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On Bat Mitzvahs and Book-Writing

Bat Mitzvah prep has begun in earnest at our house, which means that once a week, the 12 year old hides away in her room and meets with her wonderful tutor over Zoom, and comes out knowing things her very own mother and father don’t. Parenting never ceases to amaze.

The first meeting went badly, as I had warned the tutor it might. Our daughter was asked to read something in Hebrew, and when she couldn’t, she started to cry, and judging from the pile of tissues I found next to her desk after the fact, cried the rest of the session. Then she came out and cried some more to me until we had talked through it enough to move onto ice cream and an episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty, her body slouched against mine, forever my baby.

When she came out of the second session smiling, I said, “I guess when you cry on the first day, there’s nowhere to go but up?” She laughed and I laughed, but I said this knowing there will be many (many) more tears shed along this year-long journey (for both of us). Still, I wanted to give her a sense of hope. Isn’t that what we all want all the time?

Echo Park on a cloudy morning in July

My husband and I didn’t have B’nai Mitzvot — he wasn’t Jewish back then, my parents are ardently anti-religious — but since moving to LA, our lives have been guided and organized by a Jewish community, which has surprised no one more than me, who, in my previous 37 years on earth, found essentially zero reason for Judaism in my life other than to nab a husband. Over the years that we’ve been here, however, I’ve come to depend not just on the friends from our shul who make up our life here, but the rituals, traditions and rabbinical guidance in the face of a crumbling world, so when it came to deciding on whether our daughter would have a Bat Mitzvah, there was never any question that she would.

Back when we first got here, when I watched the barely-teens lead a quite substantial part of the service, I was always semi-shocked that they could do it — they were so young and it was so hard and they had to learn so much Hebrew and then interpret such a difficult text! The feat has only become more impressive as my own daughter has gotten closer. Compared to the three year old who sat on my lap through services, 13 once seemed very grown up. Now, not so much.

This could be a piece about watching your child do something that you never did, that you still doubt your own ability to do. (I do not doubt my husband’s ability to read any Torah portion, ever.) Plenty of parents have this experience — it is one of the great joys of having kids who are unlike you: to be awed by them in utterly surprising ways. I know my husband watches our daughter dance and wonders how someone so young can remember so much choreography, how she can pick up a combination so quickly and perform it with so much confidence.

But in watching this year-long learning process begin to unfold, this is not what moves me the most. It is how anathema preparing for a Bat Mitzvah is to every single other thing in our culture. It is extremely slow moving. It is difficult and awkward and not of immediate — or future?? — use. In this way, it is unlike learning French or Mandarin for your next trip to Paris or Beijing. It is not optimizable. It is not Instagrammable (though surely people have, but how boring). There are no clear applications and no short-term rewards, other than the thrill of having memorized (or read) a new line of text each week. There are absolutely no shortcuts and it cannot be helped by a hack, by Amazon, by the latest whatever. It is cumulative in the way only the very best things in life are: hard work, love, friendship, marriage.

Of course what I’m saying is the most obvious thing of all, which is that this rite of passage is uninterested in being anything other than what it is. It is unrelated to geography or political movements or trends or fads or eras. It has gone on and on for millenia, all over the world — children learning and then reciting the exact same passages of text and interpreting it differently, for thousands of years, on and on and on. For a moment, forget the iPhones, the screentime fights, the cool backpack, the right skincare, the TikTok, the Adidas everyone has, MOM! Turn your attention to something that could not care less about those things.

This is the beauty of it, of course, that she will now be part of a lineage of learners, that she has been swept into the waters of something undeniably bigger than herself.

What a relief when you are 12 and consumed with the minutiae of the everyday.

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Because I refuse to make this political, I will turn it in another direction entirely: of course it reminds me of the process of writing a novel. For all the ways people try to make novel-writing something that can fit into a reel or a post (#stillwriting, #novel, #writing), it defies all those things. The only thing that gets it done is hours and hours and hours — more than you can ever imagine — of concentrated attention that has nothing at all to do with an algorithm.

This weekend I had one of the strangest experiences of my writing life: I turned a page in Chloe Caldwell’s memoir Trying — about her experience with infertility — and found…myself mentioned back to me (without attribution, but mine nonetheless):

I wrote this piece so long ago (in 2019!), I actually had to look up whether this was its title (it was, indeed, mine). I reread it and still stand by it — the main thrust of it is about committing yourself to something without knowing what will come of it. It’s about working hard for the sake of working hard, because your mind and soul and creative being need to hook themselves onto something big and challenging and daunting and true.

Writing a novel is as slow and scary and un-optimizable and often feels as meaningless as learning lines of ancient Hebrew. Will it all come to anything? Well, yes — hopefully I will eventually finish it and feel a sense of relief and accomplishment and pride. My daughter will stand in front of the Torah and our family and friends and she will read and we will cry and celebrate, but then what? This is not a kid fated to become a rabbi.

Same goes for my novel: will it sell? I have not a single idea. And right now, I cannot care about that. It does nothing to get it done. It will one day be someone else’s concern. It’s like planning the Bat Mitzvah party before you’ve learned even your first Parshah.

Instead, when next August comes, she and I will hopefully both walk through the world knowing we did something that was demanding, that pushed us to our intellectual and artistic and emotional limits. We will know that we did something with our time outside the narrow confines of what is of momentary interest to a culture steeped in instant gratification — quick, easy, Instagrammable, bite-sized, on trend, good for the algorithm, for more followers!

This is perhaps all an extremely long way of saying for as arduous as I anticipate this year being — for everyone involved — I am grateful that the rabbis of yore thought to put something so challenging in the lap of kids (boys then, all kids now) at such a precious, precarious age, to remind them of all they are capable of. And I love the reminder for the rest of us, too.

Sending love,

Abs xo

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Photo by Rebecca Atwood

WRITE WITH ME! Do you want to write this fall but have limited time (or funds)? Come to BREAKFAST CLUB! Every Wednesday morning, I will offer a poem, a prompt and time to write together. A supportive, inspiring place to commit to your own work. Open to ALL. Please reach out with any questions!