Not my story…
What I’m about to tell you is not my story.
It belongs to someone else who is close to me. If I could, I would ask for her permission to tell it — but she’s not.
She grew up in suburbia. Lived in a place which had a significantly smaller Jewish community than my own, but still one with a few area synagogues. She was a shy kid growing up. Oh — and she hated Hebrew school, which she would have to attend on certain afternoons after school. The other girls in her class were mean to her. The teacher didn’t ever do anything about it. And it made her miserable. So she decided that she would no longer go.
Her parents weren’t happy about this. “You need to go!” they said. “They won’t let you have a bat mitzvah if you don’t go!”
“FINE! I won’t have a bat mitzvah!”
It was a trade-off for her. She probably could have learned everything easily; after all she was a smart kid. But that wasn’t an option without Hebrew school. So — she made that decision with her parents. And didn’t have a bat mitzvah.
Fast forward several years. Decades even. She has a family now. And synheagogue life became more important to them. She embraced the experience, the community and the knowledge. She mastered reading from the Torah with the proper cantillation. She even started helping others in the synagogue community to learn it! She was passionate about it. And about her kids, whom she and her husband loved to provide positive Jewish experiences.
But in her mind it felt incomplete — because she hadn’t had a bat mitzvah so many years before.
Here’s a little secret about the bar or bat mitzvah: we treat it as a ceremony. A matriculation after intense learning and presentation. A transition which occurs in front of a packed room of people singing along, throwing candy, and counting down the minutes until they can grab lunch at the buffet sponsored by the family with whitefish salad you could die for. While in reality a bar/bat mitzvah means that you’ve reached an age where the Jewish commandments are your responsibility and no longer your parents’. I had the ceremony, but I literally became bar mitzvah the day I turned 13 according to the Jewish calendar.
You don’t have to have a bar or bat mitzvah. You just become it. Whether you want to or not.
But that didn’t matter. She felt a sense of impostor syndrome as someone well-versed who was teaching without this certification betstowed upon her. And she felt remorse for not pushing through the adversity that was Hebrew school. She wanted to rectify the issue, but on her own terms. There were group adult bat mitzvah classes and a culminating ceremony at the synagogue. But that’s not what she wanted. The women in that group were discovering Judaism for the very first time as adult, and she had it all of her life.
She had read from the Torah many times before, but was never called up to the Torah for an aliyah — which is where she had drawn a line. Until one Shabbat morning in August when she was. Unceremoniously. And in that moment — known only to herself and her husband — she had her bat mitzvah.
When I started this journey earlier this year, my intention was to keep my head down. Do the work. Graduate unceremoniously. Finally get that piece of paper and add a line to my resume. Now? I honestly don’t know if that’s changed or not. With things as they are, the University is holding a virtual graduation ceremony. Do I want to be a part of it? Do I feel like it’s my place to be there?
I haven’t written the blog post about the column I wrote in the The Diamondback yet. (It’s coming soon). The morning that it was published I received a really nice email from the Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences — encouraging me through this whole process and congratulating me. And then I got an email from another administrator in the office asking if they could put up a slide of me during the ceremony acknowledging me and my Diamondback piece. The text that stuck out at me was: Michael Scheinberg ’20. I hadn’t really seen this version of my name before! It’s exciting!
Yet part of me still feels like I’m Thurston Mellon, Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Back to School. The old geezer who people love to love because he’s so atypical. I don’t want to be atypical. And perhaps I don’t want to put on that cap and gown and robe to do so.
I don’t need a tassel flipped from one side to the other in order to have graduated. I just want the degree.
