The chuppah is the canopy under which a Jewish wedding takes place, and by extension the ceremony held beneath it. A cloth is stretched over four poles, open on every side, and the couple stand under it to be married. The tradition reads the open sides in more than one way, as the hospitality of the patriarch Abraham's tent, open to guests on all quarters, and as a symbol of the new home the couple are establishing, into which the bride is brought. Standing under the chuppah is one of the acts that help effect the marriage in Jewish law, alongside the betrothal blessings and the giving of a ring. The ceremony concludes with the breaking of a glass underfoot, widely understood as a remembrance of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem kept even at the height of joy. Practice around the canopy varies across Jewish communities, but the open-sided covering itself is nearly universal.
In Talmudic law, marriage was originally a two-stage process separated often by up to a year: erusin (betrothal, also called kiddushin), which bound the couple exclusively to one another, and nisu'in, the completion of the marriage when the bride entered the groom's domain, a transition the chuppah ritually enacts. Historians of Jewish law trace the merging of these two stages into a single ceremony to medieval Ashkenazi practice, adopted to spare betrothed couples the vulnerable interim period between the stages, so that the modern wedding beneath the chuppah telescopes into one afternoon a process that rabbinic sources originally describe as unfolding across many months.