Jennifer nudged me to cross the Rubicon—to become a bat mitzvah at the tender age of forty. I fought her at first, because it felt like much ado about not much, and I didn’t want to celebrate myself for such a belated milestone. A bat or bar mitzvah (literally: “daughter [bat] or son [bar] of commandment”), typically marked at age twelve or thirteen, is the turning point of a Jew’s life—as other religions have their rites of passage—so I was hesitant, twenty-eight years late, to ask friends and family to save the date, to rent out a defunct synagogue since I still didn’t belong to one, to reserve a restaurant space for lunch. Jen told me to stop angst-ing; this wasn’t about a party, but a promise. I was signing up for Judaism, and that was worth a catered meal.
I gave in and soon found myself on the subway memorizing my parsha (Torah section) with earphones every day, pressing stop and rewind to make sure I knew the chant. As the date neared, I became single-minded, going over the prayers and feeling pulled toward the ceremony in some inexorable way.
I slept in my childhood bedroom the night before the service because my Chicago in-laws had kindly flown in and were bunking in our apartment on various sofa beds and mattresses. I suspected that I’d need a little separation and quiet to concentrate. Mom left a gift on my old Laura Ashley comforter: a silver Kiddush cup (for wine blessings on Shabbat and holidays) with my name engraved and the date of my bat mitzvah. “Better late,” she wrote in her card. “I’m so proud you chose this.”
Jen was right: my Big Fat Belated Bat Mitzvah was unforgettable. Maybe it was watching Ben and Molly come up on “stage” to recite by heart the blessings for the candles and challah (braided bread), or seeing them witness their mom officially join the Jewish people. Maybe it was that when I chanted Torah, the handwritten Hebrew letters were no longer swimming on the parchment, but recognizable. Maybe I was overwhelmed by reciting the same text that has been read and read and read by Jew after Jew after Jew for more than three thousand years—even when people had to do so in secret. Maybe it was watching my mother crying in the front row.
My Torah portion in Leviticus included the concept of Karet—being cut off from one’s people. I realized that I was choosing not to be.
After the bat mitzvah, I became somewhat insatiable, downloading books and journals, listening to recorded sermons of rabbis I admired, reading the Jewish press. I convened a monthly Torah study group over wine in my living room with friends, led by the cheeky, affable Rabbi Burt Visotzky from the Jewish Theological Seminary, an expert on Midrash (Torah commentary). Burt suggested that we begin at the beginning, so we chose the book of Genesis and didn’t stop till we’d completed it five years later.
But I was still a Jew without a synagogue, and I didn’t look for one because, for all my Jewish awakening, I didn’t view temple membership as lacking. Then I stumbled into my first real Jewish home, Central Synagogue, a Reform temple in Manhattan with Moorish Revival architecture, a dazzling rose window, and thousands of devoted congregants.
I happened to attend the bat mitzvah of my friend Pamela’s daughter and was drawn in by the splendor of the sanctuary, the urgency of Rabbi Peter Rubinstein’s sermon, and the expressive voice of Cantor Angela Buchdahl. It was love at first sound.
Outside, I phoned my husband: “We have to join this place.”
Ever the realist, he said, “You spent ninety minutes there.”
“I’m just telling you, Dave: this is where we should be.” I knew I wanted to keep listening to this clergy. I wanted to keep coming back to that room.
I signed us up the following Monday. Dave trusted my gut and went along.
Central draws people in quickly. Suddenly, I was safeguarding Friday evenings to attend services—Central’s largest weekly gathering, which numbers hundreds and feels ebullient and sacred. The music penetrated, the spoken prayers felt unforced.
I enrolled my children in the weekly religious school and delighted in watching them bow during their abbreviated tefilah (prayer) service and learn Hebrew alongside their new friends. For Ben’s “mitzvah project” (community service), he chose to visit regularly with a Holocaust survivor and was affected by his stories.
But then Ben hit a roadblock, when he was saddled by severe anxiety in the seventh grade—a discomfort that was compounded by the loss of his friend Jacob, age ten, to brain cancer. Ben told us that he saw no point in a bar mitzvah or praying to a God who could let a ten-year-old die. I wrote to Senior Rabbi Peter Rubinstein, asking sincerely for help; I had no clue how to parent this moment.
Peter suggested that Ben stop by his office, and one meeting changed everything. Peter managed to connect with Ben in a way that no teacher or therapist had. Over the next few months, Peter talked Ben through his sense of religion’s futility. One day, out of the blue, Ben told us he wanted a bar mitzvah after all.
Ben and Molly became bar and bat mitzvah two years apart in ceremonies that seized my heart. During each service, I felt my children uplifted by a ritual that conveyed, This is about you and also beyond you. None of this lasts without you. I cried at the same two moments: when the rabbi passed the Torah scroll from the two pairs of grandparents to Dave and me and then to our child—a physical passing of the tradition—and also when they received a private blessing from the rabbi in front of the ark. I don’t say this lightly: it felt as if God was close by that day. Central Synagogue brought home the idea that my mother had predicted years ago: Judaism is a train that circles back to pick you up.
So with all this newfound connection, why did I feel compelled to go further? I think because the more I did grasp, the more I saw what I didn’t. It bothered me that I had never lived the entire Jewish calendar. I couldn’t explain Shemini Atzeret. I wanted to fill in the gaps, not just asking what Tu B’Shvat means but why it began and its relevance today.
One rabbi, Irwin Kula, posed two questions that guided me throughout my yearlong undertaking: “What do we hire a holiday to do for us? What is the yearning to which the holiday is a response?”
I wanted to know what each holiday does. Not that I would sit back, fold my arms, and expect fairy dust; I’d do my part, leave my skepticism at the door, be as active and open as possible. I hoped to be taken somewhere. The land of the holiday-knowers looked compelling, grounding.
Of course, multitudes of Orthodox Jews follow every holiday as a matter of course, but most Jews in the United States are not living by the Jewish clock, nor even aware of what happens when. (The holiday dates change every year according to the Hebrew calendar, which is tied to the moon’s cycles and is impossible to memorize; many holidays officially begin at sundown the night before, often lasting more than one day depending on the holiday: Rosh Hashanah is two days; Sukkot is eight or nine, depending on whom you ask.)
I wanted to understand what we non-Orthodox Jews are missing. Not just the facts and figures of Judaism, but their expression in real life. I wanted more of the intensity that I’d observed other people feeling.
The much-dissected Pew Research Center study of 2013 revealed that most Jews do not connect their Jewish identity to Judaism. I wanted to find out if that’s because we haven’t really looked there.
So I took the
