i had to write this for my class
Being not of the appropriate age to be going through this ceremony means that this is not a routine rite of passage. This is not the time I get some cash for college and a new fountain pen. This is not a thing I do because all my peers are doing it.
It is also not an affirmation of my religion, my practices or my belonging to a synagogue. Those things are private and the congregation doesn’t need to know of them. No this is something else. This is a tradition to do because I can.
When I was the correct age for this sort of thing, being religious was the furthest thing from my mind. It was 3 years since I had arrived in the United States and I had mostly adjusted. I was still however a very determined atheist as that is what I was brought up to be. God was for uneducated old people said the Communist upbringing and thus I was slowly convinced that America was clearly full of uneducated old people since they all seemed to be religious. Even though I was going to a religious day school, when my class mates were having their bar and bat mitzvahs it never occurred to me to have one. After that, the time had passed and it never seemed that important.
In 2006 my mother and I went back to Moscow. We needed to be there for a funeral of my grandfather, her father. This was not at all the first time she was back, but I had not been in 17 years. My grandfather was Jewish, his second wife was not. His daughter, my mother’s half-sister was devotedly Russian Orthodox. It was a non-religious service, but the cemetery was full of crosses. It was a bit like standing in a forest of crosses and gold icons and statues. The images were a bit daunting.
Somewhere in that trip I came to a startling, though in retrospect it shouldn’t have been, realization. Not only did I not live there anymore, and not only was I looking forward to going back to the land of restaurants with non-pork dishes on the menu, and clean air and hospitals without rats running about, but I was able to do the things I hadn’t done when the time was appropriate even now. On a very very long escalator out of the Moscow subway (when you use these things as bomb shelters, you build them deep) I pointed out to my mother that really there was nothing stopping me from doing an adult bat mitzvah, was there.
When later that year I heard Rabbi Rosen mention the program at Beth El, I remembered the conversation on the escalator and signed up.
This is not about religion to me. It is not even about tradition. It is about beign able to do the things I aught to do. It is about fulfilling the very reason for moving across the Atlantic. It is about the responsibility I have to all the relatives who came before me who had not had the choice to do a ceremony like this.
This is for my grandmother, who was an uneducated old person and the only religious person I knew when I was little. She knew better then the rest of us, may she rest in peace.