Faith Healed

I know I’ve been singing the blues lately, but don’t let it fool you. I’m a joy boy at heart and it don’t take much to get me giddy. A beautiful cone cabbage or the sound of Lester Young’s tenor and I go full Fred Flintstone yabadabadoo! Enthusiasm; it’s an art form and I consider myself a maestro-- But that damn sciatica put a big fat crimp in my joy game. The gloom clouds gathered and the nerve pain rain went plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk. It got so bad I was preparing myself for a life of limp and gimp solitude, but lo and behold, the weather changed, and it was the institution of marriage or more specifically a wedding that brought out the sunshine.

High on a canyon hillside they appeared. The groom a lean Robin Hood in vest and headband, his ragtag crew of merry men escorting him down the twisting path like a captured outlaw. The bride, sheathed in turquoise and led by her maidens was visibly and shamelessly pregnant, and you knew from the fertile curve of her form that this was true love. (They had been summoned down by a dozen “moaning drones,” five-foot-long tube flutes fashioned out of PVC plumbing pipe by the groom himself, and played by an octet of “drone moaners,” wearing medieval garb.)

My view of all this was partially obstructed as I remained seated in one of the folding chairs that horseshoe’d the cul-de-sac where the guests had gathered. I wasn't in complete agony, but my left drumstick was shuddering, the prospect of a long night of reverie, daunting to say the least. I had come with my accomplice, who had caught the spirit, tying one of the home-sewn arm bands they were handing out (this one, orange-pink) around the crown of her black, rabbit fur fedora.

That's the kind of wedding it was. Home-sewn and home sourced. The family throwing it, a tribe of pioneers-- actors, musicians, dancers and orchard tenders. The groom (the middle child) was an old soul blues warbler, puppet master and fix-it-man extraordinaire. A craftsman. A builder of things, not a buyer of them. This was the family ethos. Whatever they could make, they made. Whatever they could infuse with their spirit, care and creativity, they infused, and just to be near this kind of homespun goodness was seeping into my body and cooling my inflamed nerve without me even knowing.

Just the sight of those brightly colored arm bands tied around two hundred limbs did you good. They were like a badge of membership, and though there was no overt political message attached to them, it was a reminder. A reminder that as the fascist limbo bar gets lower, and the phone eats more of our apple, and AI de-imagines the sacred texts, love and creativity are still possible when we come from a creative, loving place. As far as the overall dress code went, the instruction had been to follow your renaissance heart; to play the dandy or damsel, the jester or gentleman farmer, whatever fashion modality you were feeling should be followed. Just wear a pair of sturdy shoes, because the dance floor is made of dirt.

The food was killer (pork at Jewish wedding!). The words said and songs sung, all from the heart. But the most genius thing of all was that the ceremony came after dinner and the toasts, not before. It wasn’t’ some opening act, it was the headliner, the main event. What the entire evening had been leading to.

It was a traditional Jewish ceremony, but in an untraditional way. The couple stood beneath the chuppah (an open sided canopy), its four wooden poles held sturdy by their siblings. The crowd was gathered below, the bride and groom above on a terraced plateau. Our table had been on this upper terrace and having lingered there, we somehow found ourselves backstage, standing right behind the groom’s mom and dad who were just to the right of the action. We had an incredible view. The rabbi and cantor in profile, the couple in three-quarter, the crowd of two hundred, gathered below.

The rabbi looked like a kid and was a “them” as far as pronouns go, but they might as well have had a long gray beard and spoke with a Yiddish accent, for they deeply understood the task at hand. There was a depth and ease in every gesture. Love and lightness. Sincerity and humor. They knew what they were doing and did it well. But it was the cantor who got me there.

I was raised by hardcore lefties. My mother, a red diaper baby, didn’t have a spiritual bone in her body and thought religion was for dopes. I didn’t have a bar mitzvah and the first time I ever stepped into a temple was in the Philippines when I was twenty-four and I found it strange and unaffecting. But when that cantor started to sing, I began to vibrate like a tuning fork.

Her name was Danielle. She was a close friend and band mate of the bride. She spoke about the couple with reverence, saying there was “an equivalence” between the two. “Equivalence.” It was such a specific word to use and when she said it, I knew that it was true and that I was witnessing one of the rarest occurrences on earth: Two people who actually should be getting married.

And then she began to sing.

I don’t know if it was the emotion in the air or the beauty of the ceremony that softened me up, but the sanctity of her voice, and what she did with the Hebrew (my ancient mother tongue) took me somewhere. A Jewish somewhere. An undiscovered land within that she had found the map to. I closed my eyes and began to sway and dance. I was connected to the source and could sense the sacred all around me, and that was when I realized I had been standing for a solid hour and that I felt no pain.