TO BE MARRIED IN JERUSALEM IS TO RETURN TO THE HOLIEST OF HOLY CITIES

 

Charlene Spretnak wrote in her introduction to The Politics Of Spirituality:

"My own patterns of awakening in the evolution of women's spirituality parallel those of many other feminists. I began life firmly entrenched in the Judeo-Christian tradition, experienced a disappointing emptiness in that orientation, and finally began making personal discoveries of the spiritual dimensions of life. Those discoveries acquired a frame of reference when I learned of the ancient prepatriarchal myths and religions that had honored female access to spiritual realities and personal power. As I began to meet other women who were making similar discoveries and who were quick to see the political implications, I knew we would never be lost again." ¹

MY JEWISH ROOTS

I did not have role models to emulate, I had no one to learn from on my quest for the spirit hidden inside me. My first task therefore was to try to understand my own religion, but in a female spiritual context rather than a traditional context. The word "religion" is from the Latin "religare", meaning to bind, but I prefer the word "spirit", which feels to me broader and deeper than organized religion with its forms and constructs. Nontheless, I was brought up and am imbued with Jewish culture. In order to sort through this, I began therefore to search out Jewish women writers and rabbis. These thinkers had varying ideas about the traditional view of god, always portrait in Judaism as male. They instead told stories of Jewish goddesses, with names like Ashtarte and Lilith They referred to Miriam and Sarah as prophets. I was startled. Shocked that the canon could be re-interpreted so elegantly, surprised how much I could relate to the story of my foremothers,

I would have to say that the biggest surprise to me was that none of this was discussed during my upbringing. As I now understand all too well, the typical conservative Jewish model is patriarchal. Young men went to the Bar Mitzvah class, girls learned about cooking and sewing. And I thought I was lucky. Little did I realize that there were not real prepared rites of transformation for young women, nor did I realize that what they were teaching me was not for me, but for the men whom I would serve later in life. Consequently, the concept of "god" as well as the idea of "spirit" were very much in the background for me as I was growing up.

In order to rectify this, we need to begin to examine the various rites of translormation that affect Jewish women, particularly in the United States, where Jewish and secular life are in many ways melded into one. I have chosen to study the rite of marriage. While menstruation is a woman's first real transformation, and one that will forever only be available to women, marriage is the first real right of transformation that I could work with and help craft. It is also usually the precurser to the rituals of childbirth and motherhood the next two rituals that will forever only be available to women. The facts of the female body, so different than the time indifferent chemistry of the male body, dictate the bookmarks of our adult lives, menstruation as the beginning of the ability to have children, and childbirth as the culmination of that potential. It is therefore marriage that serves as the gateway from one to the other. Potential and the fullfillment of potential. A true metaphor for life itself, the life we are put on this planet to experience.

We decided to get married in Israel. The rental halls of NY held no meaning, no context. I needed to go back to the source to start the spirituality of my adulthood at the place where the context of my religious culture began. Israel, as it has been reborn out of the swamps of history, became then the beginning of my spirituality. It was a return to the Holy Land of my spirit as well as to the physical embodiment of the culture of the people I belonged to. Over a century of assimilation had accumulated in me as an American Jew and I knew that in the search for my spirit I had to return to the sources of my ancestors. From there I could choose to maintain my traditions or consciously choose to abandon them altogether. I wanted the sacred act of marriage brought alive by relevance and connection.

THE STORY OF A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE BRIDE

ADAM: He is the first man and he is my husband.
LEAH: Here I am, Leah, which means sleepy or unconscious, peaceful woman, in Hebrew.
EVE: Who of course is the first woman, and she's my mom.
ZACH: My dad who was born Sigmund, but that was crossed out on the birth certificate by my nanna, she just always did what she wanted. I suspect they had an argument about what his name should be, so one day we looked at his birth certificate and his name was Sigmund but all our lives we've called him Zachary.
MICHAEL: My brother and the anti-Semite in the family. He is married to a Shiite Muslim woman from Lebanon named Zina, who did not attend our wedding because she works for our U.N. and professed that had she gone to Jerusalem for the wedding her own people might have thought she was working for the Israelis on terrorist activities against Lebanon. So she couldn't come. She always thought she was the center of the universe. Some excuse.
ANDREW: My younger brother. He follows in my brother Michael's footsteps and the two of them came to the wedding with there hair slicked back, looking like two terrorists. Out wedding was ten days before the start of the first Intafatah.
ROMY: My half sister, she's four and a half now. She came - Oh no she didn't, she wasn't born yet. The wedding was seven years ago.
SUSAN: My dad's wife, she came because they were married a year when we got married. So Dad and I sort of went through the ceremonies together. He became a second father before a becoming a grandfather.
UNCLE AL: Ninety one years old and had never been out of the USA in his entire life and we got him a passport to Israel. He represented the ancestors. He had to prove to the rabbinate, which is the Israeli counsel of rabbis, that I was Jewish and that my mother was Jewish. Uncle Al was a great witness.

PROPOSAL

We'd been going together for four years and I thought like one day he would sit me down in a restaurant and pull out this beautiful old diamond ring box, hold champagne up and say "Darling would you marry me!", but he didn't. One day he said you know I thought maybe we'd be drinking champagne and pour it all over my body, with his appendage in mine, and say "Darling, marry me!". But none of that happened. Adam owned this big beautiful store called Caswell-Massey, where they make soaps and perfumes and all sorts of pretty things in New York and all around the country. We were in the store after hours and I was looking at some combs that were hanging on the counter and he said "you know, do you want to marry me?," and he wasn't even looking at me and I thought this is a joke, right. So I went to my friend and said "I think this guy just asked me to marry him but I can't tell." She says "Marry him!". I couldn't deal with it so I didn't do anything until months later. I really just remember he said his grandmother had a ring and I said "you know, I'll take that ring."

I thought, "It's going to take time to get married, be serious and don't get distracted by men, that's always been your 'weakness'. He's kind and good, and he's just like your grandfather and you love him." So we decided to get married in Israel, in Jerusalem. His cousins had made Aliya, which is when American Jews go back to Israel and pledge their love for the country. There were Adam's cousins who were rabbis and they said, "Come on to Israel, we'll make the reservations." I said, "Great!" So they called up the hotel and they set it all up. I didn't have to do much, which I liked. My parents being divorced at the time it was great it was out of the country, they were either going to come or they weren't going to come and that was it.

Thirty-five people came from the United States and thirty-five in Israel. We got married on Har ha Tzofim which means "the Mount of Olives". We had a seven day wedding, a traditional way of getting married. Each night everyone takes you out for dinner and they just celebrate. It was the most incredible celebration. I would say to people when I would walk the streets "Yes, I am ha-chala!", which mean the bride, and everyone would be "Oh, she's the bride!" It was so sacred and this reverence for womanhood was nothing like I'd experienced in America. I thought perhaps they think I'm pregnant because they are really paying a lot attention to me. "Sit down, do this...." I thought we should have our kids here, we should move here, they respect family. So we talked a little bit about returning to bring up children on this land.

When I was seventeen I wanted to go to Israel and live on a Kibbutz, like a lot a Jewish kids. My father said NO! I was in Greece at the time and he said "Don't you dare go there!" And I said "Why Dad?, it's just across the ocean, I could take a boat there and I could go for a week or two." He said "Don't you go or I'll never pay for college because I know you, you'll end up living there." I felt so threatened by him that I didn't go so it was a really important step for me to go back and get married on this Holy Land that I wasn't able to experience before. Now, this was my opportunity to pledge my allegiance to a country whose soil I felt I knew.

One of the first proceedings was to have the Mikva, that is where you get washed and cleansed of all the dirt. You can not have your period when you go. It's actually like a Japanese bath, a hot tub, but I didn't know what it was going to be. So you go into this big vat, this big tub, and there is this big heavy woman who says come on in and she shaves you and makes you turn around in the water and say a couple of prayers and go under water and submerge yourself and you come out and she looks at you and says "She's clean, she's ready for marriage." After that, this woman in the Mikva who spoke some English (my Hebrew wasn't as good as some of my other languages) said "Come to the Wailing Wall and we'll make a prayer." She took me to the Wailing Wall and we made this really beautiful prayer and asked for blessings for my marriage. I came home and that night slept with my mother, as the tradition has it you don't sleep with your husband from the time of the Mikva to the marriage. We had tea late in bed and stayed up talking. That morning before the wedding I actually got invited to a woman's Yeshiva by a friend of mine from New York that had been living in Israel and who was going back to her Jewish roots. A lot of people are going back to becoming religious Jews and she was in that process. There is only one women's Yeshiva in all of Israel because the tradition is quite oppressive. So we went and everyone stood around me and sang this beautiful song for the bride and just made this circle. She talked about the section they were reading from the Torah that week about Leah and Rachel, the two sisters, about how one betrayed the other, that was what we were reading that day.

We had two rabbis at the wedding, Adam's uncle, who by the way took us to the top of his roof and sat us down and said "I have to tell you the ten rules of marriage". So he made this whole sheet for us that said: Never go to sleep without resolving an argument, always make the other person right, ... I don't remember all of them but we had on our refrigerator for a while and I'll put it back up soon. So my uncle said to us he was a reform rabbi so we had to have another orthodox rabbi in order to be legally married as Jews in a religious ceremony in Jerusalem. So we had two rabbis, which is an interesting duality, kind of a theme in my life, those sisters you know. Anyway we had two rabbis and one rabbi, as it turned out, knew my father's wife from South Africa, he was her rabbi in South Africa.

We had to walk seven times around the Bima, which is the stage, because that is another part of the ritual, seven times for good luck. And I walked with my big train, turning, it was really beautiful. My father had taken me and given me away. It was really an amazing thing to walk down all these steps of the hotel. Walk down and I thought this is such a strange ritual, I mean he's giving me away but he doesn't really own me. It felt so archaic but we did it anyway. Everything. The bustles. Just to have that sense of what it is to be a princess. It was really like being princess for the day, and since I had always thought I was one it was nice to get that treatment. Then they had the traditional breaking of the glass which is to break the hymen of the women, to break into the next phase of life, and also signifies that material things are not important. So a lot of ritual surrounded our ceremony.

We had the big party, the first of four parties. So the first party took place in the hotel in a big ballroom. We did a lot of dancing, does anyone know 'Hava Nagila'? We sang and sang and sang. And then suddenly halfway through the ceremony, I'm eating, oh and it was all dairy wedding, Kosher, there was only fish and cheeses, and no meat. We had to have it Kosher for Adam's mother. She was an orthodox Jew from a Shtetl in Poland and we had to do what she wanted, we had to please her. She was a Zionist in 1948, she spoke on the platform with Chaim Weizmann, she was a brilliant woman. She was a leader in a woman's Haddasah but then she got married and didn't become a Zionist and live in Israel and her whole life, as she wanted. We found out recently she had been taking pills and was very depressed, so it is really a very sad story. When I met her I was afraid I would be like her, this really powerful woman that wouldn't realize her dream so I've always kept this very strong distance from her.

In the middle of the ceremony (we're going to go back to that) a man walks in with this woman with this bald head and a kerchief and it turns out that it's this Hasidic rabbi that Adam had met on a plane in Canada. The rabbi spoke no English so Adam had translated a phone call for him when he got off the plane. The rabbi told Adam if he ever came Israel to call him. So Adam called him and said come to the wedding so he and his wife arrived halfway through the meal because they can't eat with us. You see the Hassidic are very private and they don't even like orthodox Jews, even conservative Jews, and they don't like reformed Jews or American Jews . . . they don't like Jews, unless your Hasidic. The Hasidic live in a small area in Israel called Mea Shearim (1,000 gates) and Adam and I walked through it and we got many looks. We were lucky as sometimes they stone people. They do not respect people unless you are Hasiddic. So he came in with his wife, who had her head shaven because all women shaved their heads because once their married men shouldn't look at them, they should be ugly, it is showing that your property and your married, but she came. He got up and he sang these amazing melodies for 45 minutes. Afterwards I said to him that was the most beautiful singing and he said "It's not my voice. It's the voice of God," and I believed the voice of God had come into our arena and really blessed us. I have it all on video tape, I haven't learned it yet so I can't sing any of it for you, but Adam's cousin, Nira, is like Sherry Lewis of Israel, she sings for kids and stuff, she was so moved, she got up and sang these Yiddish songs that my father and his generation all had heard when they were growing up. She really wanted learn some of those Hasiddic melodies that the other man had sang because she said you can't even hear them outside of the little ghetto. - so next performance I'll have those memorized and translated for you.

While we're having this procession and everything, more and more tension is building in Jerusalem, more and more you can just feel there is something going on. At the end of the week we all went home, said our good-byes. Adam and I went to Amsterdam for quick little two day honeymoon after our week of procession and when we got home and we learned that the Intifada had broken out, which was in November 1987. That was the beginning of what is now, this struggle had started right then. Had it happened a week later all our plans would have been canceled. So it was really amazing to see and we got to spend a lot of time in east Jerusalem where we were married was right on contested land.

We had four more parties when we got home because we had all these friends that couldn't get to Israel. My mom made us a big party at a Russian supper club, they had vodka on the tables. We had to go to Brooklyn and all my friends in Manhattan were so upset we didn't have limousines to carry them. We had a van and they had to sit in the back of the van all dressed up and just shaking. We had one limousine with Adam and me in it, of course, and we got there late because the driver took the wrong turn and he just went on and on for one and a half hours. So there I am, I wore my dress of course to make it seem like the real wedding. We enter this Russian supper club in Brighten Beach and we walk in and everyone is yawning, I liked that. Then we sat down and drank the vodka and ate the caviar and started dancing again. There was a big band were they sang Russian songs and Italian songs.

After that party, because that was given by my mother so my father didn't attend, we had to go to my father's house to have his party. So we go to my father's house and he lives on the upper west side and again I wear my dress, what else could I wear. Everyone came and champagne was flowing and we got so many gifts. That was the bravest part of his party because we didn't know anybody, they were all his business associates, they were really kind of "Oh hi, hello, so nice to meet you". And I remember a lot of faces, if I look back to the pictures I don't think you could see any space, you just saw people jammed into this apartment. Some man said "if I had known you were going to wear your dress so . . such a lovely party I would have had the editor of the Post here". And I said "too bad, what a shame were not in the papers".

Then the last party my brother Michael, the anti-Semite, (you remember him) said "Leah it has been one month your wedding has been going on and I have a life beside you wedding". I said "fine Michael, fine, just fine". This party that Adam's mother had to be at a kosher restaurant so it's like this old fogy place. This time we had meat. All her old friends came and they were lovely and they were so sweet. "Oh this is Aunty Edda and Aunty Maxi".. it was just great. They loved that we danced and I walked around in my dress. They were so appreciative because they felt like they had come to a wedding instead it was really a reception. Oh and Josh, Adam's brother didn't come either because he couldn't deal with his family anymore either. It's interesting the two brothers are similar.
I currently live, seven years later, in Los Angeles and work as an MFCC intern and I work as a counselor at a dating service. So if you have any doubts about getting married, will it work, what's it like, call me. The name of our service is Heart to Heart.

I believe that it is unfortunate so much attention is given to marriage, but the key is not to lose oneself to the other. For me, marriage began to bring me to the strong Jewish Heroines, Golda Mair, Suzanna Heshcel. Becoming a Jewish feminist was my spiritual process as I returned to the homeland.

 

¹ Charlene Spretnak, The Politics of Women's Spirituality, Doubleday, New York, 1982.