Card Shower

Special thanks to my awesome bridesmaids who have made me feel loved from afar by organizing a card shower for me! Many wonderful women in my life wrote in with good wishes and helpful suggestions for planning the wedding. On the first day the cards arrived, I was a bit confused (how did everyone know my birthday is coming up?). On the second day, I went to the mailbox in my pajamas:

I want you to know I am taking all your suggestions. We will be sticking with the vegetarian Indian buffet, but now there will be so much more to look forward to...

To begin, we've moved the wedding to Goa. If you're going to serve Indian food, why not do it in India? We aim to be authentic. In keeping with our love of animals, we will be incorporating them in many creative ways into the ceremony. The aisle will feature a pool with graceful swans, and we will open the ceremony with a parade of dogs and goats, Goldie proudly in the lead as our ring bearer. Following this menagerie, the bridesmaids will come down the aisle. I've been informed that I have far too few, so I am tripling the number. All will be dressed in traditional Indian attire (again, we aim at nothing but authenticity!), preferably in gold, purple, and green to match the New Orleans jazz band that will play at the reception. They will be precisely identical, from tip to toe. We are investigating hair dye, tanning lotions, colored contacts, and plastic surgery as various means to ensure that they cannot be distinguished from one another.

Once our entourage has set a tone of dignity and majesty, Mordu and I will enter. We were advised that riding side-saddle and bare-backed on a horse would be the most romantic and that ziplining in would be the most dramatic. We are taking both suggestions and will be side-saddle and bare-backed on a horse dangling from a zipline. We will thus glide in gracefully to the theme music of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." The heart theme is carried over in our elegant and richly ornate huppah. The huppah itself will be constructed of liquorice, a symbol of the cloying sweetness of our union. The inside of the huppah will be a recreation of the bridge of the enterprise. My mother, as officiant, will sit in the captain's chair, wearing full dress uniform. Mordu and I will be dressed as Deana Troi and Will Riker, naturally, though I'm considering that perhaps we should dress him as Worf. Dangling from the canopy of the huppah will be heart-shaped crystals and diamonds, each engraved with the name of a guest—your party favors at the end of the night! Above this, two interlocking neon hearts will blaze out the message of our eternal love.

Erusin (the traditional betrothal ceremony that has become part of a contemporary Jewish wedding) will be accomplished by our Picard double simply pronouncing "Engage!" The main substance of the ceremony will be mixing two colors of sand in a jar, symbolizing that we are eternally bound to one another and forever imprisoned by a monochromatic love. As the ceremony draws to an end, we will release butterflies and carrier pigeons that have been trained to spell out "Mordu and Rachel 4ever" in the sky. We pull away from the ceremony in a horse-drawn crystal carriage.

You have much to look forward to at the reception! Previously, we had simply planned food and dancing. Now it is so much more! You will be seated at romantic, heart-shaped tables featuring tasteful centerpieces of real live pigs wearing cow slippers. We will dance the night away to the strains of the aforementioned New Orleans jazz band, also flown in for the occasion. Mango Grove will fly over their best chefs from Baltimore to ensure that we have authentic Indian food. The cake will be constructed of Girlscout cookies glued together with chocolate frosting as a reminder that we live by the Girlscout motto ("be prepared") and also its slogan ("do a good turn daily, but not more frequently unless the subject in question buys more boxes of cookies."). We will be entertained by professional acrobats and Bollywood dancers. Ice sculptures will be everywhere (no mean feat in Goa in June!), including two that depict the happy couple and others depicting our academic idols, whom I've been reminded are Hanokh Albeck and Saul Lieberman. Remembering that this day is all about us, we will make sure you go home with a list of our accomplishments and talents as summarized on our CVs, at the top of which you will find the title "Wedding Planner Extraordinaire." The evening will end with a literal bang as we light the sky with fireworks.

As you can see, our wedding has been much improved thanks to your many creative suggestions. I'm sure you are now even more excited to celebrate with us!

Purim 5773

Ellen just reminded me I had forgotten to post our Purim pictures! Taken at night, they didn't come out too well, but here we are:

Said "no" to the dress

Special thanks to Davida, my "big sister" in Israel, who took me all over downtown Jerusalem to search for a wedding dress. She was not only patient and supportive but also knew all the best places to look. I love the dress I chose and I would not have found it without her! In the meantime, some dresses I will not be seen wearing on June 30...

That last one was a close runner-up. In retrospect, I wish we had taken pictures of some of the more outrageous ones, as they would have been more entertaining...

Samaritan Passover

Last week, I traveled to Mt. Gerizim in the West Bank to see the Samaritans celebrating Passover.

Who are the Samaritans? The Samaritans are a religious group that have existed for over 2,000 years and whose primary religious text is the Pentateuch (Torah). (Their version is slightly different from ours, but not hugely.) The Samaritans do not have all the other books Jews have in their bible (Prophets and Writings) and they of course do not have any Rabbinic texts. They are NOT Jews, nor were they considered Jews for much of Antiquity.  The Judean-Samaritan split is quite an ancient one, and the circumstances are still a matter of scholarly debate.

After the split, Jews weren't so terribly fond of the Samaritans, it seems, though they share holy scriptures. Anyone surprised? This is, incidentally, an interesting angle on the stories of the New Testament. The Samaritans didn't have a great reputation among Jews in the first century, but occasionally one would surprise you by doing the decent thing, even when Jews didn't. He might be called "the good Samaritan."

Because the Samaritans revere the Pentateuch, they celebrate Passover, which is of course the #1 holiday in the Pentateuch. Furthermore, they celebrate it in a manner that, as far as we know, best approximates what Israelites and Judeans might have done when the Temple stood. They, like the Jews, had a temple in antiquity, but they did not situate it in Jerusalem, but rather on Mt. Gerizim (about one hour north of Jerusalem by bus), which they understood to be God's chosen place. The Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 CE, but the Samaritan temple stood until the 6th century. And while we believe that Jewish sacrificial practices ended when the Temple was destroyed (or, in any case, soon after), the Samaritans still offer the Passover sacrifice yearly on the 14th of Nissan. This is what we went to see last week.

So what can one expect from a Samaritan Passover? The Torah prescribes that the Passover sacrifice be offered at sundown on the 14th of Nissan in God's chosen place. It is to be roasted over the fire and eaten that very night, along with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Incidentally, I had brought a sandwich along for dinner (doink! leavened bread!), so I didn't take my food out until we got on the bus to go home.

We stayed for only the first part of the ritual. The Samaritans welcome visitors for this part, and then ask that they leave so they can celebrate by themselves into the night. What we saw was the community (today about 800 people, though at its height in the 1st century more than a million) gathering together in a fenced plaza. The plaza contained a seating area for the elders, a slaughter area (basically a long trench with nearby hoses and poles for stringing up the animals after they were slaughtered), and fire pits. People were slowly assembling over the course of the afternoon, but by 1/2 hour before sunset everyone was there, and visitors ringed the entire enclosure, jockeying for a good view. For that 1/2 hour, the Samaritans chanted and then, at precisely sundown, about 20-30 sheep (from what I could see) were slaughtered. What followed was a rather complicated but efficiently executed process of skinning, disembowling, cleaning, impaling, and roasting. At this point, we left them to their BBQ.

One more note for calendar nerds: Jews did not add a leap month this year (which is why Hanukkah is going to coincide with Thanksgiving), but the Samaritans did, so visiting them did not conflict with my own Passover preparations.

I have no wish to tire my readers. On to the pictures. I must warn readers that a few are graphic.

The intrepid crew: Sarah, Sara, Raffi, Jaclyn, and me

Our bus dropped us off next to a Jewish settlement on the Mt. of Blessings, or, as this sign has it, "Bless on Mountain":

We walked into town and saw many Samaritans (mostly in white) and tourists milling around. These guys were dragging a shopping cart of sheep off to their doom.

 Before things got going, we "hiked" five minutes to the top of Mt. Gerizim...

 ...and saw what are believed to be the ruins of the Samaritan Temple.

Meanwhile, preparations were well under way "downtown."

In this picture, you can see a Samaritan elder has taken a seat already, and behind the fence many spectators have gathered. In fact, the Samaritans erected bleachers to hold some of the spectators.

Temple iconography:

Those assembled included women and children (though only men performed the sacrifice). Many were dressed in all white. Most in casual clothes. Those doing the brunt of the work were wearing white jump suits and knee-high white rubber boots.

As we approached sunset, the assembled began to chant in Samaritan Hebrew, which I found quite difficult to understand (and, honestly, chanting in any language can be tough to understand). We were able to identify a few words.

A bunch of us climbed up onto a fence to get a better view. Hi Sara!

Precisely at sundown, the chanting stopped and the slaughtering all took place in under a minute. We couldn't see much from where we were. As soon as that was over, teams set to work skinning and disembowling the lambs, while others brought very longs spits to roast them on.

And still others stoked the fire pits:

 

Here's what the slaughtering trench looked like. If you look carefully, you can see a few victims that have been strung up, presumably to drain the blood.

The skins were thrown directly on the fires, but the skinned and disembowled sheep were next brought over to the fence where they were rinsed with water, salted (to remove the rest of the blood), and their guts packed with mud (not sure of the reason for that step).

So we don't end on quite such a graphic picture, here are some pictures I took around town with Samaritan Hebrew on them: