival acid free materials and the high quality printing we use on this museum-quality paper ensures that the colors are brighter and the beauty is bolder, making the awesome Ketubah you order a centerpiece of your home.

The great thing about all  of our standard and custom Ketubot is that it isn’t just the design that is modern, but the technology of Ketubah-making as an art.

In fact, the high quality designs our artistic collective makes are not only fun, but for the ages. Our archival acid free materials are estimated to have a life of 100 years on display, making your This Is Not a Ketubah a beautiful part of your home you can even pass on to your children.   It is the perfect mix of ancient ritual and modern advances in Ketubah printing technology.

When stored or displayed in low-light (a room in the interior of your home without windows, for instance), paper decay is will not begin until later. Imagine passing an heirloom Ketubah onto your great-grandchildren with the same jaw-dropping colorful and bold style that you choose for your wedding day.  Now that’s a great Ketubah!

So whether you’re most attracted to the beautiful blue overtures inspired by Gaudi, in love with Pollock’s bold style, or want to show solidarity with Eretz Yisrael, rest assured that everything shipped from the team at This Is Not A Ketubah will be around for a quite a while.  May we all have such good health!

Jacob

Team Ketubah

In the classic book of Ecclesiastes, King David’s wisest son exclaims, “There is nothing new under the sun!”  When I brought this up with the This Is Not A Ketubah team it really seemed to speak to us.  Every day we try to come up with brand new, exciting, modern Ketubah designs for our couples.  Our custom Ketubot option even lets us channel the creative juices of fiancés who just can’t seem to find what they want anywhere else!

So how could it be that there is nothing new about our Ketubahs?

Well, maybe Ecclesiastes has a point — the high quality designs our team makes in our Argentina studio aren’t just creative, they’re timeless! Though the artwork has its own colorful aesthetic inspired by beautiful modern masters and whimsical ideas, it holds true to the age-old purpose Ketubahs have always served.

The idea of finding your soul mate has always been part of the Jewish tradition—nothing new about that!  At This Is Not A Ketubah, we are bringing that very idea into a whole new medium.

Nothing makes us happier than working with couples to find the exact text they wish to use to express their love to each other.  All of our standard and custom Ketubot incorporate standard or contemporary text options by working directly with your rabbi to give you exactly the work of art you are looking for.

Designed by hand and inspired by the cool yet elegant group we are (if I do say so myself!), the content of the Jewish marriage contract itself is an expression of the relationship between you and your partner.  From traditional to egalitarian to queer Ketubahs, we look forward to accommodating not just the ideas in your mind, but also your heart.

The idea of a Ketubah to express your love isn’t so new.  But the incredible art at This Is Not A Ketubah is!

Jacob

Team Ketubah

Whenever we kick around ideas for the next phenomenal ketubah that we want to create, we always seem to come across the same problem: What happens when we want to talk about the amazing artwork that we’ve created together, to explain the many different versions of the ketubah we’ve been designing?  How can we best tell couples about the incredible modern styled ketbuahs—or is it ketubot—that we’d love to work with them to make?

And that is just the problem!

Whenever using Hebrew words in English (or in Spanish in the Buenos Aires office!), it is hard to decide which rules to apply.  Do we use the standard plural in English, ketubahs?  Or do we stick with Hebrew grammar for a feminine word, making it ketubot? Could we split the difference and call them ketubots, with the plural of both languages included?

Although it’s easy to get tripped up on something as small as this, we haven’t let it distract us from our main goal: working with all sorts of couples to create the most personalized, soulful, stop-dead-in-your-tracks gorgeous ketubahs.  And though a Rabbi might be able to help us figure out this pluralization problem, we’d rather talk with him (or her!) about writing a ketubah text that that is just right for couples deeply in love.

At the end of the day, This Is Not A Ketubah is all about focusing on how to make a traditional classic into a beautiful, even fun, modern variation.  As we work with each couple on the design of the perfect ketubah, we’re sure it’s the only ketubah they’ll ever need.

So figuring out how to say more than one of them isn’t a problem at all!

Jacob

Team Ketubah

In February, the New York Times did an exposé on many non-Jewish couples-of-faith getting Ketubot for their weddings.

This raises an interesting question: Are Ketubot appropriate for non-Jewish couples? If so, how?

A Ketubah is a traditional legal contract in which a couple pledges to be together — with consequences if you don’t, such as paying fines of zuzim to the other.

But it is also a symbol — of a commitment deeply serious to each other.

In an era in which the value of marriage is decreasing by the moment, the Ketubah is a traditional method for doubling down on the value of marriage, its seriousness, your commitment.

The Ketubah, then, is a powerful document for ANY couple, Jewish or not. For any couple that is serious about their commitment to each other, beyond government paperwork.

Of course, for a Christian couple (or Muslim couple!), the details of the Ketubah are probably a bit different. The laws of Christianity or Islam bind them more than the laws of Judaism.

Here at This Is Not a Ketubah we have worked on Ketubot for various Interfaith and Christian couples and we’re sensitive to their particular requirements. From our point of view, anyone returning to the Jewish tradition, and/or showing a serious commitment to the institution of marriage — we love and support and think there should be more of!

If there are any Christians, Catholics, Muslims, or other People of Faith who are interested in a Ketubah — then just send us an email and let us know!

Morgan
Team Ketubah

What would a DIY Ketubah look like? How do you make a cool and modern Ketubah yourself?

There are a few ways to approach this problem.

One way is to do it fully yourself, 100% home-made: Find text you like; choose the theme and design (perhaps directly onto a canvas, or perhaps digitally); source the materials you need to make it; create the artwork; review it with your Rabbi; print it out and deliver it.

This is for some people — particularly artists themselves — a fun project. This Is Not a Ketubah is a collective of artists and we pride ourselves on creating everything ourselves, with our own hands, in a sustainable way.

Often, though, if you haven’t spent a decade obsessing over how to create amazing designs, it just takes a lot of time to figure out how to create a Ketubah that looks amazing or awesome all on your own. Good art isn’t born overnight; it comes from years of focused obsession.

One solution that we advocate — and of course we are not unbiased! — is to work directly and personally with a high-quality Jewish artist in order for you two to create, together, a personalized, handmade, custom Ketubah.

This strategy has a few advantages, including:

• You use both of your expertise: you know your tastes and what you love and what you don’t; an artist knows how to convert your tastes into something that looks great.
• You don’t need to spend thousands of hours learning a new skill from nothing; you do what you do best, and work with someone else who does something else best.
• During this process, you will get to know the artist very well: at least here at This Is Not a Ketubah, we don’t have a factory, but we build one-on-one relationships with each of our clients. You will learn about us, our art, our passions — and vice-versa. And you can even come to Buenos Aires to pay us a visit if you want! Great place for a honeymoon :)

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.

In the modern world of the 21st century, many Jews marry people who were not born Jewish in interfaith ceremonies. What kind of Ketubah is good for them?

The Jewish-Asian couple is, in particular, a common pair: for at least 20 years, Jews and Asians have been attending awesome universities together, and building cool companies together in the Bay Area and it’s no wonder that more than one friend of ours has referred to Asians as “the New Jews.”

But what is an Asian-Jewish Ketubah like?

In addition to satisfying the traditional requirements of the Ketubah — and, obviously, in addition to being high quality, modern, and just awesome and cool, while being different and uniquely designed for the couple, not to mention, maybe even fun! — it would be wonderful to appeal to Asian aesthetic sentiments. How so?

Asian artwork has a long and beautiful history. Indeed, it feels awkward to group traditions as different as the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Malay, Indian and many others into one group — they are so different from each other! But they all do share one characteristic: they are far removed from the common aesthetic traditions practiced by most modern Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (although tiny communities in these countries do remain).

Our preference, here at This Is Not a Ketubah, is to incorporate the best of both traditions and creating personal Ketubahs and customized Ketubah artwork for all couples we work with. We love exploring different types and styles of art and design, and working closely with the couples to create Ketubahs that reflect their styles, designs, and traditions. The Asian style on a Jewish Ketubah is a beautiful mix. Soon we will publish a couple to our site — or if this might interest you, let us know!

Morgan
team@tinak.org

On the __________ day of the week, the __________ day of the month of __________, in the year five thousand seven hundred __________, as we reckon time here in ________________, the groom ____________ son of _____________ said to the bride_______________ daughter of _____________, “Be my wife according to the statutes of Moses and Israel. And I will work for, esteem, feed and support you as is the custom of Jewish men who work for, esteem, feed and support their wives faithfully. And I will give you ________________ and I will provide you food and clothing and necessities and your conjugal rights according to accepted custom.” And the bride ________________ agreed to become his wife. And this dowry that she brought from her _____________ house, whether in silver, gold, jewelry, clothing, furnishings or bedding, the groom ______________ accepted responsibility for all in the sum of _____________ zuzim, and agreed to add to this amount from his own assets the sum of ______________ zuzim, for a total of _______________ zuzim. The groom ____________ said: “The obligation of this ketubah, this dowry and this additional sum, I accept upon myself and my heirs after me, to be paid from all the best part of all my property that I now possess or may hereafter acquire, real and personal. From this day forward, all my property, even the shirt on my back, shall be mortgaged and liened for the payment of this ketubah, dowry and additional sum, whether during my lifetime or thereafter.” The obligation of this ketubah, this dowry and this additional sum, was accepted by ______________ the groom with the strictness established for ketubot and additional sums customary for the daughters of Israel, in accordance with the decrees by our sages, of blessed memory. This ketubah is not to be regarded as a formality or as a perfunctory legal form. We have established the acceptance on the part of ______________ son of ______________ the groom to _______________ daughter of _______________ the bride, of this contract, all of which is stated and specified above, with an article fit for that purpose. And all shall be valid and binding.

___________________________________________ Witness

___________________________________________ Witness

Here at This is Not a Ketubah, we are fans of You Look Nice Today Photography.

A couple of us are from Portland (hi, Yuji — also known as Yujinsky! — and Dan! The rest of us are from New York or Buenos Aires) and have been to many weddings in Portland and You Look Nice does work in a particular style that we like. A bit Northwestern, a bit modern, original and (to our eastern aesthetic) new — but not over-the-top. Cool but calm. We’re fans and would recommend them. The photos and their passion shine through and show the soul of the photographer-as-artist.

The light shines through in the photo, literally–and metaphorically. Their Ketubah is nicely but traditionally designed, and this design lets the light through. The photo captures this wonderfully.

And their photo of the bride with her Ketubah: spectacular! This modern and original style is very much our “onda”, as they say in Argentina, to mean “style.” It’s not so different, but it works well–especially in the photo.

(Photo Hat Tip!)

If you want to make your Ketubah even more original and different, why not base your wedding cake on your Ketubah design?

You wouldn’t be the first one!

Hat Tip to Zillycake

We just love this Ketubah signing. Hat Tip!

If you want to get a high-quality Custom-made Ketubah, one that is different than those generic styles you see everywhere — what kind of Ketubah themes work best?

This question is always a hard one for us to answer: everyone is looking for something different. Tastes are very personal. Are you cool and hipster and creative — or just want something unique and different but still very good? Do you love your pet, or punk music, or Ernest Hemingway, or the Baal Shem Tov? Everyone is different.

However, there are a few clear patterns.

Many of our most popular custom Ketubahs are based on the modern art themes: like our Gaudi, our Picasso, and our Kandinsky themes, for example. There are Ketubahs in many styles — there are few limits other than your, and our, creativity! But for reasons we don’t know, the modern art style Ketubot seem to be particularly possible.

Perhaps there is, indeed, a modern art revival happening these days!