THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 2 JUNE 201732 LIFE

misspelled on the seating chart, there weren’t enough chairs for guests to sit on during the ceremo-ny and the florist lost my bouquet. But as each new problem arose I took a deep breath and reminded myself that none of it mattered as long as we ended up married.

About ten minutes before the ceremony was due to start, as guests were assembling outside, I was waiting in my suite for my father to come and get me when someone started pounding frantically on the door. I gathered up my numerous skirts and shuffled over to open it.

There stood a member of hotel staff holding a walkie talkie.“You have to evacuate your room,” he insisted breathlessly.

“What? Why?”

“We just got a call that there’s a poisonous gas coming through the water pipes in this part of the resort. It won’t affect the wedding but you need to get out of here immediately.”

I barely had time to grab my shoes and veil. In the commotion, no one bothered to tell my dad that I’d been relocated to a different suite, which meant the ceremony was delayed while he tried to find me. By the time I finally made it to the chupah where my fiancé and our parents now stood, it didn’t occur to me that anything else could go wrong.

As the rabbi started the service, I zoned out, suddenly feeling the weight of my 6am wake-up call and the intense

SIMCHAS

WHEN I first got engaged I was confi-dent of two things: it was going to be a

small wedding (for a Jewish wed-ding, that is) and I was not going to be a bridezilla.

I’d heard too many tales of brides who’d spent more time contem-plating napkin rings than their choice of groom and, as I kept tell-ing myself every time I plummeted down a rabbit hole of floral arrange-ments and seating charts, the wed-ding wasn’t the important part — the marriage was.

We agreed to a religious cer-emony followed by a lunch recep-tion at a nice hotel in Herzliya in order to keep our families happy, but eschewed some of the more traditional wedding customs, such as dancing, best man speeches, and bridesmaids.

Admittedly, there was one thing even I couldn’t help conceding to the wedding-industrial complex, which was The Dress; I picked out a voluminous ivory concoction along with what the bridal store assistant described as a “cathedral-length” veil that was, perhaps, not the ideal ensemble for a beach-adjacent ceremony performed by an Orthodox rabbi at the dawn of an Israeli summer.

Still, having refused to subscribe to the notion that my nuptials should be the Happiest Day of My Life (what about all the days to fol-low?) I wasn’t too concerned when little things started going wrong as the wedding drew closer.

Seventy two hours before the ceremony, the fake tan I’d applied, to alleviate my ghostly Ashkenazi complexion, began to crack, leaving uneven white patches across my body, which meant my fiancé and I spent a less than romantic evening frantically scrubbing my torso with lemon and baking soda. The follow-ing day the EasyJet plane carrying my brother and other guests from London was turned around mid-way through the flight and delayed for 24 hours with no guarantees it would arrive in Israel in time for the wedding. On the day itself, the wrong date was printed on the menus, our parents’ names were

Karen Yossman and her husband, and the chupah pre-collapse

midday heat. I absent-mindedly wondered what would happen if I were to keel over in the middle of the ceremony. Even the sea breeze provided little respite as it rip-pled through the chupah, which rhythmically moved backwards and forwards with each gentle gust. Although propped up by a millefeuille of organza and tulle, I was swaying slightly too, and could feel beads of sweat running down my arms.

As the canopy shifted, I strained to feel the air current in the hope that it would cool me down. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I noticed something. The chupah had swayed forward again, but, this time, instead of reclining back into place, it continued to descend. As if in slow motion, the 13-foot structure, laden with silk and flowers, lost its battle against gravity and collapsed onto the congregation in front of us.

Chairs were knocked to the floor, vases toppled, and flowers strewn across the lawn. As mem-bers of hotel staff ran to lift the chupah off our guests I was con-vinced the ceremony would have to be called off. Only my fiancé’s hand tightly squeezing mine pre-vented me from running back to my room in floods of tears.

Miraculously, however, there were no serious injuries. After ensuring everyone was still alive, the chupah was re-erected and the rabbi raced through the rest of the service.

I was married. But the wedding had been a disaster and the sense of disappointment was acute. Dur-ing the reception, I thanked guests for coming and apologised for nearly killing them.

“It’s a sign of good luck!” an uncle said kindly, patting me on the shoulder. I couldn’t agree but appreciated the Jewish art of try-ing to find an upside to almost any tragedy.

“It’s like that episode of Sex and

the City when Charlotte gets mar-ried,” more than one friend whis-pered while giving me a hug.

“Ach, nobody died,” shrugged my grandmother, a 93-year-old Hol-ocaust survivor.

Two years on, we’ve just about recovered from the comedy of errors. We’ve even come to enjoy shocking people with the tale of our disastrous nuptials. And marriage has turned out to be wonderful, which is the most important thing.

Well, that and not killing any of your guests.

EXPERIENCEKAREN YOSSMAN

PHOTOS: LUZ WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY

move on from quickly. Jewish peo-ple who had those professions and decided to ‘stay and see how this pans out’.. didn’t survive.

“Also, Orthodox Jews need to live in close proximity to each other, because you can’t use horses or motorised transport on the Sab-bath, and you need a quorum of 10 men to do Sabbath prayers. Living close together is easier in cities.”

This is close to what Howard Jacobson thinks.

“Behind the jokes I like making about my exclusively urban Jew-ishness — and I truly never have known the name of a single tree, flower or bird — is a nagging criti-cal voice that says this is entirely

circumstantial. We were not allowed to own land or farm it, we were ghettoised literally or figura-tively, so no surprise if we find the countryside foreign. But if we go further back than that, isn’t it of the essence of Jewish morality to reject the natural man, to refuse the Gods of nature and magic, to codify our ethics in order to place more value on the spiritual than the bodily? It’s not a rural land-scape we abhor, it’s nature unim-proved by civility and judgement.”

Civility and judgement are need-ed in the city, too, of course but search any work of classic English literature, and you will — with the honourable exception of George

Jews, if Proust’s and Irene Nemi-rovsky’s rhapsodies on hawthorn, rivers, woods and meadows are anything to go by, and nor is it true of South Africans like my mother. When I first posed this question on Facebook a year ago, dozens of friends protested against it. “You must know the wrong kind of Jews,” said one indignantly. Others cited their enthusiasm for riding, rock-climbing and country child-hoods: Nicola Solomon, lawyer, rabbi’s wife and now chief execu-tive of the Society of Authors, grew up in Kent and still loves it.

Few Jews, however, seem to

In English literature it’s hard to find a Jew visiting the country

choose to live there. Naomi Alder-man, who put her own love of the English countryside into her second novel The Lessons, says the Jewish tendency to identify with the urban is “deeply culturally ingrained. For hundreds of years, it was illegal for Jews to own land across most of Europe, meaning that the normal peasant/gentleman-farmer connec-tion to the land wasn’t possible. In addition, Jewish people have had to move on quickly from many dif-ferent countries across our history. This means that we prefer profes-sions which are very portable: medicine, the law, trading, learned professions. “Professions with a connection to the land are harder to

You must know the wrong type of Jews

! CONTINUED FROM P31

My wedding was a complete disaster