My First Fat ספרדי Wedding

I have never been to a wedding since I moved to Caracas two years ago, and even less a jewish one. This time I was invited by Viviana, a girl from my synagogue who works as an administrative assistant at the Israeli Embassy. I have made good friends with her family; she has two sisters, Debi and Ruti, which are two sweet young ladies and their mom -oh Mrs. Silvera! she's definitely the star of the family. The day I was introduced to her she told me her father was a russian jew, that she was born and lived in Istanbul and she spent a lot of time with her father on her dad's car when she was a little girl and thus she speaks Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, French, English and some Greek, and she could even ask me how many languages I spoke and how fluent I was in each (and she even tested me!) all in less than five minutes, when she grabbed me by the arm while I was talking to Debi about the importance of being religiously observant! Definitely Mrs. Liora Silvera is a very special and nice lady :-)

The wedding itself was very interesting to me. We started with the afternoon's Amidah, which is prayed only by the men, and guided by my rabbi, even though there were 7 rabbis there, including the Sephardic chief rabbi; I guess that was because she attends my synagogue. Anyway, I was shocked since he knows it by heart, and the Amidah is VERY long indeed! I don't know it by heart so I just stood and recited the parts I already knew; I noticed something very interesting, and it is that three polish rabbis from NYC were there (I think they were brought by rabbi Raitport, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Caracas) and they were using a PDA to read the Amidah, which is permitted by law, since it is equivalent to carry the siddur (the prayer book) with you. Man, I have to get one of those programs on my Dell Axim!

Then, we proceeded with the ceremony itself. Since Viviana works at the Israeli embassy, the ambassador was one of the witnesses, and he read the ketubah in Spanish, and my rabbi read it in Aramaic (or so it seemed to me) and one witness read it in Hebrew. The Chief rabbi was the one who married them, although the other 6 rabbis gave a blessing each; the New Yorkers sounded very funny to me since as ashkenazim, they speak hebrew with a VERY THICK yiddish accent, and oh, that sounded so weird to me! (well it sounded rather funny sometimes)

After they were officially married, we proceeded to dance and celebrate their wedding, since doing so is a mitzvah we must follow. I danced for about one hour, until the groom was soaked sweating; men and women dance separately, and separated by a curtain. Then a band continued playing music but singing more oriental jewish music, and to my surprise (and my peers') I recognized almost every single song, and I sung some by heart, which not even they knew! that felt so amazing.. I truly started feeling like a real moroccan, and for the first time I started to feel proud of behaving like a Moroccan Jew, so loud, emotional and warmly mediterranean and Middle Eastern at the same time, in sharp contrast to my former reserved, rather uptight, sober and "germanic" Ashkenazic Dutch way of being. I remember I sang songs by Lior Narkis (Pneí Malach, Kmó Parpar, Doktor, Aní Mavtiach) and Sarit Hadad (Kmó Sindarela, Hagigá, Atá Totach, Ahavá Achéret), which are two major oriental music stars in Israel and I even sang one song in Turkish by Tarkan: Durum Beter. Mrs. Silvera was so fascinated! :-D

I feel I have founf my place in the world (and in the kehillá) and I'm determined not just to keep it but to protect it and make it grow. More to come ...