The Sacred and the Light Up Dance Floor |
My family and I just celebrated our middle daughter’s bat mitzvah, and throughout all the moments–the ceremonious, the silly, the profound–I couldn’t help but to ponder this millenia-old tradition.
Growing up in suburban Houston in the late 80s, I was blessed to have had my seventh grade social calendar overflowing with bar and bat mitzvahs. Saturday mornings were spent chitchatting in synagogue pews and Saturday nights filled with parties with all of my friends in hotel ballrooms. All the boys and girls dancing amidst the ice sculptures, our taffeta balloon sleeves rivaled in height only by our hair-sprayed permed hair. We were living out our dreams on the dance floor, sharing our secret crushes underneath the din of the DJ. As I slow-danced to Whitney Houston with Josh Schwartz, a space the size of a redwood tree trunk between us, I remember thinking this was bliss. And now, looking back, it absolutely was. But viewing this time-honored ritual through mature, maternal eyes, I see it a bit differently.
A solid thirty years after seventh grade, I went back to a bat mitzvah service as preparation for my daughter’s upcoming mitzvah. As a mother about to embark on this journey for my eldest daughter, my first thought was, “Were our ancestors sadists? Requiring pimply-faced thirteen year olds, at the precise moment that the boys’ voices are cracking and the girls are testing out training bras and high heels, to get up on the bimah in front of everyone and sing?! In Hebrew!! At the apex of teenage insecurity, they thought, let’s force a microphone into these kids’ hands. Sink or swim, suckers.
But after I recalibrated to the bat mitzvah girl’s nervous energy in the spotlight she so desperately wanted to flee, I realized that the Talmudic scholars who created this tradition were not just sadists; they were geniuses. This ceremony, and all of the hard work and preparation leading up to it, is the connection to our past, the bridge to our future, and the thing that brings meaning to three generations all in one........