Alef: The NEXT Conversation

The Accidental Bat Mitzvah

by Emily Comisar

It was the second Shabbat on my Taglit-Birthright Israel Trip in December 2006. I was twenty-one and the only member of the young adult generation of my family not to become a bar or bat mitzvah–a fact that I had already come to peace with years earlier. My Northwestern University bus had been traveling in caravan with a UCSD bus for days now and together some of our shared cohort was having a B’nai Mitzvah, an event not uncharacteristic of the trips, from what I hear.

I watched as the students were presented to the make-shift congregation and, donning kippot and tallit, each read an aliya, the blessing before and after reading haftarah. That was it. Within seconds, each had become a bar or bat mitzvah.

Not having known that this was all it took to become a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, I was stunned. Not only was this blessing one that I recognized, it was one that I knew forward and backward because I had recited it on my Hillel’s makeshift bimah every time I went to Saturday morning services. I was a bat mitzvah. I had been a bat mitzvah for nearly four years and had absolutely no idea.

My first reaction was to feel like a failure as a Jew. What kind of bat mitzvah doesn’t do a mitzvah project, make a speech, or worse, have any recollection of her Torah portion? I don’t remember exactly when it was, or who was there, or what I was wearing that day. My Bat Mitzvah was essentially meaningless. I’ve botched a few things in my life but this one, I thought, was a big time screw up.

I look back at that moment now and have to laugh a little. Many cultures have a coming-of-age ritual–the Bar Mitzvah is just one in a long list that includes confirmation, quinceanera, and rumspringa. Note though, that all of these rituals take place during the middle teenage years. All of them. Could I really expect to have felt as if I had come into adulthood at the age of twenty-one, by participating in a ceremony that is designed for budding thirteen year-olds?

The year I turned thirteen, I attended my third middle school (in as many years), made my first Jewish friends ever (some of whom I still have now), and became a full member of the community that shaped me into the person I am today. Doesn’t get much more Bat Mitzvah than that.

Photo by Chajm, licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more posts from Issue #13: Bar Mitzvah Season.

Tags: bat mitzvah, Birthright, hillel, jew, jewish, Shabbat

Posted by Emily.Comisar@birthrightisraelnext.org, Wednesday, May 19th, 2010, 12:17 pm, Bar Mitzvah Season.