Last week on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” Meredith Marks became a bat mitzvah, performing the Jewish rite of passage at the age of 52 in front of a rapt national audience.
Sure, the ceremony itself was blanketed by drama — fights between the housewives, use of terms like “high body count” and their less savory alternatives — but the bat mitzvah itself was a deeply meaningful Jewish ceremony. I even teared up on multiple occasions, like when Marks, a Jewish Chicago transplant who has been part of the show since its inception, reflects on what it meant to her to read from the Torah, seeing her three children, Reid, Brooks and Chloe, chant the priestly blessing, and watching Meredith’s husband Seth proudly beaming as his wife wraps herself in the tallit he wore at his own bar mitzvah as a teen.
The ceremony was led by a familiar face, at least for me. Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder is a Kveller contributor, and on the lonely and scary days of the pandemic, she joined Kveller on Zoom and Facebook to help lead our audience in making their own matzah and sharing Jewish holiday hacks at a time when getting together in community was impossible. Rabbi Ruth always knows how to suffuse events with warmth and familiarity, and so it was no surprise that Marks’ bat mitzvah felt just as warm and authentic. When Marks, a jewelry designer and caviar purveyor, tears up while telling the audience why having a bat mitzvah was suddenly so important to her after all these decades, Rabbi Ruth stands by her, giving space for that emotional moment.
“She was nervous. And I said to her, it’s OK, you can be nervous. I’ll be there. I won’t let you fall,” Abusch-Magder told Kveller last week after the episode, “Mazel, Meredith,” aired. “And I think that that’s also a really important Jewish value: It’s not a performance and it’s not a test of how good you are. It’s really an opportunity to celebrate what you’ve learned, and she had done the work and the learning.” A bat mitzvah, to Abusch-Magder, is not “about perfection. It’s about providing an offering. A tefillah [prayer] is an an offering, literally an offering to God.”
Magder-Abusch, who lives in Atlanta, was brought onto the show by a fellow rabbi who passed on the gig but recommended her for the role. The former director of education of Bechol Lashon, she has been spending the last year tutoring kids who may not have the traditional bar or bat mitzvahs.
“There are far too many Jews who don’t fit into the mold of what the organized Jewish community does Jewishly, and helping Jews find Jewish expression that is meaningful to them, to me, that is really the sacred work that I am called to do,” Abusch-Magder said. “I will go wherever somebody needs something that’s personalized and a little out of the box, but also really draws on our tradition.״
“We come together in community, in synagogues, but when you think of it, there is no space that is more sacred than the next. We can bring our sacredness anywhere. And that’s part of what it means to me to be Jewish. And so I get to do this kind of work all the time these days,” Abusch-Magder added. She’s done a bat mitzvah on a boat, at a country club, and now, in a chalet in Salt Lake City, where the bat mitzvah celebrant was brought in on a horse-led sleigh.
When “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” first began airing in 2020, its two Jewish cast members weren’t very open about their Jewish identity. There was Lisa Barlow, born Jewish and then converted to Mormonism, and there was Marks, a proud Jew but not particularly observant in any way. But this past year, something changed for Marks. As she says in the episode, “I did not have a bat mitzvah growing up. For most of my life, that didn’t bother me. I knew my heritage as Jewish, and that was enough. As we have all watched significant growth in antisemitism in the U.S. and around the world, I decided that I wanted a chance to publicly affirm my pride in being Jewish, and to have an opportunity to gather with my family and my friends. My hope and prayer is that we come together in community across our differences, Jewish, Mormon, Christian, Muslim, gay, straight. In doing so, the world will truly become a better place.”
For Abusch-Magder, Marks’ shift to being so proudly Jewish is not a coincidence. “She is someone who has been in the forefront as a supporter of gay rights for years and years and years. She uses her platform continuously for that, and she felt that this year was the year to also use her platform to highlight Jewish pride and Jewish culture.”
Abusch-Magder traveled to Utah twice for the event — once to meet with Marks and once for the ceremony. In the same way that she grows to truly love any child she works with, she grew to love both Meredith and her family — how connected they were, how seriously they took the ceremony, how lovely and meaningful the entire process was. “There were hours and hours of filming that don’t make it, but it was all really meaningful.”
Abusch-Magder tries to make her ceremonies accessible to all, and you can see that in “Mazel, Meredith.” She explains to the audience what a bat mitzvah is, what a tallit is, even what “mazel tov” means.
“When a family does an independent bat mitzvah, the community is very, very mixed, and many of the people, including some of the Jews, don’t really know a lot of what’s going on. And so for me, explaining: What is happening? Why do we have a bar mitzvah? That this is something about coming of age, but also about Jewish pride and taking your place in the Jewish people… those are really critical things.” It isn’t just about people understanding what is happening, Abusch-Magder added, but also about them being a part of what she believes is a sacred moment. “I want people to feel not that they’ve been sitting there in theater, but rather part of what a ceremony is supposed to be, and part of the community. And it is sacred. It doesn’t matter what they come from. Your presence at a sacred moment is a blessing to the people that are there,” she explained.
Abusch-Magder also got an intimate look at the Marks family’s Jewish identity. All three kids had their bar and bat mitzvahs. “Her daughter Chloe had her bat mitzvah in the same place that Meredith had hers,” the rabbi shared. They celebrate Jewish holidays, and sometimes Shabbat. Meredith grew up in a home that didn’t have a lot of Judaism in it, yet she took the process seriously all throughout her work with the rabbi. The three children were extremely proud of their mother, and were very supportive, she said. But nothing quite compared to the elation of her husband, Seth, who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home.
“This was something that they found meaningful to share together, and that was clear. He was so happy. So genuinely thrilled to be there and to be doing this,” Abusch-Magder recalled. “Judaism is very meaningful and powerful to him… Even with the families, when you have two Jews who commit to each other, they don’t always share the same exact perception of what Judaism is, so it can be really lovely when people find that common ground.”
Seth and Meredith have, in fact, been very open about struggling to find common ground at times. The Torah portion that Meredith read for her bat mitzvah is about Joseph, and Abusch-Magder spoke about how the biblical hero “also had to do reconciliation and tikkun [repair] in his relationship.”
“None of our families are perfect, and when we can be generous and figure out our ways forward together, it’s just always wonderful,” Abusch-Magder said.
While viewers mostly see the drama between the housewives, aside from a moment of reconciliation between Meredith and Mary Crosby over a fight in a previous episode, Abusch-Magder saw a lot of authentic engagement from the other women in the show. “I had really meaningful, thoughtful conversations with many of the housewives and their family members [about faith and what it means to them]. The other women, some of whom had never been to a bat mitzvah, were just thrilled to have taken part of it. They really paid attention.” In the episode, we see Barlow clearly moved by being part of a Jewish ceremony and talking about how being Jewish will always be a part of her.
After the ceremony, people commented on how natural Rabbi Ruth felt throughout it, and it struck her that there was nothing all that different about this ceremony than any of the other ones she’d worked on before. Well, maybe aside from the sleigh.
And yet, Marks’ adult bar mitzvah was a shehechiyanu moment — a first — for Abusch-Magder in many ways. Her first time teaching an adult bat mitzvah student, her first time traveling to Salt Lake City, her first reality TV show appearance, for which she purposely wore clothes by Israeli designers to share another aspect of her identity. But it was also a shehechiyanu moment for the “Real Housewives” franchise. The way Abusch-Magder sees it, and the way many viewers do, is that the beauty of the show is its ability to juxtapose diverting dramas with real human issues that touch families of every stratum of American society — from addiction to teen pregnancy to personal faith — and melding the overblown interpersonal drama with real life weighty topics. This was the show’s first adult bat mitzvah, and also the first episode since October 7 that dealt so beautifully and authentically with Jewish pride and Jewish tradition. It showed the audience of “Real Housewives” the significance and gorgeous cadence of reading and holding the Torah, of being in Jewish community and family. It showed us all a very familiar transformation for Jews this year, many who have clung closer to their culture than ever before, to the comfort and power of our tradition amid strife. In many ways, Meredith Marks’ authentic and genuine bat mitzvah was history-making. It showed us that it is never too late to take your relationship to Judaism into your own hands, and never too late to become a bat mitzvah.
If it hadn’t been for a badass Jewish woman, her own Israeli mother, Abusch-Magder too might never have had a bat mitzvah. “I was very, very fortunate. I was the first girl to have a bat mitzvah at the Agron Street Street Synagogue in Jerusalem, because nobody would bat mitzvah me at the Hamilton, Ontario synagogue reading Torah where I grew up.”
“There are a lot of women who didn’t have a chance [to have a bat mitzvah] for all kinds of reasons,” Abusch-Magder added. “Some of them because when they were younger, it wasn’t what girls did. Because their families were conservative. Some because they converted. Whatever it is, there’s really no time where you can or can’t do it. Do it anywhere.”
