I’ve been attending several weddings this year, a nice activity any time of the year, but especially lovely when the weather is warm and sunny, and spring radiates optimism. Combing through my journal, I came across this entry, about a June wedding that was one of the more interesting and poignant ones I’ve attended. It was a Jewish wedding of a most interesting kind, and took place on the heels of another wedding my wife and I attended, which decidedly was not.
June 11, 2000
Went to another wedding, this one very different from the one last weekend that took place under tall California Redwoods. This one was under a true chupah, and was Jewish in every sense. Two Jews were married according to Jewish law in a Jewish place, with Jews in attendance.
Otherwise, it was unusual, and symbolic. It was the wedding of Serakalim and Belaynesh Zevadia [at the time Israel’s Deputy Consul General to the Midwest, and now Israel’s Ambassador to Ethiopia], two Ethiopian Jews who found themselves under a chupah in Evanston, Illinois. We, the collection of American and Israeli Jews, came to the Hillel house at Northwestern to celebrate the event.
I'm left with the image of strands twisting together, strands that have come a long way to be united, a uniting of elements that are the same but also different. The Ethiopian contingent is far from home, far from their roots, and yet there they are, Jews like us, our destinies wrapped up together.
All the guests sensed there was something extraordinary in this seemingly ordinary event. It was a simple, understated wedding. It was odd for me to know so many of the people there through work or professional connection, and to realize that the chatan and kala, the groom and bride, had so few (less than half) of "their" kinsmen present. Their people are in Israel, scattered in other countries, and perhaps still in Ethiopia.
The distinction between the Western and African elements were drawn most clearly after dinner, when we went back upstairs for the cutting of the cake, and the Ethiopians began to dance to Amharic music. It was a lovely, subdued, swaying sort of dance, and the Americans and Israelis stood in a semicircle around the Ethiopians, clapping in time to the music, while they were in the inner circle, dancing. I wondered how it felt for them. Under different circumstances, in a different place, this wedding would have been a very different affair. I wondered if the Ethiopians felt a little bit on display, like a folklore exhibit, holding onto a thread, a vestige, of what had been their culture, which would inevitably pass from the world. Yet they embraced their “other” people, those of us who clearly are Ashkenazi Jews.
There was a dichotomy, a distinction between what was shared and what was not, between what we all had in common, and what we did not, between the anomaly this event would have been even in the not-too-distant past, and the perhaps greater ordinariness that will accompany such events in the not-too-distant future.
Here was a group of Jews—there was no doubt about one another’s Jewishness—and yet we were superficially different. But underneath it all, and in fact so overt during the wedding service, was the shared tradition and text: the sheva berachot, which bless G-d for his creation of humankind in G-d's image, this powerful view of creation, and of the people of Israel, and of Israel's desire to sanctify G-d's name. These were the unifying, underlying themes.
And there was the poignancy of coming to a Hillel house, in a room, as Rabbi Balinsky pointed out, filled with many people who serve the Jewish community, with Belaynesh, a representative of the State of Israel, which led to the sense of connecting that which had been disconnected.
And now Belaynesh and Serakalim are off to Israel, where there will be a huge party.
May their future be blessed.
