First I was a Presbyterian; then I converted to Judaism; now I wander around in the same humanist/deist fog that substitutes for Organized Religion with so many of my contemporaries. Not exactly satisfying; not bad either.
Obviously, there’s a longer story in all that, but you won’t read it here.
One result of this stuttering odyssey through comparative religions is that my children are Jewish. Which means that, on or close to their thirteenth birthdays, my daughters, each in turn, are formally accepted into adulthood in an elaborate ceremony, a bat mitzvah.
My older daughter went first, five years ago. That event took place in an Orthodox synagogue, where the patriarchy still held sway. Officially, it was not taken seriously. A rump service. Men and women even got to sit together.
My younger daughter, however, attended a Reform temple, where women, and their attaining of majority, are taken seriously. She had to learn the melodies of the passages in the Torah (essentially the first five books of the Bible) and the Haftorah (more or less the rest of the Old Testament) which she was required to chant.
And, since she was singing directly from the Torah, she had to learn formal Hebrew, Hebrew without written vowels. Her part was long and complicated, a formidable challenge. I was impressed and not a little awed that she had chosen to take it on.
And myself, the father, the jack Jew, had to participate, wanted to participate. There follows the diary of this event.
December 15: Ex-wife on the telephone; we must discuss the guest list. All very cordial; agreement is easily reached.
When I get off the phone, I begin thinking about implicit social dynamics. The guest list is loaded with people who used to like each other but don’t anymore; people who used to hate each other but now are quite friendly; people who used to be indifferent to each other and have retained their indifference.
Ex-lovers, ex-spouses, ex-friends, ex-enemies. It’s like some Masterpiece Theater production: Chapter Nine, A Family Gathering. A set piece.
I develop a headache.
December 30: Another phone call. Try to make decisions about role of stepmother (wife of self) and stepfather (husband of ex). Decisions also include role of mother-in-law (mine) and brother-in-law (ex’s). Some objections are raised about the ceremony being “too Marin County.”
“Too Marin County” is the curse of the Eighties. Anything, oh, please, but that. I briefly wonder how the residents of Marin County formulate that same compliment. Do people in San Rafael complain that hot tub therapy is “too Mill Valley?”
I say that stepparents are either valid or they’re not; if former, let’s acknowledge validity. I argue with great persuasiveness and conviction. Then I lie down for eighteen hours.
January 10: Receive from younger daughter transliteration of blessing I am supposed to deliver. Also get tape of cantor singing same. Discover that pronunciations learned during Jewish period now all wrong; long “i” at the end of Adonai (I learned “oy”), etc.
After anxiety attack, I run to singing teacher. We work on blessing. Tension strangles my throat; the top notes come out as garbled squeaks. Singing teacher, a woman of wisdom beyond her years, says: “Don’t worry about the people out there. You’re praying. You’re talking to God. Do that.”
Oh, yeah, I thought: God.
The day dawned clear and cold. The weatherman had predicted morning showers, but the sky promised nothing but harsh winter sunshine.
I arrived at the synagogue far too early; I was just too nervous to sit at home. Gradually, in twos and threes, the other celebrants arrived. We stood outside on the terrace, making conversation about the weather and each other’s clothing.
From a distance, I suspect, we looked like a band of dress extras, waiting with politely concealed impatience for the director to call us onto the sound stage. We are all strangers at moments like that; the internal clatter is so loud that it drowns out the little messages of etiquette and gentility.
Finally it was time. We filed in and took our seats. The rabbi and the cantor started the service. My daughter was about to come to the Torah, a formalized end to childhood, an end as well to a certain kind of fatherhood.
And something happened then, something inexplicable and surprising. That well-known peace, the one that passeth all understanding, that elusive calm in the center of the storm, settled over me. It startled me; there were ways in which I didn’t even welcome it, but there it was.
I began thinking about critical masses. (I know there’s a bad Catholic pun there, but it’s the only phrase that seems appropriate.) Maybe when enough people get together in a single room with a single ennobling purpose, the combined essence of their good intentions leaks into the atmosphere like a benign vapor.
And we breathe each other’s effusions of tolerance and love, and we strengthen each other, and our hearts (racing with the unfamiliar emotion of complicated pride) rise together, and we are ready to encounter the ineffable.
In that way we create God, or summon him, or acknowledge him; pick your own construct. All I can tell you is that it happens; it happened. I was there.
My daughter sang the song of Deborah, from the fifth chapter of Judges, one of the oldest fragments of Hebrew literature that has come down to us.
It is not a particularly peaceful song; Deborah, it would seem, was sort of the Margaret Thatcher of her day. One set of verses within the song tells of the murder of Sisera by Jael. She finished Sisera off with a tent peg through his temple, occasioning great joy.
But, of course, the song was in Hebrew, and when my daughter sang it, in her high sweet voice, it was like standing under a gentle waterfall. It cooled; it healed.
Later, of course, reality knocked on the gates and was admitted. That is the habit of reality.
But there was a moment there, a time out of time, when I walked through an unfamiliar meadow and discovered an innocence I thought I had lost forever.
Thaddeus Golas, author of The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, and a SUN subscriber, sent us this piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting we’d like it. We did. Our thanks to Jon Carroll for permission to reprint it. He said his daughter will be very pleased.
