The Grammar of Tradition

During my first period living in Israel, I studied in a university Ulpan alongside a diverse group of immigrants and students. One of my classmates was a member of the US military, sent to Israel to pursue a master’s degree. He once shared a fascinating detail about his selection process. Before the military approved him for the programme, he had to pass an exam testing his aptitude for learning foreign languages. The exam, he explained, was not about knowing any specific language like Hebrew or Arabic. It was a test of structural flexibility, the ability to understand that the grammatical structures valid in one language might not exist in another. “That said,” he told us, “the more languages one speaks, the easier it is for that realisation to take hold.”

The same is true for Jewish tradition. We often grow up in a specific community, taking for granted that everyone in the Jewish world follows the exact same customs. It is only when we visit different communities that we realise our “dialect” of Judaism is just one of many. We discover that different communities, sometimes even within the same city, hold different traditions, and this variety is precisely what makes Jewish life so diverse, rich, and beautiful.

One of the main differences I encountered when I arrived in South Africa concerned how a wedding is officiated. I learned that here, the b’deken (veiling ceremony) is a separate ritual held a few minutes before the wedding starts, often in a private space with only the closest guests present. I had never heard of such a separation.

To be sure, the b’deken, which many sources relate to the episode in this week’s Parashah, Vayetze, where Yaakov marries Leah thinking she is Rachel, has been part of every wedding I have ever officiated.[1] However, in my previous experience, the veiling of the bride happened at the end of the aisle. It was the natural conclusion of the processional, witnessed by all the guests just before the couple stepped under the chuppah.

With time and experience officiating the South African way, I have come to appreciate the intimacy this separate ceremony offers. It provides a quiet, sacred space in the final, frenetic minutes before the chuppah, allowing the couple to be showered with blessings from their closest family and friends.

When I researched the origin of these differences, the “grammar” of the tradition became clear. Because the vast majority of South African Jewry traces its roots to Lithuania and Latvia, the “Litvak” model, which emphasises a clear separation of the wedding stages, became the dominant norm here.

In Brazil, however, the story is different. The Jewish community there (as well as in Argentina, France and parts of the US) is a true melting pot, formed by significant groups of immigrants from Poland, Russia, Romania and Germany, alongside a large Sephardic population from Morocco, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.

In many Sephardic circles, there is traditionally no b’deken at all. As these communities mixed in South America and elsewhere, the practice that became the norm was a compromise between the separate Ashkenazi b’deken (as in South Africa) and the Sephardic absence of one. The solution was a public, shorter b’deken at the aisle, a fusion that honours the Ashkenazi custom of veiling while maintaining the unified, seamless flow typical of Sephardic celebrations.

This brings me back to the Progressive approach to Judaism. One of our defining characteristics is the recognition that Judaism is not static. It is the product of the historical experiences of the Jewish people in the places we have lived. Our traditions developed in slightly different ways across the globe, interacting with different cultures and sociological realities.

Just as my classmate learned that different languages have different structures, we learn that Jewish tradition has different “dialects”. Recognising that ours is just one way of speaking this holy language does not diminish it. Rather, it highlights that this adaptability is part of what makes our culture so rich, so colourful and so strong.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Some commentators alternatively trace the practice of b’deken to Parashat Chayei Sarah (Genesis 24:65), where Rivkah lowers her veil upon seeing Yitzchak for the first time.