Celebrations
If you’ve never been to a Palestinian wedding or engagement party, you need to understand that the whole town shows up to celebrate and rejoice together. Nightly we see fireworks in the sky hallmarking another wedding, engagement or birthday. I went to an engagement party Saturday where there had to be over 300 people. The engaged couple walks in and everyone stands up, welcomes them and dances. Then the Father blesses them, they exchange rings and the girl receives gifts of gold. At this point, everyone files by and offers the couple and their families “mabruk” (congratulations), grabbing a piece of cake, chocolate and shots of araq (arab liquor) on their way back to their seats. Then there is more dancing until it’s time to cut the cake and pop champagne. The couple shares a dance (the lights are turned down low and the pillars around them are lit with sparklers) before the real celebration begins. People dance and drink into the night. And did it matter that I didn’t know the couple? Nope. The bride’s grandmother grabbed me, kissed my cheeks and hugged me the second I walked into the door. Later, while we were dancing, the future bride even intentionally broke out of the circle to grab my hands and dance with me! I’ll go to my first Palestinian wedding this weekend— my host father’s brother is getting married— and the festivities are all week. There are henna parties and visitations to all of the families’ homes, everything! I can’t wait!
Wednesday I went up to Haifa for the wedding of a classmate. Ari, the groom, is a Messianic Jew so the ceremony incorporated traditional Jewish customs. They blew the shofar as Ari’s groomsmen, playing instruments of all sorts, and led him up the street into the synagogue. They broke the glass, stepped over the broom, sang traditional Hebrew prayers and were taken out of the ceremony atop chairs. It was really neat to be able to share in all of the festivities, not to mention see a few friends! We learned traditional Jewish dances, jumping up and down until my calves groaned! Haifa is only a 2 hour bus ride from Jerusalem, but in order to get there it took about 5 or 6 hours. Well worth it!
Finally, remember how I said the whole town can’t ignore a wedding because they are either attending it or drowned in the noise of the festivities? Multiply that noise by 4 and you have the celebration of a prison release. Quite unexpectedly, I got caught in the midst of the ‘parade’ of a prison release last week and it was madness! Families and friends pile into their cars, waving flags, shouting and cheering as they drive through the streets celebrating their loved one’s homecoming. It was so loud it was almost deafening! In a place where proper legal representation is often denied and sentencing is very subjective— often people are arrested and detained just because they have the same or similar name to a suspected party and can spend weeks or months in jail before being released even though they may be innocent— the homecoming is a big deal. I had read about prison homecomings in a past participant’s blog, but it really was something else!
