Partners or Victims?

“Mommy, did you hear about the wedding?” It was Wednesday night last week and my older children had just heard the news about a Givat Ze’ev wedding busted by police due to noncompliance with the COVID restrictions.

Soon a single image surfaced, a dazed young man propelled past his parents’ door by police forces as blood streamed down his face. Then the reports: the screams of the mother facing arrest at her child’s wedding, the chassan describing his new kallah vomiting, the family trying to shield their living room from a police invasion.

My children were uncharacteristically quiet, pensive. I think we all knew that there was likely another side to this story. We are in the midst of a pandemic with too many victims and too little compliance with regulations, and no one envies the police’s job.

But this wasn’t a mass event in an illegal wedding hall. It was already constrained far tighter, far smaller than any young couple’s dreams: just family and maybe some friends in a living room and garden. And then there was the timing, and the manner, and the violence, and the callousness…what kind of nightmare had this wedding turned into? How could the young couple possibly get off to a positive start, my children wondered, after their special night had taken on the undertones of a pogrom?