A Tale Of Two Weddings

You might call this a tale of two weddings. The first took place in Cyprus. Its bride and groom were young Israelis, the latter the son of acquaintances of ours – but like many young Israelis, they did not want an Orthodox religious wedding, and since there is no such thing as civil marriage in Israel, or even as government-recognized non-Orthodox religious marriage, they preferred taking an alternative route.This route is to get married in a civil ceremony abroad, which is then recognized as valid by Israeli law. There are a number of venues that are commonly used by Israelis for this purpose, of which Cyprus, less than an hour’s flight away, is the most popular. It is the nearest country with civil marriage and therefore the cheapest to travel to, and it even has entrepreneurs who, working together with Israeli travel agents, offer complete “wedding packages,” complete with hotel reservations and the booking of a Cypriot justice of the peace. Whole parties of wedding guests are commonly included in them.Why do many Israelis avoid a religious wedding? The reasons vary. In some cases, such a wedding may not be possible because one of the partners is not Jewish. (Thus, our weekly house cleaner, a non-Jewish woman from Ukraine who arrived in Israel with a Jewish husband she later divorced, recently flew to Prague to marry another Jewish immigrant from the ex-Soviet Union.) In some, one or both of the partners may have strong anti-religious feelings.Yet in probably the majority of cases, the feelings are not so much anti-religious as anti-Israeli Orthodox, or even just anti the procedures that Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate imposes – especially the requirement that the bride attend a lesson in the rabbinic laws of “family purity” and undergo an ablution in a mikveh or ritual bathhouse. Many secular Israelis who would not mind an Orthodox wedding ceremony find such demands offensive and even humiliating.This is too bad, not only because the Orthodox wedding ceremony is itself a simple yet beautiful ritual next to which a justice of the peace’s office in Cyprus or the Czech Republic can only seem sadly inadequate, but because it reflects the widespread alienation of an entire generation of Israeli youth from the religious traditions of its people – an alienation for which, by its narrow-mindedness, politicization, and insensitivity to the secular public, Israel’s religious establishment is itself largely to blame.But I have spoken of two weddings. The second took place on a beach in Israel a few miles from the town in which I live.The bride in this case was a good friend of my daughter’s. She, too, might be defined as a secular Israeli and she too did not want to go through the hassle that the rabbinate inflicts on those marrying, but neither did she want to forgo a religious ceremony that she believed to be deeply meaningful in its own right. Nor did she want this ceremony to be Conservative or Reform, not only because she would then still have had to have a civil wedding for her marriage to be recognized by the government, but also because an Orthodox ceremony seemed to her more authentic.And so my daughter’s friend did not go to Cyprus. She searched until she found an unconventionally minded Orthodox rabbi who cared enough about outreach to the secular that he was willing to skip the “family purity” lesson and let the ablution take place in the Mediterranean, and the wedding took place by the Mediterranean, too. The rabbi brought his guitar, there was singing and dancing on the beach all night, and whoever got tired curled up in the sand in a sleeping bag and went to sleep.That happened to be a Thursday night. The wedding party continued on at the beach over the weekend, and the next night, which was Friday night, it had its own kabbalat Shabbat or “welcoming of the Sabbath” – not a traditional Sabbath eve prayer, but a homemade ritual that included prayers from the prayer book, readings from the Bible, and songs, skits, and performance of the guests’ own devising. On Saturday morning, when I went down for a swim, the encampment was just waking up. The bride was in her bathing suit, little babies were crawling around among the sleeping bags, and a large beaker of Turkish coffee was being brewed over a fire.One would be rightly cautioned not to make too much of such an event. And yet neither is it all that unique. For the first time in Israel’s history, a modest religious revival is going on among young secular Israelis that does not involve a return to Orthodoxy, or a turning to American-style Conservatism or Reform, but rather an attempt to re-connect with Jewish tradition on these young people’s own terms. Various influences are at work: New Age spirituality, feminism, the spread in Israel of so-called “secular yeshivas,” the “neo-Hasidism” of offbeat American Jewish religious leaders like Shlomo Carlbach and Zalman Schachter, the fad of Kabbalah, the enormous impact on Israeli youth of relatively nearby India and Indian religion – but above all, what is at work is the desire to find one’s way back to a personal Judaism that lies outside of institutional frameworks and institutional formulas.For decades, a common complaint about life in Israel, on the part of both Israelis and diaspora Jews, was that it was polarized between an ossified Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and a knee-jerk secularism, on the other. Although it was never quite as bad as all that, it is true that Judaism in Israel has suffered from long years of stagnation. This is now beginning to change, not institutionally, from above, but on a grass-roots basis, from below, both among young secular and young Orthodox Israelis, and in the interstices and meeting points between them. Israel is on the brink of a genuine Jewish revival. In fact, it’s already under way.Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

A Tale Of Two Weddings

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