In the last days of 2023, Pamela Michelle Soberman first laid eyes on Benjamin Michael Summers and thought he was just her type: tall, full head of hair and “Jewish-looking.” They were both attending the same three-day singing retreat, called Sing a New Song, in Dover Plains, N.Y.
After hearing him sing, Soberman confessed, “I have a crush on your voice.” Summers, who goes by Beni, later said, “It was a good pickup line.”
Two flirtatious days later, the pair sealed their mutual interest with a kiss in the woods, surrounded by reeds and a running stream. Judaism is central to both of their identities, and the moment, they said, felt nothing short of “biblical.”
After all, they credit “divine bread crumbs” for their union — they weren’t supposed to spend the holiday upstate. Summers had just moved back to his home state of Massachusetts to finish his final year of rabbinical school after his stint in Jerusalem ended with Oct. 7, along with a four-year relationship. Without a plan, he saw a friend post about the retreat and went on a whim.
“I wanted to vibe out with hippie Jews,” he said. Finding a woman wasn’t on his radar (but he did get a haircut just in case).
Soberman intended to go a year earlier, but caught Covid. In 2023, a girlfriend canceled their 2023 New Year’s Eve plans at the last minute.
Looking for a way to avoid spending the holiday alone, she signed up with the same organizer Summers had contacted. “I just imagined it was going to be five women with guitars, singing around a campfire,” she joked.
The two bonded quickly over shared values of Jewish spirituality, play and community, and soon slipped into what they called a “smedium” distance relationship between Boston and New York, where Soberman lived.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
That February, a mutual friend texted Soberman about someone to possibly set her up with. Summers was over at the time, and she showed him the message. They became exclusive that night.
The following month, Soberman told a friend over dinner she thought she’d marry him.
“I never had the anxiety of, ‘Is he going to text me?’” she said. “Even though the logistics were challenging, the relationship never felt challenging.”
Soberman, 38, was raised in a reform family in Easton, Conn. In 2019, she moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to reconnect with her Jewish identity after feeling disconnected from religion during her undergraduate years at Vanderbilt and at business school at the University of Michigan.
She now works as an H.R. director at Fireblocks, an infrastructure company for digital assets, and chairs the Brooklyn advisory committee of the UJA-Federation of New York, a philanthropic organization. Dating Summers felt like a homecoming to her Judaism. “He brings the Shabbat vibe into our lives,” she said. “He reminds me of my sweetest memories in Jewish youth group.”
Summers, 37, grew up attending Hebrew school in Salem, Mass. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Binghamton University and was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., where he found resonances in mysticism and neo-Hasidism.
In 2025, Summers began searching for synagogues to work at in New York. Soberman helped rework his résumé and pushed him to include his album of original niggunim, the Hebrew term for wordless spiritual melodies.
Michelle Dardashti, the rabbi at Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, heard his music and knew she had to hire him, even without an open position. In April 2025, Summers became the synagogue’s director of liturgy and engagement.
Ten days prior, he proposed inside a friend’s Park Slope brownstone. Soberman knew it was coming, just not how. At the end of her workday, Summers told her a car would be waiting outside her building. Asked what to wear, he texted: “Something to get engaged in.” Her Uber driver even congratulated her on the engagement.
What awaited her was a scene of tea lights, flowers and seven English translations of the “Song of Songs” hung along the staircase to the rooftop, where Summers waited with a rose-covered altar and a ukulele. On both knees, he proposed. Twenty minutes later, friends and family arrived to celebrate.
“It’s pretty bold to shoot your shot for a job and a wife in the same week,” Summers said. “Turns out I stuck my landing on both.”
In July 2025, the couple moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Soberman’s building, and Summers became the stepfather to Prince, her Chihuahua.
They married July 5 at the Garrison, a wedding venue in the Hudson Valley, before 165 guests. Rabbi Jill Hammer Soberman’s former spiritual teacher, officiated.
The ceremony was structured under the Sefirot. Instead of vows, guests affirmed their dreams for the couple and the world, followed by a night of shtick — performances for the bride and groom. “We made a gateway into divine love,” Soberman said.
After the ceremony, Soberman’s father, Steven Soberman, performed an iteration of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to celebrate the pair’s love of music and belief in divine miracles.
The post ‘Divine Bread Crumbs’ Guided Their Love Story appeared first on New York Times.
