Bureaucracy is Expensive

I feel like I have been up to my neck in bureaucracy over the past few weeks and I would like to share a bit of the experience. In order to have a legal Jewish wedding in this country every couple must register with the religious authorities. The process is pretty complicated and rather expensive and if you aren’t at least somewhat religious and understanding of the necessity of a central rabbinic authority, it can be an absolute nightmare. Each member of the couple must bring witnesses attesting to their status as an unmarried single (if you have been previously married you must provide a divorce certificate or a death certificate etc). Then each must bring their parents ketubah (as proof of Jewishness), a kosher certificate from their wedding hall, a certificate that their rabbi is allowed to perform the wedding according to the religious authority’s standards, a certificate that the woman has completed a course in the laws of marital purity, and a hefty chunk of money. Fortunately we are student/soldier so we get a significant discount…but still. They definitely don’t make it easy even to REGISTER to get married here. We are also fortunate that David lives in Efrat and they have their own branch of the religious authority here AND that the Rabbi who is marrying us happens to be the head of it! We can register everything for the wedding here in Efrat, but I had to bring my single certificate from my place of residence (aka Jerusalem).

Unfortunately for me the process in Jerusalem is a bit nightmarish. I tried to go a few months ago to the Rabbinate to get my certificate and after an hour and a half of waiting and being shuttled around from desk to desk I was informed that I couldn’t get it anyway because it only lasts 3 months and it would be expired before the wedding came around and I’d have to do it again anyway!!! I was so flustered and stressed when I left there that I ended up going on a shopping spree to calm myself down! The Rabbinate building is dark and cramped and everyone is angry about something and it was just a really unpleasant atmosphere. It is also very unsettling that some unsympathetic religious guy can potentially control my future!

Last week I decided to try to register at my other option, another branch of similar something (I’m not really sure how it really works anyway). I brought my witnesses with me (Noam and Becca’s boyfriend Aaron) so that we could get it done on the spot and everything would be great. We got to the office and immediately were sent to talk to the head of the place because something in the paperwork I had didn’t look right. Turns out the letter that my Rabbi from home had written attesting to my Jewishness couldn’t be accepted because he didn’t show up in their computer system as a real Rabbi. He refused to register me until we could prove that he really was a Rabbi. Our options were to let him fax it to another office and we could have waited a week OR we could schlep to the other side of town and go to that office ourselves. Obviously we decided to take it in our own hands and not rely on him to fax it or do anything to help me. We rode to the other side of town and waited for 45 minutes in the lobby of the Chief Rabbi’s (both of them) Office for a really nice pregnant woman (the only person who smiled at me throughout this whole process) to have one of the Rabbis check up on the status of my Rabbi in the states. It was really strange that the Sefardi and Ashkenazi Rabbis had two different sides of the building and there was no connection between the two other than through the lobby… as if this place didn’t have enough problems!! Fortunately they were able to verify his status and wrote me a letter to give to the other authority so I could get my certificate. We then raced back to the other office and I was able to fill everything out. My witnesses testified and all is good. I almost had at least 3 nervous breakdowns that day but all in all I survived!

My other bureaucratic messiness was getting my drivers license!!! I had to take 1 lesson and 1 test if all went well, but first I had to do a whole bunch of stuff: get a special form from only 1 place in the whole city, get an eye test, get a doctor to sign it (almost 100 NIS), go to the licensing office to have them sign it, find a teacher, take the lesson, have him sign me up for the test, take the test, go back to the licensing office to pick up my license, and THEN go to the bank to pay for it so it would be valid. It took me about 5 months in total to get everything done. Obviously I didn’t do it all at once, but still!! After just about 1000 NIS I am now a licensed driver in Israel and SOO glad it’s all over.

All in all it wasn’t so bad to deal with the bureaucracy, but as I was talking with a girl who was on my aliyah flight we made an interesting observation: this is not an easy place to live. If you really want to be here because it’s where you believe you’re meant to be then yea the bureaucracy junk is annoying but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that much. If you don’t want to be here more than anything, I can guarantee that within a few years you will have returned to where you came from because it’s just not worth the headache if being here isn’t worth it. For me, being here is worth every second and every penny.