The sound of commitment

The other night Zahava and I attended the engagement party of one of my regular hitchhikers who is also the daughter of one of our neighbors. 

The engaged couple is what I always pictured in my mind before we moved here when I day-dreamed about how our children might look as young Israeli adults.  They make such a striking couple that you would want to put them in an advertisement for Jewish singles tours to Israel ("Come to Israel and find a husband/wife that looks like this!").

He is a tall, handsome, young man with close cropped blond hair who is a reserve officer in the IDF and has an air of casual command of which I'm certain he is completely unaware.  His easy smile might be taken for shy if one didn't also notice the constant gleam of mischief in his eye.

She is a tall, slender, beautiful young woman with shoulder-length brown hair that falls somewhere between 'windblown' and 'dreadlocks'.  She dresses almost exclusively in loose-fitting long cotton tunics and harem pants (what her father jokingly calls 'the Bedouin look') and my daughter Ariella considers her to be the final word on fashion.

Between these two young people, their combined circle of army and university friends looks a bit like a casting call for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog photo shoot.  Seriously, I can't remember ever seeing such a collection of tall, tanned, beautiful, athletic-looking kids in my life!

So we arrived to the engagement party fashionably late (we had to watch D.H., after all) and the festivities had already spilled out onto the street.  Most of the people outside in the front yard were the the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog crowd... with a few of them playing guitar and banging on various sized drums while the remainder sang loudly and danced around in dizzying circles.

Inside the living-room/dining-room and kitchen was where most of the Parent's friends had gathered and every horizontal surface was set with plates and trays of cakes, dried fruit, olives,cheeses, drinks, nuts and about a million other treats. 

As with the celebrations going on outside, there wasn't an inch to move inside, and periodically the group would spontaneously pause to dance around with the parents of the couple.  The only thing that occasionally brought the crowd to a semblance of decorum was the clink of a glass as someone in, or close to, the family stood up to say a few words of blessing for the couple.

It was shortly after one of these lulls that Zahava and I heard a muffled crash from another part of the living-room followed by a joyous shout of Mazal Tov.  We looked at each other and wondered out loud if we had simply heard a plate or tray being dropped or if they had actually carried out the religious ceremony of 'Tena'im'.

[Skip the following paragraph if you already know what ''Tena'im' is]

Tenaim, which translates as "conditions," is an Ashkenazic tradition of engagement, a pre-Ketubah contract setting out the terms of the marriage, including the date and time of the wedding ceremony (chuppah). After the witnessed signing and reading of the Tenaim, a plate is smashed, traditionally by the future mothers-in-law, symbolizing the impending breaks in their relationships with their children, who will soon take responsibility for feeding each other. In recent years, many Orthodox rabbis have encouraged the Tenaim to be scheduled very close in time before the wedding, if at all, out of concerns that it has a binding effect under Jewish law and requires a get (writ of divorce) if the engagement is called off.   Source:  Here

You see, while in Europe a century ago it was quite common for the formal announcement of a couple's engagement to be accompanied by ''Tena'im'... in our circles in the US, we had become accustomed to the ''Tena'im' being delayed until the day of the wedding immediately before the actual ceremony was about to begin.  As noted above, this practice was done because according to many Rabbinic authorities, though the couple isn't fully married after their parents perform ''Tena'im', they aren't fully single anymore either.  They are now in a funny middle ground where they are legally betrothed to one another... and technically, if they call off the engagement they will need a formal 'Get' or divorce under Jewish law.

Since we couldn't see all the way to that part of the living room I'm not sure if what we had heard was ''Tena'im' or simply a dish or tray being dropped.  However, I would not be surprised to find it was, in fact, the former. 

You see, in addition to the tendency of post-army Israelis to 'cut loose' a little bit, traveling the world... letting their hair grow long... establishing themselves outside (and often at odds with) their parent's sphere of influence, they are also much more serious and worldly than their typical American counterparts.  Their life experiences have given them the tools to make decisions that many young Americans happily push off for a decade or more.

I suppose I can now add to the long list of stuff I didn't recognize before we moved here: 'The sound of a commitment being made'.