A Wedding Story. Part 3. Post Wedding

Part 3: POST WEDDING

I’m going to briefly go back to Hollywood comparisons. What the wedding lacked in contrived, scripted drama was made up for with morning after hangovers that have been the staple of Hollywood comedies since the invention of the motion picture. Some of us left dinners in places other than our stomachs, with one unnamed family member who might be the oldest sibling, being so drunk that when he got home he threw up in two of the three bathrooms in our house. To make matters worse, he was so out of it that he failed to notice that he largely missed any bathroom appliance that had running water. He owes his younger brother an eternal debt for helping him clean the mess up.

Most of us felt as if the DJ’s reverb had evilly been wedged somewhere behind our frontal lobes. We knew that we had had a great party and we were paying the price for it now. And all our movements were in in slow motion. Even sister-in-law Karen, whose hyperactivity usually outruns the Duracell bunny, moved with all the bounce of a punch drunk fighter. The rest of us were even more lethargic.

Headaches and hangovers or not, the celebrations were planned to continue. 300 family and friends had shared the simcha with us. Wanting to extract every last drop of wedding aura, we had booked 2 nights in a very nice boutique hotel in the seaside town of Naharya. I would love to say seaside resort town, but after 30 years of neglect by a megalomaniacal mayor, rather than it being the Riviera of the Eastern Mediterranean, Naharya is just another faceless Middle Eastern city, with a slight sadness for having missed the boat. There is a new mayor and there is definitely a nice feeling to the town and even a hint of optimism. To be honest, a nondescript Israeli town filled our needs better than the fancy resort that Naharya could have been.

Sivan and Buchach spent the night in the hotel directly after the wedding and we were to join them some time in the afternoon. There was, however, one item of business that had to be dealt with beforehand. Karen, Ma’ayan and Gal all needed to do mandatory Corona tests before being allowed to board planes and jet off to their respective home towns. It wasn’t simple finding a place that would do an internationally accepted PCR covid test with results in English, on a Friday morning. After some Googling and a telephone call to the Rambam hospital in Haifa to check what time they closed the Corona testing station on a Friday, it was decided that even though Rambam hospital was south of Tuval and Nahariya was north of Tuval, this was the best, or only, place to do the test. Given the late rise after the 3.30 bedtime, and the already mentioned lethargy, they set off slowly and late, but with just enough time to get there by one p.m. closing. With Susan’s foot flat to the pedal, they arrived at 12.55, to find an empty testing station, which closed for the weekend at 12.00. Someone had either given the wrong information, or a fuzzy hungover brain had interpreted the information incorrectly. I don’t want to risk ending 32 years of blissful marriage, so I will chose not say where I think the problem lay. In the end, the waste of time was actually a blessing in disguise. Karen and Ma’ayan were forced to delay their departure from the planned Saturday night by 24 hours, and travel to the airport on Sunday night, thus fully enjoying the entire family weekend away rather than cut it short in the middle.

We all made it to Naharya by mid afternoon and after kisses and hugs and reminiscence with the young couple about their amazing wedding, we all flopped into bed for an afternoon shloof. By the time we made it downstairs, ready to head out for a celebratory dinner at a fish restaurant in Akko, we were feeling slightly better, or at least felt that there was no headache that a good meal couldn’t cure.

I am definitely aware that when people read my writing, they often comment how often and effusively I describe eating. Guilty as charged. We are a family that loves our food. And we loved the meal in Akko. True, if we were served shit on toast we would have liked it, considering the joyous events at hand. But we didn’t have shit on toast. We had fresh sardines, white-fish ceviche, pickled octopus, a couple of prawn dishes served in different ways, pasta with seafood and lots of other sea creatures that were happily minding their own business in the Mediterranean only a few hours earlier. Sa’id, the chef, came out of the kitchen to share a drink with us (hair of the dog that bit you?), declaring that he thought we had probably had enough. He didn’t take into account Paul, Gal, Yoav and Buchach. When we inquired if there was anything else in the kitchen, or whether we’d stripped it empty, he volunteered that he had some baby red mullet, barbunya, which is regarded as one of the best eating fish on the Mediterranean shores. They are only small and are thus battered, deep fried whole and eaten as is. The others were a bit put off at first, eating an entire fish, head, bones and everything else. After a short instruction how to eat them (you just put them into your mouth. That’s it), this final portion was duly demolished. That was a meal fit for a wedding.

I hope I’m boring you. Not because we were bored, but because it really isn’t so interesting to write, or read about us having breakfast, relaxing, Saturday morning walks, and just general taking in the post wedding ambiance. But I have to fill up at least a few lines between the previous night’s dinner and lunch. I wouldn’t want the reader to think all we do is eat. Nor would I want the reader to think that all we do is go from one amazing meal to the next. A bit of extreme dissonance is sometimes a good thing. Friday night at a fancy, modern restaurant in Akko run by an Arab chef. Saturday lunch at Naharya’s oldest restaurant (turns out the 2^nd oldest continually operating restaurant in Israel) that was set up by one of the yekkeh (German Jewish) families that founded the city. I think for the owners, there is pride in the fact that the restaurant hasn’t changed its menu since the 1950s. I wasn’t convinced, but Susan loves old decrepit restaurants and it was her turn to choose. I suspect she actually chose to come away to Naharya after the wedding just so we could go to lunch at the Penguin restaurant. In keeping with the crumbling persona of a restaurant whose glory days have passed, half of the menu was unavailable, thus not so gently pushing the customer to order their famous chicken schnitzel. The schnitzel is famed for its size rather than its quality, but to be honest, it really was quite good. It remains to be seen, however, whether I’ll be rushing back to order another schnitzel there any time in the next 5 years. I’m sure Susan will and I am happy for her.

Since today we were under Susan’s tutelage, rather than return to the hotel and lounge away a perfect Saturday afternoon, all 10 of us squeezed into the cars and drove 40 minutes in order to participate in Susan’s favourite sport. 10 pin bowling. After lunch at a faded family restaurant and good clean family fun ten pin bowling, I was starting to feel that I was in an episode of the Brady Bunch. To be fair, I was the only dissenter. Everyone else was quite into our Nirenses-do-the-Brady-Bunch day. We played two games. The first was bowled in “regular” style and the gutters hadn’t seen so many bowling balls since, well, ever. In order to compensate, some of the bowlers decided to ask to have the gutter barriers put up. I know this is meant for the under 10-year-old bowlers, so they don’t send every ball down the gutter, but some people simply have no pride. I have never enjoyed bowling but decided that the barriers could be fun. When it was my turn to bowl, I wanted to see how many times I could get the bowling ball to ricochet from one barrier across to the other before it inevitably struck the pins. My record was 5 criss-crosses of the lane. It wasn’t easy. I expected the bowling police to come over at any moment and demand I act like an adult.

We arrived back in to the hotel in time to fully exploit what hotel rooms are meant for. After our Saturday late arvo shloof it was time to hit the Naharya boardwalk. Even if Nahraya never quite made it as the Riviera of the Middle East, it does have a very nice boardwalk along the length of the beach, where you can sit around at any number of outdoor restaurant/pubs and enjoy a beer whilst watching the sun set over the sea. There is no denying that Naharya is closer to Beirut both geographically and culturally than it is to Nice. The modern Israeli music blasting out of the speakers could be mistaken by the untrained ear as Arabic music, which is perfectly logical, given that many modern Israeli singers are of Sephardi background. About a third of the people promenading down the boardwalk were Arab. Once again, perfectly logical considering that half of the population of the Galilee is Arab. And the yelling and screaming that added to the cacophony of the music was pure Middle East. If the original Naharya yekkehs, the somewhat elitist German Ashkenazi Jews who looked down upon their Sephardi brothers, were turning in their graves, we revelled in the fun, raucous vibe. It seemed perfectly natural that in keeping with the vibe, we had ice cream for dinner.

Next day, Sunday, the wedding season was starting to close. Karen and Ma’ayan were set to leave after getting their unintended extra day and Gal too was flying out that evening to face a real 14 day quarantine in super strict Australia. They still needed to undergo the covid tests they weren’t able to do on Friday, before being allowed to board their flights. Israeli hotels are famous for their buffet breakfasts and those flying out in the evening weren’t about to allow a pesky medical test to interfere with a good morning fress. Solution. Get up at 6 in order to be at the testing station when it opens at 7 and be back for brekky by 8.30. If Friday’s attempt to get tested was an abject failure, this time, it was a total success.

The flights to Boston and Melbourne both left at night, about an hour apart.  Their departure was met with mixed feelings. We had derived so much enjoyment from every single aspect of the wedding that it was sad to confront the beginning of the end. And yet we all knew that all good things must come to pass and we all had to start to go back to our normal lives in different parts of the globe. It was right.

The drama-less 3 weeks had to have at least one potentially major drama. And the end is the best time to have it. I dropped the 3 travellers off at the airport and started to make my way home. 20 minutes later I receive a flustered call from Susan. The Israeli health department authorities weren’t going to allow Karen to board her flight. There was a discrepancy between the ID number and Karen’s passport number on the serological test that Karen had done a week earlier. The serological test was to prove that the testee is vaccinated, has antibodies and thus doesn’t need to do quarantine. If her serological test was invalid, she needed to go back and either do another test or complete the 14 day quarantine, even though she legally hadn’t been in quarantine to this point. Either way, through a technicality, Karen wasn’t being allowed to board her flight. Rabbi Karen, who has seen untold Covid related death this past year at the aged facility where she works, who has calmly and passionately guided hundreds, if not thousands of people through varying types of life crises, dropped the plot. She was in a panic, not knowing how to navigate this totally unexpected predicament. She was in total disarray and it was up to Ma’ayan, her 24 year old daughter who can at times be a little, umm, spacy, to gather her mum and hold her together. Meanwhile, I stopped by the side of the road and contacted a friend of a friend who was somewhat high up the pecking order in the health ministry. He gave me the phone number of the manager of the health department apparatus at the airport who promised to look into it. The misunderstanding was cleared up and Karen duly boarded with Ma’ayan and was back at work calmly administering to her flock the next day. Phew.

The last of our all too few overseas guests to depart was Yoav, returning home to work in Hollywood. I’m such a proud Dad. My son works in Hollywood. In any case, it was his turn to leave on Tuesday and we were quite sad about it. If we were philosophical about sending the other family members from abroad back home, you know, all things must end, blah, blah, blah, now we were less understanding and more self pitying. Half our children live overseas, empty nesters, blah, blah, blah.

Coincidentally, Buchach’s uncle was holding a sheva brachot celebration for his family about 15 minutes away from the airport. For those not familiar with Jewish religious custom, the sheva brachot, or seven blessings, are recited under the chupa as part of the wedding ceremony. It is customary for the young couple’s extended families to continue with events during the seven nights after the wedding. I think that Buchach’s family were slightly surprised that we accepted the invitation, and to be honest, we probably wouldn’t have driven the two hours down and two hours back had we not had a son to drop off at the airport. But it all worked out just right, and for us it was a sort of dress rehearsal for the last event of our wedding season.

We had been invited and had enthusiastically accepted to join the Ben-Nun family at their religious kibbutz for the weekend following the wedding, or following our weekend away at the hotel. Traditionally the Shabbat before or directly after a wedding is usually reserved for focusing on the groom, so whilst having a celebratory weekend 8 days after the wedding may not be according to the usual traditions, it was with tradition in mind. Many of our friends and family found it strange that we had so readily agreed to spend a weekend where we would strictly adhere to Shabbat restrictions. It is a far cry from our regular Shabbat activities. And yet to us it was never in doubt. We didn’t agree out of obligation, rather we viewed it as an opportunity to spend a weekend with our in-laws who we feel very close to. It seemed like the perfect, most natural conclusion to the wedding.

We were instructed to arrive at around 5 p.m in order to settle in before Shabbat came in. The Ben-Nun’s neighbours had arranged to visit relatives in the centre of the country and thus vacate their house for us for the weekend. Apparently this is the done thing within religious communities. We were given explanations regarding Shabbat clocks, kitchen appliances we shouldn’t use so as not to taint the Shabbat and which of the sinks and utensils were for milk and which were for meat. Dressed in our Shabbat finery (in itself an achievement for us) we shut off our cell phones and made our ways next door. Shabbat candles were lit and the men went off to shule to pray whilst the women and Paul went to the kitchen to prepare salads for the meal. By about 9.30 we were seated at the table to start dinner. Firstly, an array of salads and then fish, as a middle course. The table was emptied before the main course and all the table-ware washed. Fish and meat can be eaten at the same meal but not with the same utensils. I long ago ceased to try to understand the logic of Jewish dietary laws, let alone adhere to them. A sumptuous feast was laid before us and then cake for desert. Around midnight we crawled back to our accommodations. I once had a stomach that could be charitably described as a bottomless pit. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case and I went to bed uncomfortably full. Sivan warned me that tomorrow wasn’t going to afford me too much relief.

At 8.15 next morning I entered shule for Shabbat services. I grew up in Melbourne attending an orthodox school and shule. The customs and services were familiar and even if I haven’t been on talking terms with the man upstairs for many a year, it felt as normal as if this is what I do every Saturday morning. In reality, it will be a good few years until I do it again. I actually enjoy the reading of the Torah. I always have and did so now. I enjoy a little less thanking god for protecting the weak, healing the sick and allowing thousands of years of despicable acts in his name.

As we walked out of shule, Ran asked me if I knew what was going on during the services, knowing that we were an extremely secular family. I wasn’t in the slightest bit insulted, especially since many secular Israeli families feel very foreign in shule and Ran assumed that for me. I explained that the situation was exactly the opposite, that whilst I had made a clear decision how I express my Jewish identity, Orthodoxy wasn’t foreign to me. I felt very at home at shule.

Back at the Ben-Nun’s it was coffee and cake and a family stroll around the kibbutz. We talked about family, travelling, issues with kashrut in Israel and reminisced over the wedding, agreeing it was one of the most special events that any two families could hope for. We were two families that enjoyed each other’s company that have far more in common than what sets us apart. It has been that way since we first met. There is no “elephant in the room” here. We recognize our different lifestyles and beliefs, are open with questions if there are things we don’t understand and respect each other because we deserve each other’s respect. I am certain that the Ben-Nun family feels exactly the same way as we do.

Upon returning back to the Ben-Nun’s lunch was served, straight off the hot plate where it had been warming since before Shabbat came in eighteen hours earlier.  The meal may not have been as big as last night’s bonanza, but it was certainly big enough to demand the shabbos shloof. After waking up it was family card games, coffee and cake and discussions about who held 4, 5 or 8 hours between meat and milk. Normal Saturday stuff. By the time the men (the religious ones. I’d had my fill of communing with god) went out to the final Shabbat prayers and then Havdallah, it was 9.30. Time to leave. Time for everything to go back to normal. This family weekend away was the perfect conclusion to the wedding season that started with Gal’s arrival not quite a month earlier.  

It’s hard to summarise this past month. If I had to imagine beforehand what the entire event, not just the wedding itself, was going to look like, what I have described is pretty much how it would be. I feel privileged and lucky enough that it all turned out this way, especially given the limitations that this period has posed. I guess ultimately, to quote Susan’s Uncle Eddie, It’s All About Family.