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.
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