It has been a crazy week, so it's been really tough to find the time to post. Because of that unfortunate fact, this post is going to be really long. Sorry.
I'm going to begin from last Thursday night, when I had the experience of being a fly on the wall during one of the most interesting spectacles of my life: an religious Israeli wedding.
I wish that I could tell you who was getting married. If I understood it correctly, the wedding invitation came from the fact that Art (the guy I went with) and his wife Carol have been helping to support Ethiopian girls go to college, and the most recent girl whom they supported was getting married, so they were invited. Carol was still in the states, so I was Art's plus one. He had never met the bride, and neither of us knew anyone else there; so to say the least, we looked pretty lost.
When Art picked me up (in my borrowed-modern-orthodox-elbow-and-knee-covering outfit (of course)), we drove over to a Kibbutz near Beit Shemesh (between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) where the wedding was taking place.
There were many interesting parts of this wedding, but I'll just note a few things that I found particularly fascinating.
1) The bride was Ethiopian and I believe secular while the groom came from a very religious background. I assume this because many Ethiopian girls who were at the wedding were wearing less than modest clothing while the majority of non-Ethiopian men who were there were wearing tzitzit and had epic pais. if your not Jewish, I'm sorry. You're just going to have to be confused for a bit.
2) Before the ceremony began, there was a little ceremony called Kabalat Panim which happens at all Dati (religious) weddings. The bride and the groom each have a separate reception. The men went inside where the dinner was going to take place and the women were outside. The bride's reception consisted of women sitting on the couch next to the bride and giving her words of wisdom while other women sang and danced around her. It looked very sweet, but I can honestly not begin to portray to you just how out of place I felt.
I didn't go inside (obviously), but I observed that the grooms reception consisted of drunken dancing (yes, BEFORE the ceremony) followed by ma'riv (evening prayer). The two receptions went on for about 30-45 minutes, and ended when the men burst from the buildings singing and dancing with the groom outside. He walked into the bride's reception and put her veil over her face (I forget the name of the ritual, but it's symbolic of the story of Jacob being tricked into marrying Leah when he wanted to marry Rachel back in the Bible. He then left the circle, and his friends and family danced all the way up to the Chupah (wedding canopy) with him. While there were chairs nicely set up for people to sit in to watch the ceremony, the men found it more fitting to surround the chuppah as though the wedding was a concert.
Next, the bride was led up the chuppah by (I assuume) her mother and grand mother. The flock of women (and even men) surrounded her throughout the whole process. It was quite a site to see.
I'm not going to outline the entire wedding ritual, but if you've never been to a religious Jewish wedding before, I urge you to Wikipedia it or something so you can understand what happens as the rituals are pretty cool. There were a few things that happened during this ceremony that I feel like I should point out though.
1) Whenever the rabbi stopped talking for whatever reason, the men flocking the Chuppah picked some wedding song and started singing loudly.
2) The only people who had a good view of the wedding were the camera men. They were standing directly in front of the ceremony so that no one could see it.
3) The Ketubah (wedding contract) was not signed by both the bride and the groom, but rather only by the groom. When the Rabbi gave the bride the Ketubah, he told her to give it to her mother for the night and to then put it in her home and never lose it. Though in modern Judaism the Ketubah is less legally relevant, I found it interesting that they still emphasized it as being an important way for women to have rights within the marriage.
4) Every single person who was called up to read one of the seven wedding blessings at the end of the wedding was a member of the grooms family who was a Rabbi.
5) When the groom broke the glass thus solidifying the marriage, instead of allowing the new couple to walk into their reception, the grooms friends attacked them and started dancing with them UNDER THE CHUPPAH. In true Israeli fashion, these men had no patience.
At that point, it was about 10 at night and Art had a lot of driving to do that night, we decided to leave instead of staying for the drunken bacchanal with a bunch of people we didn't know. As we left the wedding, a Charadi man who had been at the wedding asked us if we were going back to Jerusalem and asked us for a ride, so we took him with us. As we were sort of confused as to how to go (even though we had directions), we took his advice as to how to get back to my home. Sure enough, he took us back to his ultra orthodox neighborhood and sent us back to where I live on the most busy road ever. To say the least, we got screwed over. And even though a Charadi man took advantage of us since we were merely lost Americans, we still had a very enjoyable and interesting night.
The next morning, I woke up and went to the bus station to go to Herzlya to visit my friend Mika who is studying at IDC, the college in Herzlya. Herzlya is a suburb right outside of Tel Aviv, and it is beautiful. It is not touristy the way that most every other place that I've been to thus far has been, but rather is filled with genuine Israeli stores and people.
We spent Friday afternoon hanging out and getting back in touch as I hadn't seen her in nearly two hours and had Shabbat dinner with her roommate and a bunch of her roommates friends. Her roommate was from South America, but since she had Israeli parents, she is fluently tri-langual. Her friends were from all over the world, and the Shabbat table was surrounded by Israelis, Brits, Argentinians and more. Also, all of them were in their mid 20's. When I told them I was 18, they were shocked, and one of them told me that she assumed I was 22. WIN! We spent the rest of the weekend Shabbat sleeping, talking, watching TV, walking around Herzlya and hanging out. It was very restful, and it was quite nice to be away from the Nativ bubble for a while and to instead be around a group of older people. I definetly think I saw a preview of what my life could look like in 5 years. To say the least, I'm terrified.
The next exciting thing that happened was Monday night, when the Nativ women's football team had is first game. Many of us had class that ended at 6 and we were supposed to meet as a group at 6:15 for the game that started at 7. I should mention that it takes 45 minutes to get from school back to base. The large group of us literally sprinted from our Holocaust class to the bus, from the buses to our rooms, and then the group of us ran about a mile and a half to the field. Huffing and puffing, though, we made it (pretty much) on time. We were very proud...but the game hadn't happened yet.
To call the game football isn't really fair, since it is 5 on 5 and no contact, but it was fun all the same. We have about 20 girls on our team, and about 25 people came to cheer us on, so we were one big loud annoying group, but we had fun. And we SLAUGHTERED the other team. They had been playing for 3 years and we had been practicing for a week. It was quite funny.
Tuesday was pretty low key, but at the Nativ night time activity, we talked about the Yizchak Rabin assassination as it happened 15 years prior to the day. We watched a video about him and talked a bit about the lessons that Israel has learned from that event, and it was interesting to talk about such a pivotal moment in Israeli history from the place where it happened instead of from the states. After the Rabin talk, the Executive VP of the United Synagogues spoke to us about some of the problems facing the conservative movement in preparation for our conservative movement boot-camp this weekend and then fielded our questions. I asked him a question that I thought was pretty basic, and something pretty incredible happened: HE OFFERED ME A JOB!
It was half a joke and half not, but he handed me his card in the middle of the talk and told me to contact him when I got out of college. To say the least, it was funny to watch the reaction of the college graduate staff as they asked him why they didn't offer to hire them. The honest best part of the talk, though, occurred when the door of the theater we were sitting in swung open and an ultra orthodox Charedi man appeared at teh door. It was very funny.
Wednesday and Thursday were both very low key. I wish that I had something really interesting to talk about, but this post is quite long, and nothing that interesting happened during the days. I will say this though: I'm loving my classes, I'm enjoying being at school, high school was way more difficult, and I'm loving life in Israel.
Until next time, thanks for reading!
Becca
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