Monday, March 08, 2010
Henna Ceremony
My daughter is getting married and yesterday we had a Henna party with a Yemenite belly dancer and many sweets. We all dressed colorful galabiyas. Henna actually is a plant and it is made into a paste that leaves yellowish marks on the skin. Henna is a Middle East tradition, my daughter wanted it. It is a symbol of good luck, fertility, prosperity and shared happiness.
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15 comments:
The henna fashion is assiduously cultivated among Indians too. They have henna hair and henna designs for feet and hands.
Mazel Tov!
Mazel tov again on your daughter's wedding. The Henna party sounds like harmless fun but I think overall it is a mistake to make such a mishmash of our cultural customs - we are Jews and now we are Israeli Jews or American Jews or whatever but before that there was 1000 years of life in E. Europe and we had plenty of our own customs for brides and don't need anyone else's. Do Yemeni Jews make borscht and gefilte fish and put on capotes and shtramls?
K
Personally I wanted a Hungarian Hassidic kleyzmer orchestra and a long-bearded Naturey Karta Rabbi, but (1) nobody cares about what I want, (2) it is my daughter who is marrying, not me, (3) she is marrying according to the laws of Moshe and Israel - dayenu ! These days, my friend, that is more than enough for me!
I would have done the same in your situation. Women have long memories and hold grudges forever. When my daughter starts to recite to me my "sins" from the time she was 4 years old, I always tell her that she should save these allegations and present them to my "war crimes" tribunal. If I imposed my views on the wedding ceremony, it would surely be added to my dossier.
I am sad to say, the offspring of my generation of cousins is starting to marry (mine are still a little too young) and the results regarding intermarriage are none too encouraging. It appears that the majority are choosing non-Jewish spouses, including just recently my sister's son. I'm glad my parents are not around to see this - they would have been livid. And my family is a generation or 2 behind most in the US since they came after WWII while most US Jews came before WWI at least 40 years earlier.
K
Congratulations!
Thanks.
J, you can enable captchas on your comment form in order to stop this spam.
Although I could be wrong, you could enjoy reading about surferdude23's ex-girlfriend.
I have a filter but is not 100% secure.
A filter on your email account, or one on the comment form for this blog?
A captcha is different than a filter - a poster has to pass a "test" - he must read and retype some distorted characters on the screen (the spammers constantly upgrade their OCR capabilities but if you make the characters too distorted then humans can't read them either) so "bot" (automated) spamming is blocked. It's not foolproof (worst case the spammers can hire Indians to solve the captchas for a few cents each) but it helps.
K
"the results regarding intermarriage are none too encouraging. It appears that the majority are choosing non-Jewish spouses"
K,
I am full-blooded Ashkenazi and a generation younger than you and J. The most salient traits I have inherited from my ancestors are tendencies for extreme anxiety, pessimism and bitterness. I am also not a believer. In that light, I think that intermarriage is not all bad from the perspective of passing on our genes if not our culture. If (when) the liberal Jews foul our American nest and our lives are again in peril, those with gentile relatives may just be connected enough to survive. We must face the fact that it will never be entirely safe to be Jewish anywhere and that membership in this group is not without significant problems.
Anonymous,
If the survival of Jewish individuals only was the question, then the "Jewish question" could have been solved long ago (and it has been solved this way in many places). Have the Jews convert or intermarry and they are safe from persecution as Jews. End of story.
But cultures and religions have a life of their own - it is almost as if they are living organisms themselves, with their own goals which sometimes contradict individual goals (see suicide bombers).
We live in a world where major efforts are made to conserve rare native species and keep them from interbreeding with imported species so the original pure strain is maintained. Aren't the Ashkenazim as worth of preservation as a frog or a fish?
Every trait exists because it has some survival value - being overly optimistic is a good way to get killed. The unique traits of the Ashkenazim have literally transformed the modern world. Without the Jews, the secrets of the atom (for better or for worse) would probably have remained hidden for another 50 years if not forever. Don't give up your birthright for a bowl of porridge (a cute shiksa girl).
Even on an individual level, I think intermarriage is a mistake many times. First of all, when you marry a person of a different culture, things that you take for granted are not obvious to the other person, or they view them in a completely opposite way - this can lead to tensions. Second, while all religions are ridiculous on some level, they also have some internal consistency and they provide a good framework for raising children (as self perpetuating organism, most religions favor children - those that don't, like the Shakers, disappear). If you have a mixed marriage, the children have to observe 2 sets of customs and end up in a kind of limbo without strong attachments to either. Rootlessness is a dangerous condition - look at someone like Adam Pearlman (Azzam the American) - cast free from his roots, he ends up a Muslim terrorist. I'm not saying that's what will happen to your children, but children do thrive the most on consistency.
K
Ashkenazi Jews are very ugly because they are so inbred.
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