I was chatting the other day with a Jewish rabbi. We were exchanging experiences and somehow the conversation drifted round to the marriage service.‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that, at a Jewish wedding, a wine-glass is broken as part of the symbolism of the ceremony. Is that a fact?’
‘Of course it is,’ he replied. ‘We hold aloft a wine-glass; let it fall and be shivered to atoms; and then, pointing to its fragments, we exhort the young couple to jealously guard the sacred relationship into which they have entered, since, once it is broken, it can never be restored.’
F W Boreham, ‘Jed Smith’ Shadows on the Wall (London: The Epworth Press), 200-201.
Image: Jewish groom breaking wine glass with his shoe.