The Great Wedding Walkout: Litvish Appeal and the Fight Against Internalized Sephardi Racism

The Event

The Rosh Yeshiva walked down the aisle... and right out the door, dragging all of the chosson/chattan's (groom's) friends behind him and leaving the poor newlywed—pleading for him to let the boys stay—to cry alone. At issue: the Israeli rabbi's objection to the bride and groom conducting their wedding according to normative Sephardic halacha. No, this is not an Ashkenazi couple breaking from tradition; both bride and groom are from sephardi families, the groom's father even a rav of a Sephardi congregation. Not even the ruthless Rosh Yeshiva is Ashkenazi; he's a Sephardic man heading a school for Sephardic boys.

Not surprisingly, the Rabbis Yosef, champions of Sephardi halacha, responded quickly and forcefully. Rav Yitzchak Yosef headed straight over to the wedding to celebrate with the abandoned groom and his father, Rav Ovadia invited the groom's family to his Jerusalem home the next day. Rav Avraham Yosef, Chief Rabbi of Holon and Sephardi representative on the Chief Rabbinite Counsel, said in a radio interview that the rosh yeshiva is a "criminal," adding that he should be banished from the city and that it is assur to learn Torah from such a person.

The Read

Clearly, the issue here runs deeper than a rabbi being a jerk or supporting the unquestionable halachic basis for following the (legitimate) practices of one's forefathers. This event represents one of the fundamental struggles of Sephardi Jews living as a socio-religious minority group in today's Haredi Israel.

Tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews are nothing new in Israel. Shas and the Education Ministry are still fighting to solve the problem of Sephardi girls sitting at home because they can't find Ashkenazi high schools that will take girls with their skin color. What this fiasco highlights is something more insidious than external Ashkenazi discrimination. It demonstrates Sephardi Jews who have so internalized the societal biases against them that they abandon halacha and human decency in an attempt to "overcome" what the see as their racial handicap.

We can get a bit of interesting insight into this phenomenon by looking at the experiences of African Americans and members of other American minority groups with their race here in the U.S. The study of racial identity looks at the way in which individuals see their own race in relation to the majority race and how that view affects the role of race within their overall sense of who they are. Atkinson, Morten, and Sue's  (1998) Racial/Cultural Identity Development Model (R/CID)  defines five stages through which individuals progress along the path to a fully integrated racial identity.

The most primitive stage is conformity, in which individuals hold negative attitudes and beliefs toward themselves and toward members of the same minority group, while holding appreciating attitudes and beliefs toward members of the dominant group. Individuals at this stage attempt to deny thier own racial/cultural heritage. However, as they encounter information or experiences that are inconsistent with the attitudes, held by the dominant culture they gradually move into the dissonance stage. Here they experience conflict: between thier self-depreciating and self-appreciating attitudes and beliefs, between group-depreciating and group-appreciating attitudes and beliefs toward members of the same minority, and between group-appreciating and group-depreciating attitudes toward members of the dominant group.

As the individual develops through the resistance and immersion stage, he or she comes to completely reject the dominant culture in favor of the beliefs and values of his or hew own race or culture, with increased regard for self and group coming together with group-depricating attitudes toward the majority culture. The introspection stage is where the individual is able to reassess his or her ethno-centric biases after recognizing how draining it is to devote such emotional intensity to and how unsatisfying it could be to hold resistance and immersion-stage views. Finally, by the integrative awareness stage, minority individuals  have developed an inner sense of security and they own and appreciate unique aspects of both their own and the mainstream culture.

What Rav Ovadia et. al, are doing is more than just defending their culture. They are fighting to prevent their Sephardic followers from regressing in their cultural identity development to a stage of conformity. In Israel's current socio-religious climate, it is hard to be proud of being a Sephardi. So hard that even a learned man with his own yeshiva, who should know better--both from a halachic and a don't-be-a-jerk perspective--will still go to shameful lengths to try to be like the Ashkenaz. Thier fight is an important one, but time will tell if it can stand up to the force of Litvish appeal.