May 28, 2007 - Monday

May 28, 2007 - Monday
anatomy of a jewish wedding

Recently I had the honour of attending a Jewish wedding and be a key personage therein.
As an outsider to the Jewish faith I became privy to a number of nuances and traditions surrounding their marriage ceremony. For the benefit of those of you who have never attended such a wedding I shall attempt to deconstruct the thing in order to alleviate any embarrassment or blunders that might occur in your ignorance. Blunders such as calling the Yamulke –a traditional head-doily– a 'beany', or screaming "Boo-yaka!" after downing a glass of wine during a toast situation.

I should point out here that in Hebrew the bride is called the Choson . Which would make one think that the groom should be called the Chosor. This is not so. The Groom is in fact called the Kallah, prompting people to say (in Hebrew, of course), "Hey, the chick you've choson is hot, you lady-kallah. Nice one."

The Jewish wedding actually begins a week before the ceremony. At this time it is tradition for the Kallah to say the Haftorah in Synagogue. The Haftorah is a reading of the Torah (the Jewish book of 'Stuff To Do With Our Faith') –but only half of it. In it, the husband-to-be sings a number of pertinent verses from it's pages. Because the Torah is read back to front it must be sung in this manner as well. This means that if you were to record what the Groom is singing and play it in reverse, coherence and understanding will illuminate such lines as:

Aye, so I'm getting marrrried a week from todaaay
She's pretty hooooot, and a hell of a laaaay.
But will she by kveeeetching when she has to cleeean?
This goddamned weeeedding is bad on the beeean.

In the synagogue there is a gentleman who is turning a large brass handle. He appears to have been sitting there since the sixteenth century because he is slumped over dead, and nothing on him moves except for his arm (Perhaps it is the handle that is turning him, the wise Jew might ask). At first I couldn't figure out what his purpose was until I realized that he was changing the numbers on a very large panel featured prominently beside him. These numbers indicate on which page the congregation is meant to be during the shared recital of the Torah. Without once turning his head, and assuming he had gone deaf in 1837, it is beyond me how he kept the non-dyslexics abreast as to where exactly in the massive tomb you were expected to be reading from.

It is imperative during the singing of the Haftorah –and this surprised me somewhat– that members of the congregation wander around aimlessly, talk loudly to each other across the synagogue, and shake hands repeatedly with people they just shook hands with a moment ago. Loud whispering, giggling, and hawking phlegm are also acceptable. However –and this is important– when the drapes that hide the compartment (arc) containing the Torah scrolls are open the entire congregation must hide under their seats and keep perfectly quiet and still until they are closed again. This whole aspect bears further investigation, but I doubt I'll ever be invited to a synagogue again.

It is interesting to note that at the Haftorah candy must be thrown at the Choson and Kallah-to-be. Smaller, sucker-type candy is preferable. Only Rabbis are permitted to throw Toblerones, Reeses Pieces, Oh Henrys, and the more advanced sweets. According to the helpful Rabbi, the throwing of candy is symbolic of friends and loved ones wishing sweetness upon the new couple. This may be so, but I was aware that the trajectory and speed of those hard candies suggested wishes that were more in line with severe ocular injury than sweetness offered. We needn't have worried our throwing arms though. As it turns out, there would be plenty of opportunities to jeopardize the couples' lives later.

But, before I get into all of that, I need to put the Jewish wedding into context: alcohol is involved. Sadly there are no words to describe just how much alcohol is involved. It is the lifeblood of the Jewish wedding –or any Jewish ceremony it seems. Suffice it to say that the amount of alcohol consumed could easily have filled six Olympic sized swimming-pools and still kept all of Malaysia unproductive for a week.

For me, the drinking began at about 9.30, the morning of the wedding, when we met the other groomsmen to change into our tuxedos. Immediately shots of tequila were had –threefold. And, as any professional drinker knows, once you tie on a good drunk you've got to keep the thing going or risk total mental and physical shut down. This was also the first time I'd ever drank a full cup of coffee. The result was that I was twisted and brutally wired by the time we got to the nearby lake, at 11.00, to have the ubiquitous pictures of the wedding-party taken.

Originally a groomsman had a little flask of whiskey which we all surreptitiously sipped out of in respectful deference to the thousands of Chinese tourists milling about to see the famous Ottawa Tulip Festival. But men in tuxedos disdain such mundane rules as it being illegal to have an open bottle of alcohol in plain sight, it being disrespectful to drunkenly park on a heavily populated sidewalk, or screaming loudly and incoherently at entire families unhinges people –especially on a beautiful, peaceful, Sunday morning. The flask was soon abandoned in favor of a mickey of scotch, out of which we took many copious gulps, and commented loudly to passing children how grateful we were to be drinking scotch.

With our utter inebriation things could have gotten sticky when the bride and her maids arrived, but thankfully they had been drinking heavily as well. Occasionally a few of us would wander off to a nearby bar to have more shots. The overall effect was of a large group of well-dressed people carrying on like Mexican sailors at a cock-fight.

In the Jewish wedding it is also necessary to have one key person so above-and-beyond pissed that they become a hazard to themselves and the entire wedding altogether. Essentially, his job is to be 'The Random Factor' –that one uncertain element that needs constant attention outside of the regular stressful build-up towards the actual ceremony or Simcha. Thankfully, one of the groomsmen selflessly took on this role two nights before when he attempted to fire-walk a bonfire at another groomsman's place. The first walk was barely successful, the second time, not so well. I believe someone actually screamed. On the wedding day it was his job to maintain his drunk at such a level that he wobbles precariously, slurs his speech, fondles the bridesmaids, enrages the wedding planners, needs to be supported down the aisle by two people, makes awkward sexual advances on every one of the two-hundred guests with a vagina, and hugs and expresses 'deep love' to every other guest with a dick. All these important tasks should culminate in a loud and stirring version of U2's 'With or Without You' in which the last verse is repeated eight times into a microphone that can only be pried away with two crowbars and a chainsaw.

Where the wedding party itself is expected to be drunk three times on the day, it is the responsibility of all the guests to become drunk at least once by the end of the evening. This drunkenness not only tweaks companionship and dulls embarrassing situations, but it also serves to utterly confound any unified attempt to learn, or dance, some of the required steps. It also excuses your incoherence as you try to sing along with a Cantor who is singing backwards without the benefit of a dead guy with a brass handle and large numbers.

Due to the Bride's heritage it was required that everybody dance the Greek Zorba. I dimly recall the Choson showing me the moves, but it was right after rehearsal, and I was in the heavy-headed ditch between my first and second inebriations. When it was time to actually dance the Zorba there was a failure in concentric theorem –abruptly halting the circular motion of the group and forcing someone's shoulder deep into my nostril. Also there was injurious misstepping onto the bare feet of the dancing women who would soon be hurt more because it is part of Jewish tradition to smash all sorts of tableware –plates, glasses, salt shakers, quadriplegics– onto the dance floor. Further injury would come from people slipping on sudden and surprising pools of fresh female Greek blood.

Indeed, the opportunity to place the lives of the Bride and Groom in great peril abounded throughout the wedding Simcha itself. For example, dancing the Horah; where two men grasp each other's hands in a cross-wise grip and create a kind of centrifuge with their spinning bodies, as they turn in increasingly faster circles, while flailing their legs about like spastic hacky-sackers. The goal here seemed to be to create enough circular momentum for both parties to simply lift their feet off the ground entirely and twirl up into the air like helicopter propellers.

Later, I would unorthodoxically dance the Horah to techno with the groom himself. Happily I finally had an opportunity to injure him and approached the duty enthusiastically; successfully wrenching his shoulder and rendering him incapable of surgery for two to three weeks.

Other duties of the groomsmen include:
Getting drunk
Arranging, and taking part in various circles
Making lewd comments to the bridesmaids
Controlling the 'Random Element' Groomsman
Screaming loudly at anybody not speaking English
Creating a 'flying wedge' through groups of Sunday morning gawkers
Swaying unsteadily, and obviously, during the course of the ceremony
Viciously attacking other groomsmen from behind with large pieces of cake
Constantly explaining your relationship to the Groom
Using your shiny shoes to look up women's dresses

Another excellent opportunity to injure the Bride and Groom is the point at which the Choson and Kallah each sit on chairs of such ancient quality they seemed to be held together by spit. As soon as they are barely seated members of the wedding party hoist them into the air and vigorously bounce them up and down. This is to dislodge their brains which have been affixed to the back of their skulls via the centrifugal force of all the spinning they were doing only seconds before. Keep in mind that the couple have been fasting all day and therefore each of their brains have long been marinating in bone-tanks of pure alcohol. Further serious injury or total death is risked by them both hanging on to one end of a flimsy veil while airborne with one hand, and desperately clinging to their violently bucking chair with the other. The hope at this point is that their eyes are pointing in entirely different directions in their skulls, but because the hoisters cannot see the eyes of the couple they vigorously buck them ten or twelve more times for good measure. I could not find the name of this particular tradition anywhere, but in some cultures it is known as Fukkin Pr'karious.

All this is done while men are wearing the traditional Jewish hat called the yarmulke or kippah. The sources for wearing a kippah are found in the Talmud. In tractate Shabbat 156b it states "Cover your head in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you". The kippah, in it's inherent symbol of faith, defies basic laws of gravity by not falling off, even when you have a garden-hedge sized afro or a smoothly shaven head. And, although I did not specifically feel the fear of heaven upon my head I did, however, feel the fear of looking like a well-dressed penis with a large mole.

The actual ceremony itself is marked by traditions spanning many thousands of years. The recitation of the Sheva Brachot or Seven Blessings is done surrounding the shared drinking of a cup of wine. After the recent lull in drinking before the ceremony this ensures that the couple remains drunk. Relative inebriation is tested by having the bride walk three circles around the groom who could potentially pass-out from the ensuing vertigo. It also prepares the Choson for all the drunken circles she'll have to deal with for the rest of the day. Directly after they have been wedded, and smashed a glass of wine under foot (more broken cutlery), it is custom for the Choson and Kallah to retire to a room by themselves for a duration of time. This is called the Yichud. There is much mystery about what goes on during the Yichud, but in my best estimate it is an opportunity for them to vomit copiously enough to allow their bodies to consume more alcohol. Either that, or it is time to do a series of stretches and exercises to limber up their bodies for the upcoming psychological and physical attacks upon their person.

This Jewish wedding, for me, was an absolute blast.

I hope to finally injure the bride at a later date.