Continuation of Last Post...

[Yeah, that post was pretty awful. I hope this one is better.]

According to the wedding invitation, the "chupah" (actual wedding ceremony) started at 6:30, and Jerusalem is about an hour away from Bnai Brak. At around 6:15, I got on a chartered bus in front of the Yeshiva that was actually going to another wedding in Bnai Brak, full of these Yeshiva students. I won't go into too much detail about this bus ride, except to note an interesting event that occured: about 15 minutes into the bus ride, the driver mysteriously pulled to the side of the road. Everyone was yelling (in Hebrew and many, many differnet English accents) to figure out what the deal was. It turned out that he pulled over to let some important Rabbi onto the bus (who's entrance onto the bus caused complete silence, and everyone stood up). After he sat down, some guy shoved a microphone in front of the Rabbi's mouth, and the Rabbi proceeded to give a d'var Torah (sermon) for about 20 minutes, a sermon I could not understand in the least.

Anyway, we finally got to Bnai Brak around 7:30 (remember, about an hour after it was scheduled to start), and, when we finally found the wedding hall, the ceremony still had not begun.

I am going to be honest: there is no way I can completely describe what this wedding was like, even if think you know since you have been to a religious Jewish wedding before; no---this had to be one of the strangest scenes I have come across in a while. The Chupah was taking place in what appeared to be an open-air lobby (open air in that it had no ceiling), but otherwise looked like a regular building. A huge, white canopy was set up in the center of the room. In front of the canopy, all of the guests were amassed in no particular formation, and in the middle of this blog of mostly black suits and hats was a MASSIVE boom and camera---like what you would see on a Hollywood movie set: it was about 30 feet long, and was moving around the room, capturing the "action" of the wedding. Add to that, that among the guests, besides men in all black, most of the women wearing what appeared to be a kind of fake-silk dress that managed to cover everything but their face, and throw in a small clump of guys in white shirts and white kippahs, and a few Israeli soldiers with their M16's slung across their backs, and about 50billion little kids running around, and you start to have a picture of what was going on.

Suddenly, the groom's procession (which really just included my friend, Tzvi, his mother and father, and 15 Rabbis) came out of nowhere and charged to the middle of the room to the Chupah, the Hollywood camera capturing the entire charge. When many of the Rabbis forming this contingent melted away into the rest of the black of the crowd, Tzvi, his parents, and what I will assume were the two Rabbis officiating the wedding were left up under the Chupa, with Tzvi chanting something, which I will completely guess were Tefillim (Psalms), since that seems to be the general rule among the very religious when they are trying to keep focused on certain things.

Soon, a second mass of people erupted out of one of the other doors in this lobby, only this group was almost completely made up of women, many of whom were crying (they were happy...?). At this point, I had already worked my way around the crowd, and had realized that one of the Israeli soldiers was Sam, the groom's cousin and a friend of mine, and added to this crew was the brother of the groom, Yisrael, a 17 year-old rebel of sorts. While all of the above is going on around us, we had the following conversation:

-Me: So, Yisrael, I am embarresed to be asking, but could you tell me what the Bride's name is?
-Yisrael: Umm. No. I don't really know it. [At this point I realize this 17 year old is piss drunk]. Hmmm. No.
-Me: That's funny. Seriously, I was just wondering...
-Yisrael: No. I really can't remember. Maybe it's Sarah or something [note: I found out later it was "Rechele"]...no....Well, I don't even think that Tzvi knows her name.
[We all laugh]
-Sam: So...Yisrael. You're going to be an uncle again in, what, 9, 9-and-a-half months from now?

I will actually stop this conversation at this point to protect him from any embaressment. Needless to say, it was hilarious and completely inappropriate---either for a wedding, or any 17 year old. But Sam and I got a kick out of it. Yisrael left, and I caught up with Sam about his venture in the Israeli army (he is serving in the town of Ramalah (in Palestinian controlled West Bank; it's actually the unofficial capital of the Palestinian Authority). A few days before the wedding, the big news in Israel was that Israel was handing over some weapons to the Palestinians (under Abbas' control), with the "promise" that they wouldn't be used against Israelis. Sam had actually been in the unit that delivered the guns.

At this point, I ran into a huge number of faces that I hadn't seen in over 6 years, some more: a few old middle school teachers (Mr. and Mrs. Uzan, Mr. and Mrs. Edelstien), a father of a friend (Dr. Friedman, father of Bezalel Friedman, who is apparently now doing officer training in Shcem, in the West Bank), and lots of other people from the past. Last time I had been in Israel, I had stayed with the Uzans for about two weeks, and really hadn't communicated with them since. As Mr. Uzan put it (in broken English): "Keeping up with people....it is....you know?...a luxury."

He proceeded to lecture me, making sure that I hadn't gone "overboard" with my religiousness, that I am still close with my family, and that I shouldn't consider moving to Israel (this probably deserves a seperate discussion of its own, which I hope to give in the future). Needless to say, he was pretty much the same.

Well.....I need to get back to doing some work. I will wrap up this wedding description in the next post (hopefully), and then move on to tell of the other interesting things that have happened since then (including the events surrounding watching the America-Ghana soccer game, running into a bunch of MIT kids in Jerusalem, trekking clear across the city with one of them, and Shabbat at my Yeshiva).

Best,

Michael