It’s Friday night, and my 13-year-old daughter has joined the rabbi at the pulpit to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, marking the start of her leadership for the weekend’s services. Wearing a bubblegum pink dress, I am awestruck by her confidence, poise and sense of purpose. Just beyond her, in the Presbyterian church where our congregation meets, are several crosses displayed throughout the sanctuary. We were asked if we wanted to cover them up, but instead, we decided to embrace the beautiful partnership that has allowed us to share this sacred space. It may look like an unconventional bat mitzvah to some, but for us, it’s the perfect culmination of the journey we took to get here.
For a long time, I mourned the Jewish experience I didn’t think my kids would ever have.
Even though I had to travel almost an hour away as a child to attend synagogue and Hebrew school and, later, work at the JCC and participate in youth groups, I had a robust and meaningful Jewish upbringing in Charlotte, NC. As a teen, my weekends were full of bar and bat mitzvahs, youth group meetings and serving as a madracha, assistant teacher, at Hebrew school on Sundays. It wasn’t until my early 20s, when I was turned down by my rabbi, who wouldn’t officiate my wedding to a non-Jew, that I felt that the community was no longer a part of my Jewish story, despite being a Reform congregation.
My husband and I agreed from the beginning that we would raise our children as Jewish, and he has absolutely killed it in the role of supportive partner and parent to his Jewish wife and daughters. This is the same guy who googled Judaism 101 when we began dating many moons ago and whom our kids refer to as “Jew-iiissshhh.” As a family, we still put up a Christmas tree and go on Easter egg hunts, while at the same time, our Jewish holidays are filled with rituals, traditions and so much food and laughter. Seriously, I ask myself every year why we need to make 20 pounds of latkes…and yet we just do.
But living in South Carolina, finding a Jewish community hasn’t always been so easy. So when a few local Jews started a congregation here in my county, I couldn’t believe that for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to cross state borders to feel a part of one. Our daughters attended an all-volunteer-led Hebrew school from a young age with a handful of other Jewish kids, some of whom are great friends still to this day. It was nowhere near the size of the religious school I attended and certainly didn’t have official Hebrew workbooks and homework assignments from week to week. But there was so much joy in watching my young children and other Jewish kids learn the basics of the Hebrew alphabet, making letters out of clay and celebrating the Jewish holidays for the first time with people that actually live near them and not across state lines.
As our kids got older, the local congregation grew in size and so too did the Hebrew school. When the Hebrew workbooks were whipped out and pressure to prepare for a bat mitzvah that was still many many years away started to take over the joy of learning about our religion and traditions, my kids expressed disappointment in attending Hebrew school each Sunday. Then came COVID and virtual Hebrew school was so not something my kids wanted to take part in. So we took a few years off. When the world started to open back up, we made the decision not to force them to attend Hebrew school if they didn’t want to. We joined another local smaller congregation that had also formed in our community and, while much smaller, we began attending services and taking part in some of the temple’s special events.
As our daughters continued to grow older, we started thinking about their bat mitzvah ceremonies and what those would look like, if they had them. I was horrified that they didn’t know Hebrew and had never actually been to a bar or bat mitzvah and the Jewish guilt went on from there. But then I watched one of my best friends create a meaningful learning environment for her son to prepare him for his bar mitzvah just a few months before our oldest daughter would also be called to the Torah.
My friend and I talked for hours on the phone about mitzvah preparations and there was so much excitement and anticipation as we worked to craft this experience for our children. Notice I said craft, because that’s exactly what we did. Sans the pressure to meet these unofficial standards I had set for myself and my kids’ Jewish upbringing, we relished in the preparations and experiences for our children and never once thought about what should have been or could have been.
On the day of her bat mitzvah, when I looked out into the sanctuary and saw our family, friends, neighbors, teachers, coworkers and so many others who came together to celebrate this special day, do you know what I wasn’t thinking about? I wasn’t thinking about the fact that my daughter memorized the English transliteration of her Torah portion instead of truly reading the Hebrew. I didn’t think about the fact that my husband wasn’t Jewish and couldn’t lift the Torah for Hagbah so we asked a dear Jewish friend to stand in his place. I didn’t think about the fact that the first two bar mitzvahs she ever went to were during the same year of her own. And I never once thought about whether or not the cantor was cringing behind her when she didn’t hit the right note or if anyone in the congregation would compare her ceremony to another kid’s from a week ago.
Instead, I saw a room full of people who loved us and who were truly so happy to be together to share in this momentous occasion. And because us Jews are few and far between down here in South Carolina, for most of my daughter’s friends in attendance, this may very well be the only Jewish ceremony they ever take part in. But that didn’t matter either because my daughter was prepared in the best way for her special day.
How she managed to bring together generations of Jews and non-Jews to carry on this ancient Jewish tradition — I don’t have the words to describe what an accomplishment that was. She filled the sanctuary the same way I did when I was 13, by studying her Torah portion, completing her mitzvah project, picking a party theme and sending out invitations and trying on 10-15 dresses to find the perfect one. Although how we got there was so drastically different, we both followed our own paths to be able to stand before the Torah and become adults in the eyes of our Jewish community.
I’m so proud of my daughter, I’m so thankful for all those who helped prepare her for her bat mitzvah, and I’m so proud of our little Jewish congregation who puts service and tikkun olam before all else. And I’m so proud of my own family — not just that we are carrying on this beautiful tradition, but that we have gotten here with so much love, respect and joy, and got to do it in our own way. No tears were shed practicing a Torah portion, we didn’t spend every waking moment of every single weekend attending bar and bat mitzvah services and parties, and we certainly, quite literally stepped on a lot of toes figuring out which direction to dance during the Hora.
We partied our hearts out and hugged our people tight, because, against no barriers other than the ones that previously persisted in my head, our Jewish daughter became a bat mitzvah. Period… amen!
