I was drowning in shame and humiliation. Couldn’t there be another way to get married?

The tables in the small apartment on Rechov Morgenthau in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood were modestly set.

A plate of rugelach, some bourekas, a few bottles of sweet carbonated drinks. A small crowd gathered in the simple dining room to celebrate the engagement of the 22-year-old chassan.

That chassan was me.

I sat at the provisional “head table,” giddy with excitement. Among Breslov chassidim, I was considered an “older” bochur, and finally, at this ripe old age, my yeshuah had come.

Sitting beside me and managing things was my unforgettable maggid shiur from my yeshivah ketanah days, Rav Binyamin Zev Knepelmacher, who had accompanied me from my bar mitzvah to this day.

My heart was soaring with joy, but it was also frozen in dread. I was very aware that in just a few minutes, after some brachos and good wishes, handshakes and excited words about the importance of building a Jewish home, that moment of commitment would arrive. The tena’im.

A tense silence hung in the room.

Everyone fixed their eyes on Rav Knepelmacher, who was writing the tena’im. It was no secret that I didn’t have a shekel to my name. My father was still in kollel, my mother, a homemaker. Our family of ten was poor by any definition, and I knew there wasn’t an extra penny for a wedding.

But I was an older chassan and the kallah was an orphan, and someone would have to take the reins here.

I was already floating through a fog when I heard the maggid shiur reading in a celebratory tone: “Hachassan mischayeiv…. The chassan commits. To. Provide. All. The. Expenses. For. The Wedding. And. Everything. Involved.”

I nearly stopped breathing, gaping at him in disbelief, and he, with that ever-present smile, closed his eyes in a motion to convey “it will be fine.” As far as I was concerned, nothing here was going to be fine.

I had always had a good head for calculations, and when the maggid shiur said “all the expenses for the wedding and everything involved,” I began to crunch the numbers. A hall, food, band, sheva brachos, photographer, shtreimel, shoes, beketshe, furniture, appliances, clothes, linens, beds. Shabbos sheva brachos, rent for a year.

And my world went dark. I tried to imagine the most frugal version of it all. The smallest hall. The oldest-style shtreimel. Ribbono shel Olam! Me? A 22-year-old bochur? Forty thousand dollars?

O

ne thing was clear. I wasn’t going to find the money in my parents’ home.

I won’t complain about my childhood. We had a happy home, but we were poor in a way that you only read about in stories.

Our apartment, like the other apartments in the eggbox-shaped buildings of Ramot Polin, was designed so that neighbors couldn’t look into others’ homes, but those slanted walls made our apartment feel even smaller.

My memories of winter can be summarized in one word: freezing. The neighbor who served as the vaad bayit (the building committee), who was supposed to activate the heat, was a Holocaust survivor who was careful about every drop of fuel. In his view, the entire Middle-Eastern winter didn’t justify turning on the heat. “When you feel here like we felt in winter of 1942 in Buchenwald, then we’ll turn on the heat.”

Still, we, the children of 1990, had to cover ourselves with an old quilt just to keep warm.

Private heating was out of the question, and so was purchasing what most people consider a normal shopping list. Our meals were based primarily on what came in Yad Eliezer deliveries (when they sent canned peaches, we were thrilled).

That’s how we grew up, and somehow, we got used to it. But now, forty thousand dollars?