Love in the Time of Corona (pt. 3)

A month and a half later, the lockdown ended and we were eager to get on with our plans. We didn’t want to be that couple that waited until the last moment to do everything, drove each other and themselves crazy, and then ended up having a mental breakdown and being committed to the ward of an institution designated for victims of wedding planning procrastination. So we called up Ramat Rachel to confirm the date we had decided on with them. No answer. We sent messages. No answer. Finally we got a response that they had not returned to work yet, but that they’d like totally get back to us when they did. A week went by. We sent another message inquiring about their operational status. Still not opened. Finally, after a month or so of bugging them, we gave up and decided to look elsewhere. Now you would think that after having been shut down for a month and a half, they would be eager to start booking again as soon as possible to make up for the financial losses incurred during lockdown. But they had a very typically kibbutzy attitude about it all, and didn’t seem to care if they made or lost money. Or perhaps they were just enjoying the kibbutz pool while sipping margaritas and didn’t feel like coming back to work yet.

A friend of ours, who was also getting married in the summer, recommended a nice events restaurant called Montefiore, that was right across from the Old City. They had room for up to 100 people, which was about the number of guests we had been thinking of, and the chuppah would take place on the promenade above the restaurant with a view of the Old City during sundown. This location was even easier to get to in Jerusalem, and the food was dairy and less expensive than Ramat Rachel although it was not all inclusive. We would still have to get a chuppah, flowers for the tables, our own alcohol, and rent an additional room for the buffet so there would be enough space. I was perfectly happy just having a music playlist playing in the background during dinner. Frankly I hate wedding dancing (well, dancing period), and have never been and plan to never be spotted partaking of this particular activity which induces exuberance and requires synchronized movements. There wasn’t really anywhere to dance anyway, since it was a restaurant, not an events hall. Gil really wanted a live band though, so I told him as long as he found it and they weren’t God awful, absurdly expensive, and didn’t play bad Jewish simcha music (or any Jewish simcha music), I would grudgingly tolerate it and not complain TOO much.

Making a guest list is difficult when you don’t know whether international travel will be permitted. We had no idea if my sister and her family or if any of Gil’s friends or family would be allowed in to attend the wedding. And if they were, it would probably require a two week isolation period. Plus there were the guests in Israel who didn’t know if they would be able to make it because they were either high risk, care for or live with high risk people, were medical personnel and therefore couldn’t risk it, etc. So at least half our list told us they wouldn’t know if they’d be able to make it until several weeks before the wedding. This makes planning a wedding difficult obviously. We had committed ourselves with the restaurant to 100 people. So we couldn’t invite too many people and we didn’t want to have fewer than 100 since we were paying for 100 anyway.

Meanwhile, progress with Tzohar was going pretty slowly. Getting letters from Rabbis attesting to our Jewishness was not going as smoothly as it should. In my case, having the wrong email address for the Rabbi, and then having to go back and forth with him several times to get the exact version that would be acceptable to Tzohar and in Gil’s case it was just not knowing what Rabbi to ask. And anyway, how could a Rabbi really know if you’re Jewish unless he knew your grandparents, and your great grandparents, and your great great grandparents, etc.? And what kind of whacko would PRETEND to be Jewish just so he could jump through the flaming hoops of hellfire that the Rabbinate would put him through? He or she could just as easily skip out to Cyprus for the weekend and get married there, and the marriage would be legally accepted here in Israel. I’m not going to lie and say that at no point were we tempted to do this, but again we had the little problem of restricted international travel.

The closer we got to the wedding, the more we realized that the virus was still alive and kicking and we were going to have to have special considerations and change things around a bit. Gil changed his mind about the band since he didn’t want to encourage dancing, which was still against government regulations (weird, sounds like a movie I once saw...). And we were trying to figure out what to do about the serving of food so everyone wouldn’t be touching it and coughing all over it. Plus there were the guests who were at high-risk so we were trying to figure out how many people we could fit outside on the small balcony and if we could bring them their own food outside or maybe we should just have servers and forgo the whole buffet idea, which would be more expensive, but more hygienic, or maybe everyone should just have their own personal serving utensils, and so on and so forth.

And then the government announced that they were restricting the number of guests at events and weddings to 60 people inside and 100 outside. Ok, no biggie. So we ran through different options- having only 60 guests, having the meal outside of the restaurant, splitting the guests into two shifts, etc.

And then the government announced that event halls would be closed and the number of people congregating together outside would be reduced to 20. So we canceled our wedding and sat and had a beer. Or three.

Love in the Time of Corona (pt. 2)

Fast forward 5 months. Gil’s kept me company while I’m sick. I’ve made him soup when he’s sick. Oliver approves of him enough to sit on his lap uninvited. Gil’s daughter likes me enough to play games with me on Shabbat afternoon. We’ve had conversations about everything from whether  aliens exist on distant planets to the merits of Kabbalah. Plus, he’s the only person on the planet who would willingly listen to me repeatedly practice presenting my final master’s project, though he understands perhaps 1% of it (the prepositions, and perhaps an adjective here and there). Willingly listening to someone spout half an hour of gibberish 4 times in a row is true love, my friends.

At this point Gil’s already thinking about popping the question. He gets a mutual friend to scope out the situation and make a subtle probe into my emotional preparedness for a marriage proposal. She asks me what I would do if he asked me that day to marry him, and like a deer in the headlights I respond without thinking, “probably jump out the nearest window.” She sends him a frantic message to abort the mission, and I am none the wiser about any of this (as usual).

In a lot of ways, getting married when you’re older is harder. You’ve settled into a routine (mine being never leaving school and acquiring as many side jobs as possible), you have a self-perception of yourself born of many years of being single and independent, and you have a fear of failure and a healthy skepticism that has developed as a result of life experience. When you’re a kid (yes, you 20 year olds are still children. Your frontal cortex has not even fully developed yet, which explains your bad judgment), you just jump into the water with no fear of drowning, or hitting the rocks, or losing your bathing suit when you hit the water, assuming you were wearing one at all because you kids probably didn’t come prepared to the outing, so who knows what you’re even wearing to go swimming in, if anything at all. Plus you forgot the coals and lighter fluid for the barbecue, and your gas tank is on empty.

However, the question eventually gets popped, and I accept. And now the hard part: planning a wedding.

Anyone who has read any of my blog posts knows that this process is going to be as complicated as humanly possible. Getting engaged in February of 2020- how can anything possibly go wrong…?

Step 1- find a location.

We did this pretty quickly. We visited several locations in Jerusalem but were sold on the first tour which was at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. We got a great deal (which included an absurd amount of food, alcohol, decorations and flowers, the chuppah, and even a bridal suite in the hotel overnight), the location overlooked the hills of Jerusalem, and it was easily accessible by bus. 

The day we were going to call and book the place, a nice sunny day in March, the government announced that all event halls were going to be shut down and there were not going to be any weddings for at least a few months. Ok, that’s fine. We weren’t planning on getting married til August anyway. Guess we can wait on that.

Step 2- make a guest list.

At this point we were in complete lockdown. The skies were closed to travel, heck, we couldn’t even go further than 100 meters from our front doors. But we made a nice list of people that we would like to invite since the lockdown was only a temporary measure (lasted about a month). Eventually we were allowed 500 meters from our homes. Then we were allowed out to exercise. Then we could go pickup takeaway from restaurants. Then the lockdown was over and though we couldn’t go back to “normal,” we developed some new concept of “normal” and went with it. This included a heavy dose of optimism that everything would be over soon. And so we made our guest list hoping that at least most people on it would be able to come, whether they be in the US or in Israel.

Step 3- paperwork.

Our lives are ruled by paperwork. It’s inescapable. But some paperwork is irritating, unnecessary, and inconvenient, and some paperwork makes you want to go back in time and murder the parents of whoever is responsible for these documents so that they had never been born. You don’t even want to just make sure his parents never meet, oh no, someone must die as restitution for the mayhem this person has inflicted on humanity.

Getting married in Israel is not just getting a marriage license. You can’t just go to a government office, sign a document, and congratulations, you’re married! That would be too easy. Instead, all citizens are forced to go through whatever religious body their census information says they belong to and file their paperwork with them. So whoever thought that a group of rabbis paid by the government would be the perfect crew to be responsible for such important processes as getting married, has clearly never met a Rabbi or a government bureaucrat, and certainly never could have dreamed up the horror that a Rabbeaucrat could perpetrate. Example- when my sister was getting married, they called up her uncle at 3am in NY to ask him questions about Judaism just to prove that my sister is in fact Jewish.

So we decided to go through an organization called Tzohar that acts as a bridge between the couple and the Rabbinate. The first step was filling out a very long form online. Ok, no problem. Except that we don’t know when or where we getting married yet because there’s a global pandemic going on outside that may or may not go away within the next few months, and you can’t send the document in without that very pertinent information obviously, but you also can’t save the form as a draft and fill it out those two boxes when you DO know. So we gave up and had beer.