We were driving back to the hotel after my granddaughter’s bat mitzvah last August when my grandson Garrett, who was 15 at the time, sat up and declared, “I want to have a bar mitzvah.”
I told him I thought that was incredible. Garrett comes from an interfaith family, one that exposed him and his brother to both Judaism and Catholicism and never pushed either of them toward one. No one saw this coming. It was entirely his decision.
And then he surprised me again by asking me to do it with him.
I did not have a bat mitzvah when I was a girl. I didn’t particularly want one at the time, and my parents never pushed me toward it. It simply wasn’t expected for girls back then, so it never happened, and I never thought much more about it. It wasn’t on my bucket list. So I surprised myself with how fast I said “yes” and with how much that “yes” revealed a new sense of capability, as the months of studying went on.
Three thousand miles apart — Garrett in Connecticut, me in Palo Alto — we both learned to read Hebrew for the first time, sharing how we were progressing.
There is something about knowing you and your grandchild are both genuinely choosing the same thing, both a little nervous, that shortens the distance between generations in a way nothing else quite does.
After six months of preparation, Garrett, my daughter Deborah, my husband Chuck and I all stood on the bimah and read from the Torah at a Mincha service on June 13. Rabbi Wiederhorn and Cantor Penner-Robinson from The Community Synagogue in Westport made the experience everything we hoped it would be, giving me an East Coast home away from home.
It was there, on that bimah, that I got to share what the whole journey had stirred in me.
I built my d’var Torah around the word tamid — eternal, perpetual, continual. It was the last word of my Torah portion and it’s the word used for the light that’s always on in the sanctuary, the Ner Tamid. I talked about how this concept informs how I conduct my own life, which was never built around achievement or recognition, but instead around family and the traditions and values that were passed down to me. Around showing up for the people I love, again and again, in whatever form that took. Around the particular joy of passing something down and watching it land somewhere new. That is its own kind of eternal flame, the kind that is felt meal by meal, holiday by holiday, generation by generation.
Garrett didn’t just give me the bat mitzvah I never had. What he gave me was an unexpected invitation into my own capabilities and the chance to share something sacred in a way neither of us could have planned. I can’t imagine a more meaningful way to deepen my own connection to Judaism and my family. Rabbi Wiederhorn said it best when he described Garrett’s choice as l’sheim shamayim — for the sake of heaven. Garrett arrived there on his own. I arrived by saying “yes” to my grandson. Both of us, it turns out, chose it from the heart.