In retrospect, my bat mitzvah was about nothing less than life and death. But it’s not when I became an adult.
Girls at my synagogue did not read from the Torah. Instead, each girl led a service using a photocopied booklet based on a theme. The available themes didn’t do much for me, so I decided to make my own book, choosing the not at all limiting theme of “Life.”
My dad and I collected source material. The Life project was fun with him. We were both editors and terrible procrastinators, and we assembled dozens of quotes. We included Tennessee Williams, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Confucius, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and a Sanskrit poem. To round things out, the rabbi added Ecclesiastes 9, a meditation on death. When the big day came, I blithely chanted it in a language I didn’t comprehend. My single-minded focus was on getting the melody right. I had no idea then that my personal booklet of Life came complete with its inevitable conclusion.
Twenty-three years later, I sat shiva for my father, feeling the full weight of the final loss of both parents. In the damp, open hours of grieving, I decided to watch my bat mitzvah video. At first it was funny – the painfully solemn delivery, my obvious sense of self-importance. There I was, a pre-teen admonishing the congregation to make the most of “all our fleeting days” because “the same fate is in store for all.”
But as I watched, I wanted nothing more than to have my parents there, both to laugh and to help me remember. Their absence was and is devastating. The end of my childhood came at last in the shadow of mortality. I profoundly understood how fleeting our days are. Then I began making conscious choices about how to live.
