Yesh Matsav

Recently, Ulf, Gabriela, Michal, and I went to a wedding of Gabriela’s first cousin’s son, Daniel, which would make him Michal’s second cousin. For Israelis, the wedding probably just blended into some of the approximately 2000 that they go to in the course of an Israeli lifetime. For me, however, it was a small peek into the masala – the diversity and mixture – that makes up Israeli society.

The wedding took place in a kibbutz a little outside of Jerusalem. This was not a kibbutz of the founders, however. This was a kibbutz of the new Israel, that is, a five-star kibbutz resort with immaculate grounds, a nice pool, and nightly room rates in the multiple hundreds of dollars.

To get to the five star kibbutz we hired a two star taxi, driven by Anat, the only female taxi driver I’ve come across so far in Israel. 12 years ago Anat immigrated with her now deceased husband from France, where she lived in the outskirts of Paris. She loves being in Israel now, though, and her son, she proudly informed us, is soon trying out for the Sayeret Golani, an elite special forces unit which, among other things, extracts suspected Palestinian militants from their homes in the West Bank while scaring the shit out of their neighbors. You can see an example of what they do here.

When I told her that I had family and cousins in Paris, she asked me if “ils habitent au centre de paris” which was of course a somewhat class-loaded question, given that she didn’t. And when Gabriela asked the leading question if she was from Algeria, she quickly denied any non-Parisian connections.

When we finally arrived at the five star kibbutz, Daniel the groom, grinning ear to ear, met us at the entrance. That was the only time we could talk to him of course, but I had learned before that he was a basketball coach for a professional basketball team in Tel Aviv, which is a little surprising given that he’s a mid height guy with a kipah on his head. But that’s Israel.

The wedding was an extravaganza with about 450 guests. They ranged from Daniel’s mostly secular basketball coach colleagues, lots of modern orthodox, an elvish black hat rabbi who performed the wedding and who jumped up and down with glee over the mitzvah, and a few west bank settlers in their trademark hippieish (if hippies carried automatic weapons and imperial aspirations) white kipot, sandles, and head wraps for the women. There were also plenty of Americans whom it seems came especially for the wedding (the bride was born of American parents). They were pretty easy to identify – they were the ones wearing suits and going up to the catering staff to ask “what is in this, it’s delicious!”  There were even a couple of non-Israeli Indians who were perhaps connected to the bride’s (non-Indian) family that had traveled from Pune, India, where they were living for some undisclosed reason.

The Landos and I sat at our table with another first cousin of Gabriela, Gila, and her amazing family. Gila is probably slightly younger than Gabriela, but has five daughters and something like 15 grandchildren. And the youngest one is still yet to get married. Gila and her husband not too long ago decided to leave their religious kibbutz, which they founded 30 years ago, and strike out on their own. She is a nurse, and her husband is now trying his luck in the diamond business. Three of their daughters were with them at the wedding. The oldest daughter, Liat, was there with her husband, who, as has apparently every Israeli, just returned from India. He was there not to backpack around (he has five kids and is probably in his mid-30s), but to try to and sell Indian buyers an Israeli deep sea aquaculture technology. The youngest, Michal, had also been in India recently, where she recounted being on a bus in the Himalayas when all of the sudden he bus stopped and all the men were asked to get off because a woman in the back was giving birth. Once she did successfully, everyone got back on the bus and kept on going.

Gila’s middle daughter, Ori, had also just come back from spending time in India, but not for traditional business or tourism reasons. She, along with her husband, are members of the Breslov sect, which is a mystical branch of Judaism whom you can see on the streets here dressed all in white, playing music, and singing and dancing. They seem to me something like Jewish Hare Krishnas, but with a lot more hair. Ori was in India for 4 and a half months with her husband and two kids endeavoring to inform backpacking Israelis that true joy is to be found not in smoking hash, lounging on Goan beaches, and having lots of sex, but rather in deep and joyful Torah study. I’m not sure how successful they were. Ori and her family now live on a hilltop somewhere in the West Bank with only 12 other families in a caravan.  Her mother, not surprisingly, is a little worried about her.

As the night ended, Michal and I hitched a ride home with one of Daniel’s basketball coach colleagues. Gabriela was of course panicked that he might be drunk and unable to drive her daughter safely home, but she was assured by Daniel’s brother that she had nothing to worry about as he was of solid Yecca heritage and absolutely straight and sober. That he was, and instead of talking to us, spent the entire ride home on the phone talking business, negotiating over the hiring of a player from Georgetown. A possible new addition to the Israeli landscape.