A Tale of Seven Wedding Blessings

This past weekend, I started working on the program that Kenny and I are going to distribute to our guests at the wedding ceremony. The program will have short blurbs on the Jewish traditions that we are incorporating into the ceremony, and the full English and Hebrew text of the Sheva B’rachot, or “Seven Blessings”, that are the central part of the Jewish wedding liturgy.

When I started, however, I found that the text of the Sheva B’rachot was nowhere to be found on the internet, either in image form or (as I preferred) text form. Unwilling to give up, I finally decided I was going to have to type them up myself. I downloaded a free Hebrew font, got out my tattered printed copy of the blessings, and set to work. This was no easy task, because the English-Hebrew keyboard mappings are not at all intuitive. And because Hebrew has a lot of complexities with the placement of vowels and dots and things all over the place, I had to spend a lot of time playing just to figure out the magic incantations to type in order to form the letters and words that I needed. For example, alef, the first letter in the alphabet, was mapped to the close paren (shift-0). Who knew?!

But after much pecking away, I finally figured out all of the mappings I needed and within a couple of hours I had my perfect rendering of the Sheva B’rachot. In my attempt to save some poor unsuspecting engaged Jewish couple from the same pain, I’m posting the MS Word doc containing the Hebrew text here. Enjoy! You’ll need the SPTiberian font, which is free and available for both Mac and Windows.

As a side note, I realized today that I would have been much happier on Saturday if I’d done a quick MSN Search for “SPTiberian” and found this convenient key mapping chart. Oy.