D.I.Y. Bar Mitzvah

When my husband and I started talking about having kids, the first thing he said was, “I want to raise my kids Jewish.” I answered, “What does that mean to you?” And we’ve been trying to figure that out ever since.

We are not a religious family. I was raised Catholic by scientist parents who stayed with the church for the sake of tradition and community, but made it pretty clear that (like most American Catholics) their views didn’t align with the edicts coming down from Rome. My husband comes from a long line of Jewish rabble-rousers — socialists who expressed their Jewishness in the spirit of tikkun olam — “heal the world.” He had a Bar Mitvah, but they seldom went to temple otherwise.

So what does it mean to us to raise Jewish children? For me, it meant education. Although I’d always had Jewish friends, and I had a vague sense of the basics of Judaism, I had not scratched the surface of a religious tradition that goes back before written history started. As soon as our kids’ Jewish education started, in preschool, I felt lost amidst a body of learning that Jewish children absorb slowly, through practice in their households. At preschool, we learned the basics of celebrating Shabbat and the major holidays.

Then our son aged out of preschool and it was on to Temple school. We’d fit in pretty well at preschool — one teacher in particular was such a perfect nurturer for my unusual little beings that we still keep in touch. But Temple school was a different story. Most of the kids found it fun; our shy son usually ended up in tears. This is not to criticize our local temple for how they run their school — it works great for most kids. It just didn’t quite align with our needs. We tried out another school, which was better but didn’t work out for location and scheduling reasons. And then we were on our own.

I guess our Jewish schooling story is a bit like our schooling story in general: We tried out all the possible options, and though we could see that the schools we tried were great schools for some kids, they didn’t work for ours.

We ended up doing the same thing with our Jewish education that we did with the rest of their education: cobbling up something that fit with our family’s needs. It was not orthodox, but it’s been a wonderful experience for our family.

Last weekend was our son’s Bar Mitzvah. He has been working with a wonderful tutor, whose job was not only to prepare our son for his Bar Mitzvah, but also to help us as a family figure out what our son’s Bar Mitzvah was going to mean to us.

The B’nai Mitzvah (that’s for either gender — for girls it’s Bat Mitzvah) is the rite of passage into adulthood for Jews. By becoming a Bar Mitzvah, a boy declares that he is taking responsibility for his actions. When we started the process, it seemed forced. How can you get a kid to get meaning out of this process? But as we approached the actual event, it seemed that the event itself was bringing about the change that it required. Our son, after a year of intermittent gritted teeth resolve and pleading not to do it, became committed to the process. He read, studied, and learned. He started to take responsibility for his actions.

Ours was a pretty unusual celebration. Usually done in a temple, our son became a Bar Mitzvah in a tent in an olive orchard on my parents’ farm. Usually surrounded by a Jewish congregation, we invited the people who we felt would most appreciate sharing the day with him. We couldn’t invite everyone we wanted to, so it was winnowed down to some of our closest friends (few of them Jewish), teachers from 3 periods in his life, relatives who had been a part of his life (most of them not Jewish),  relatives we wished we could spend more time with. Three of my husband’s cousins came to take part in the ceremony, which meant a lot to us.

In the end, the Bar Mitzvah we made was probably rather different than what we ever would have pictured. But it was perfect for our son and for our family. After a nail-biting couple of months, sure it was going to be pouring that day, we got a gorgeous, mild winter day. Coming back from the house just after sunset, I saw the tent lighted from within, the moon a sliver so small it doesn’t show up on the photo, flanked by Venus and Jupiter, shining brightly over the scene. The kids were blowing bubbles and chasing each other down the hillside. The adults chatted over homemade wine and olive oil.

A little off-beat, on familiar turf, it was the Bar Mitzvah that fit our family.