On having an adult Batmitzvah

HEDI LAMPERT

Why did I do it? Because it’s a requirement for a Batmitzvah girl. Okay, that’s pushing it – I was approaching 57 – but let’s start at the beginning.

My father, a traditional orthodox Jew who immigrated to South Africa from Riga in 1930 at age nine, found the concept of Batmitzvah all too modern. I was, however, the only girl out of my year at King David School who did not partake in the communal, orthodox, Batmitzvah ceremony at the Great Synagogue in Wolmarans Street, and at the time, I sulked, but briefly.

It was, in the grand scheme of things, a non-event both practically and emotionally, since just a year before, my 14-year-old brother had died. Meningitis had destroyed him in three days. It felt like a bomb had exploded in the heart of our home, and we survivors could do little else except gather up the shattered pieces, regroup around the raw and gaping gash that had been left, and limp on with it forever in our midst.

At that point, I didn’t really know what to do with my father, and I certainly didn’t know what to do about G-d either. All I knew was that I was angry and heartbroken.

Grief-stricken as he was, my father clung to his principles, one of which was immortalised on a page in his will, headed, “My daughter’s marriage”. It stated that my marriage to a non-Jew, or to a man who had converted to Judaism through the reform synagogue, would instantly render me, for all intents and purposes of the will, to have died without children.

Chilling words indeed, but did they serve to keep me on the straight and narrow? Hell, no! I married out of the faith, and yes, he remained true to his word – I was disinherited. Did that make me less Jewish? No, but it probably wasn’t the ideal way of keeping me on a true path either. I never turned my back on my Jewish identity, but I performed the bare basics. I celebrated high holy days in that I cooked up a fabulous feast and shared it with my friends, the majority of whom were not Jewish, and most years, I fasted on Yom Kippur.

I confess there were seminal moments when I had to acknowledge my Judaism as something way bigger than myself. There was no question in my mind, for instance, that my son would have both a Bris and a Barmitzvah. Similarly non-negotiable was giving my mother a Jewish burial, and saying kaddish for her. However, it’s not easy to bury a Jewish person without a Jewish community, and frankly I could barely scrape together a minyan. For many years, I’d been wandering in a wilderness of my own making, from time to time doing Judaism on my own terms. The irony was strikingly biblical in that it had been 40 years since I’d requested and been denied a Batmitzvah.

I joined the Progressive Jewish Community of Temple Israel in Cape Town, and was relieved and grateful to deliver a eulogy at my mother’s burial – to my distress, this had been denied me at my grandmother’s orthodox funeral. Among other things, I quoted Mizuta Masahide when I said, “Now that my house has burned down, I own a better view of the moon.” Silver linings, you see. Having braved a long illness, my mother’s death had come as a merciful release, and she had died peacefully. I felt this had been her blessing to me.

The true blessing, though, was only beginning to unfold. Having sensed that Temple Israel was a sanctuary in which I could be my very unorthodox self, I started attending services. I felt a profound peace among the congregation, and was inspired by the leadership of Rabbis Greg Alexander, Malcolm Mattitiani, and Richard Newman.

And then there was the music of Shabbat. Temple Israel presents it in a way I had never experienced in any other shul. It drew me back time and again. I joined in, and sang along, often moved to tears by the strains of the stirring melodies, some as ancient as the DNA I had inherited, others more modern, but wistful and lovely. I soon joined the musicians leading the services.

It is through the music that I have come closest to approaching a congruence of my Jewish identity, my faith, and my heritage. It dawned upon me gently, a little more every week, that the strength of my faith was in fact growing, and then, it happened. I realised I’d finally let go of my anger. I was moving forward, even if it was with the scars incurred during my 40-year-long night of the soul. And that’s when the Torah offered, as it often does, a parsha that could not have been more apt had I written the sacred text myself.

On the day of my Batmitzvah, one week before my 57^th birthday, I read from Vayishlach, in which Jacob spends the night wrestling with a man, perhaps an angel, or possibly the manifestation of his own conscience. Had I not been wrestling all these years? With my conscience, with my faith, with the greater questions of where, what, and who is G-d? And why does G-d allow such devastation to occur?

Jacob refuses to let go until the being blesses him. Perhaps the blessing is the knowledge that he has finally earned the right to his destiny through his own endeavours, not via a birthright, or in his case, the paternal “blessing”, which he had wrongfully acquired.

Now, I don’t know that I needed to earn my Jewish birthright by studying for my Batmitzvah, I was simply aware of a desire to learn more, and hopefully reach a deeper understanding. What I am sure of is that I feel blessed by a sense of gratitude for having finally reached a place of “letting go”.