The Broken Glass: Letting Go of Their Hands
“Any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of English county families baying for broken glass.”
– Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh (1928)
The sound of glass breaking can be terrifying, evoking Kristallnacht, dormant Judaeo-hatred becoming, once again, undeniably public (frighteningly similar to what might be transpiring 88 years later.)
And yet, we break a glass at the apex of our joy, the climax of every Jewish wedding ceremony.
Why?
The common answer: Remembering the temple’s destruction (Brachot, 30B), to temper our joy.
The symbolic answer: Reminding us marriage is as irreversible as a broken glass. (Halevai.)
The anthropological answer: Making noise to frighten away jealous demons (why we attach cans to the bumpers of newlyweds’ cars.)
The psychoanalytic answer: The glass (like the plate that we break at the Tenaim engagement ceremony) is a domestic item symbolizing our parents’ kitchen.
Breaking it certifies we are no longer sitting at their table. We are moving out on our own. Like breaking the glass, we are breaking our ties to them.
I have written previously about the unfortunate “No-Contact” phenomenon. (“Pray That Your Children…” June 21, 2026) Unlike that, this is not radical, unhealthy, or destructive. Indeed, it is traditional.
As a psychiatrist, I often witnessed the Separation Anxiety in newlyweds moving out of their parents’ homes for the first time. No one however, addresses the intensely ambivalent feelings of parents who are, to some degree, losing their children.
A wedding is emotionally different from a bar / bat mitzvah. We go to the celebration with our child, but, a few hours later, return home without them.
Is that something to celebrate?
Many parents report similar recurrent dreams following their children’s wedding: Engaged in some activity, they look up and unexpectedly notice their newly married child on the other side of a window, or glass door. They both smile, acknowledging each other, but because of the glass, cannot communicate.
It is a dream, not a nightmare, but it has a melancholy aftertaste. Parents sense their child is happy, which gladdens them. Yet, part of them wants to break that glass, grab their child’s hand, and return home with them.
Sagacious parents understand breaking the glass would be a mistake.
If their child communicates to them information they aren’t sharing with their spouse, it weakens the child’s marriage. Newlyweds’ secrets should now belong to their new partner, not their past progenitor. We must release our embrace to strengthen their incipient bond.
The glass helps us do that. We dare not break it.
At my youngest daughter’s wedding, I concluded my blessing to her under the Chupa, describing how, half her lifetime ago, on countless occasions, I sat next to her, holding her hand, as she lay unconscious in the emergency room because of a pertinacious Traumatic Brain Injury.
Eventually, despite my white coat and hospital ID, I would be asked to leave. I desperately did not want to. Most of all, I did not want to let go of her hand.
My wife was sitting in the waiting room. As she and I slowly, reluctantly, walked up the aisle of the emergency room to return home without our daughter, invariably we would both be in tears.
Trying to make her feel better, I would remind her, and myself, that someday, God willing, we would walk our girl up another aisle. At that moment, neither of us truly believed it.
Over a decade later, as God had willed, we did indeed walk her up another aisle, and up the stairs to her Chupa.
Once again, I did not want to let go of her hand.
As I blessed her, I noticed she was now holding hands with her groom. She was smiling, but simultaneously crying.
Her mother and I were doing the same, for identical reasons.
She had walked up the stairs holding our hands; she walked down holding her husband’s.
Under her Chupa, the glass had been literally, and figuratively, irreversibly broken.
The broken glass however, did not temper our joy, frighten us, or precipitate the demons of jealousy.
Today, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of their wedding, during which time they have given birth to three children, a new home in which to raise them (and a cat named Apollo.)
Simultaneously, we celebrate breaking the glass.
Sadly, in some cases, it is precisely a parent’s refusal to let go of their child’s hand that precipitates the “No – Contact” tragic outcome.
We break the glass to remember the temple being destroyed.
Ironically, it is only by breaking the glass that a new temple can be built.
