SUSAN MILLER
Congregation Beth Ami, Santa Rosa
Date of bat mitzvah: Jan. 31, 2009
Number in group: 13
Susan, 57, lives in Santa Rosa, where she is a practitioner of Jin Shin Jyutsu (a Japanese healing art) after a 35-year-career as a public health nurse. Married for 20 years, she has no children.
“I was one of the few kids who loved Hebrew school,” she points out. She attended Hebrew school four to six hours per week and was confirmed at her Conservative synagogue in Rochester, N.Y., and even attended Tel Aviv University in her freshman year and went to nursing school in Israel — but she never had a bat mitzvah as a youth. “It was available to me, but it was on Friday night and [girls] just sang a Haftorah bit. I thought that was insulting, not allowing us to do what a boy would do. I loved my Jewish education, but I didn’t want to be thrown a biscuit.”
ELISE TRUMBULL
Temple Isaiah, Lafayette
Date of bat mitzvah: Jan. 10, 2009
Number in group: 16
Elise, 64, a resident of Oakland, worked many years for WestEd, an educational research nonprofit. She is now an independent consultant specializing in relations among language, culture, learning and school. She has co-written 10 books on those topics.
Raised as a Protestant and Presbyterian, Elise had what she calls a “fling” with the Ethical Culturist community in her 20s and became a Jew-by-Choice two years ago. She describes her Jewish upbringing as “none,” but says in adulthood she had “much informal education via Jewish husbands and friends.” Married to her current husband for 12 years, she has a daughter and two stepdaughters from previous marriages.
MARLENE DINES
Temple Israel, Alameda
Date of bat mitzvah: Jan. 31, 2009
Number in group: 4
Marlene, 57, is an Alameda resident who has been married 32 years and has two children. She works in human resources at Kaiser Permanente, where she is the operations manager for the Workforce Absence Management Department.
She grew up in a Conservative Jewish home and attended Hebrew school “up to grade gimel.” Even though her father (the son of a Hebrew school teacher) was fluent in Hebrew, she elected to discontinue her studies since “I was not planning to become bat mitzvah” because “this was not the custom at our synagogue.” Her mother grew up in an Orthodox home and was educated in a Bas Yacov school in Poland.
What was your No. 1 motivation for deciding to have an adult bat mitzvah?
Marlene: When my daughter became a bat mitzvah 13 years ago, the revelation came to me: “When I grew up, I wanted to be just like my kids.” With my children, but also my parents and my husband, as role models, I wanted to achieve the level of Hebrew and Torah literacy that they all had. I consider myself a deeply spiritual Jew. I attend temple regularly and follow the laws of kashrut in and out of the home. I always felt somewhat inadequate, however, because I never attained the knowledge I needed to become a bat mitzvah.
Elise: Peer pressure from all the great friends I made in the group. I started with the classes just to learn Hebrew and more about Judaism, and had no intention of going through with a bat mitzvah. But my friends wouldn’t accept that stance, and with their “encouragement,” I came to realize the experience would be meaningful and wonderful.
Susan: I mainly wanted to have the feeling of completion of my studies as an adult. Learning Torah trope is hard, and having the ceremony honored the hard work we did to learn it. When I was a girl, I didn’t feel they were giving the girls an equal place alongside the boys; at that point, I didn’t need a bat mitzvah to prove I wanted a Jewish education. I read Haftorah and chanted Torah back then, but this time learned to understand it.
What was the most difficult part of the process?
Marlene: Simply making the decision to begin. That’s why it took me until this stage of my life to even attempt to learn everything required of me in order to become a bat mitzvah. Once I began the process, a good deal of what I had learned in Hebrew school actually did come back to me and I found myself more comfortable than I expected reading the prayers. Preparing to chant from the Torah was, by far, the most challenging thing. I had to do more than just learn. I had to be worthy of chanting those sacred words, and that scared me!
Elise: Getting up the nerve to chant Torah in front of a large group, many of whom have grown up immersed in Jewish practices and with a sense of what chanting Torah should sound like.
Susan: The hardest was learning to chant in key. I don’t have a music background. I got through only 10 tropes. It’s an ongoing life study, but I felt more accomplished with Torah trope than I had ever been.
Anything funny or otherwise memorable?
Marlene: When our class was finally ready to practice chanting our Torah portions on the bimah, Cantor Pamela Sawyer advised that if we made a mistake or mispronounced a word, she would whisper the correction and we should just repeat it (without visibly reacting in any other way). In that practice session, sure enough I made a mistake — and Cantor Sawyer corrected me. However, I responded, “Thank you,” not knowing I had even said it. Afterward, when told what I had done, I laughed and said that raising my children to be polite, I always preached that saying thank you should be as automatic as breathing. I promised that the next time I made a mistake, I’d remember only to breathe!
Elise: Fellow b’nai mitzvah Jonathan Young’s discussion, in his Torah commentary, of what it means to be a Jew. He mentioned Elvis Presley, who had a Jewish grandparent, as an example of a marginal claim on Jewishness. And he also highlighted some of the complexity of Jewish identity by referring to Sarah Silverman, who describes herself as “Jew-ish” but not Jewish.
Susan: When we, the 13 students, handed the Torah to one another at the ceremony, it was a moving experience. The rabbi handed it to the first person, then that person to the next, etc. It took a little while because there were so many of us. The Torah is usually passed from generation to generation, but because a lot of us in the group don’t have parents anymore, and I don’t have children, it was a sweet moment, very moving.
What was it like having a bat mitzvah with a group?
Marlene: I couldn’t have ended up with a better group with which to share this experience if I had hand-picked them myself. These three women, whom I called my “bat mitzvah sistahs,” were already special to me, and going through the experience with them guaranteed that I would have all the support, encouragement and fun that I needed in order to see it to completion. Moreover, being responsible for learning a quarter of the service (Torah readings and Haftorah) was the only way I would have had the courage to attempt this.
Elise: A transcendent experience — humbling, emotional and solidifying of membership in the Jewish community. It felt great to realize that there are now 16 more Temple Isaiah members who can now chant Torah, even if not perfectly.
Susan: The support of one other helped. Two women and I gathered frequently to learn and study together. We still are gathering, in fact — there are many tropes to learn.
Life-changing on a spiritual level, or empowering in terms of your identity?
Marlene: Empowering. I have always been an extremely spiritual Jew. I never questioned my belief in or devotion to God. What I questioned was my own ability to live up to the level of knowledge and religious proficiency of everyone most dear to me — my parents, my husband and my children. I needed to prove to myself that I could be worthy of my family, my heritage and my God by learning how to pray and chant from the Torah. I still hope that someday I will flawlessly chant a full Haftorah with confidence like my children did, retain the knowledge needed to spontaneously read Hebrew in the prayer book as my husband and mother can, and proudly sing an entire Shabbat service the way my beloved father could. I now believe I can.
Elise: I found the process empowering, but perhaps more than that, unexpectedly revealing of what it means to publicly commit to Judaism. It added another dimension to being Jewish — beyond what my conversion process yielded and beyond how participation in the life of the synagogue has changed me.
Susan: It made me feel more a part of my synagogue. As a married woman (who often goes to synagogue on her own), having a bat mitzvah really made me feel like this is my spiritual home — more so than I felt before. I really feel a part of the community now, and that’s special.
Finish the sentence “My bat mitzvah was . . . “
Marlene: … one of the most memorable milestones in my life. From the moment I made my decision to take on the challenge until the ceremony itself, preparing for my bat mitzvah brought me even closer to my family. Taking my place at the bimah gave me the opportunity to tell my children how much they inspired me to begin my journey. It also gave them the opportunity to express their pride in me, because nachas goes both ways. It was a chance to affirm the role my parents had in molding my Jewish identity; of my mother, it was her beaming smile of encouragement as she sat and watched me from the pew; of my late father, it was the blessed memories of him as I read from his Torah, which my family donated to Temple Israel when he died. To honor me, my husband, Keith also read from the Torah, and together we made a commitment to continue learning Torah so that this wonderful journey will never end.
Elise: . . . a joyous event and all the better for being a group experience, I am sure. Community is necessary to the practice of Judaism, and so it seemed very fitting that we became b’nai mitzvah as a group. I also want to say that the clergy helped us to both delight in and take seriously the whole process and the service itself.
Susan: . . . so special. The energy in the room was so high. When the rabbi carried the Torah around the congregation, we all followed him. The shul was very full, and walking down those aisles with people hanging out to touch the Torah or us, it felt like a tunnel of warm love. Everyone was happy, it was so joyful. The energy felt so high, like a wedding. Rabbi George Schlessinger helped us do a great job, and he orchestrated it in special, spiritual way.