It Is So, So Hard to Get Over Yourself

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Until yesterday, the last b’nai mitzvah I went to was approximately 34 years ago. It was my brother Steve’s, it was held in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I can’t tell you anything more about it, because I don’t remember. Yesterday’s was for my daughter Sandy’s friend, S., it was held in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and I wish I could forget certain aspects of it already.

Don’t worry. Nothing outwardly embarrassing happened. (Unless you consider my very presence, which Sandy is always ashamed of; lucky her, she got to sit up front among S.’s friends, instead of with me.) No, my regret is purely internal. If you’ve read my essays about feeling like an outsider, about Christmas, Judaism, and The Simpsons, and about my inability to have faith in anything, you might be able to predict what happened, but here it is: From the very beginning of Shabbat morning services, held in a domed temple more than a century old that was adorned with Corinthian columns, stained-glass images of the baby Moses, and both the U.S. and Israeli flags, I could not relax. The rabbi was a woman with gray hair, a youthful face, and an endearing disposition, and I could not relax. The cantor sang with a resonant, confident voice as he played guitar and piano, and I could not relax. This was not some Orthodox congregation, with strict rules and an expectation of Torah scholarship; these were Reform Jews who prayed for Palestine and who unblinkingly accepted the presence of a grandmother “and her partner,” and still I could not relax.

It was not anyone’s fault but mine. The rabbi and cantor did everything they could to make everyone feel at home. They explained the meaning of the rituals, they sang in both Hebrew and English, they emphasized, quite directly, that everyone who was there deserved to be there, that all had a place in that place, at that time.

But something in me revolted. I couldn’t do it. I did not sing when everyone else sang. Instead I silently read the words of the psalms—praising God, exalting God, expressing joy at simply being alive and among other Jews thanks to God—and felt like an intruder, like a spy. I could not say the words that seemed to come so easily to everyone around me. (It didn’t help that I literally cannot sing.) Everything reminded me of what as a child I had rejected about religion: belief as a basic requirement. Or not even belief itself but the capacity for belief, the desire for a community built around a common history of belief, whether that belief is now real or a fading memory. The rabbi told the story of Moses and the burning bush, and how God told Moses to remove his shoes—probably sandals, honestly—so that he could make direct contact with this holy ground, and she asked us each to think of a time when we ourselves had been on holy ground, whatever that meant to us.

All I could think, however, was that I just don’t think this way—I don’t think about the world and my place within it the same way as the people who surrounded me, or even maybe how you think of it. I have a capacity for wonder and awe, yes, but it’s driven by doubt and skepticism and the rejection of holiness as an ideal. Nothing, I feel, should be upheld as holy. Nothing deserves worship. Nothing is inviolable. Joy is certainly possible, but as a confluence of luck and reason and a bit more luck, not faith, not tradition, not these intangible but unbreakable ties.

Then the rabbi asked us to turn to our neighbors and discuss with them this feeling of being on holy ground—and to seek out anyone who might be solo, so that they would not feel alone. I was solo, with no one to either side of me in the pews. I tried to become invisible, looking at nothing and no one without seeming to look at nothing and no one, but it failed. I could hear him walking toward me well before he arrived, and I dreaded it. I knew the funk I’d fallen into, and the last thing I wanted was to drag someone down with me. If I’m going to be a killjoy, the only joy I want to kill is my own.

But once he said hello, I put on a smile, and while I emphasized that this [waves hands about] was not so much my scene, I just tried to listen. His name was Murph, he was tall and sort of gray and probably a decade younger than me, and he was Catholic, and he talked about how amazed he was at the welcoming nature of the congregation, the ease with which the clergy made jokes (the stained-glass baby Moses had “the face and hairline of a 50-year-old man,” the cantor said) and brought people in close to participate.

“It’s round,” Murph said in amazement at the synagogue itself—no rectilinear reinforcement of hierarchies here.

As he spoke, I envied him his outsider status. Here nothing was expected of him, and he likely expected nothing of himself. He could take what he wanted from these rituals, or nothing at all, because they weren’t his. He could be engaged or not, and it wouldn’t mean anything. And when he left, he could go back to being himself. I wished I could give him my Judaism for a few hours, so I too could look in from without, and without judging myself in relation to the members of my own supposed tribe.

Quite soon, the services started back up, and our conversation ended, and I asked myself, for the umpteenth time that morning, why couldn’t I just get over myself? What is this poison in my brain that prevents me from setting aside these asinine self-conceptions, these over-intellectualized analyses, and just participating in a ceremony that I desperately wanted to appreciate? Why can’t I say the words—sing the words, badly even!—and forget about attaching any meaning to them? Why can’t I be around other Jews, and do Jewish things, without feeling this toxic mix of smarty-pants resentment, inadequacy, and otherness? Because it’s going to happen again: I can’t stop being Jewish, because I am Jewish, and I don’t want to be not-Jewish. I just want to figure out how to be whatever I am, but a little less fucking maudlin about it.

The worst was the finale: At the end of services, we say kaddish, the traditional prayer for the deceased that does not actually mention death, and the rabbi asked those of us in mourning—for a week, a month, a year—to stand up and offer the names of those we’d lost. And there I was, a week out from the loss of my editor L., a year out from the loss of another friend, C., and I couldn’t do it. I was filled with sadness and grief even in that moment, yet I couldn’t do the smallest, the simplest thing to acknowledge them: to stand and speak aloud their names to a few dozen people who would nod and pray and share my feelings for a couple of minutes. Others did, naming mothers and fathers and grandparents, but I couldn’t, even though I wanted to. I so wanted to. And even though I still want to, and I know that I could return next week and do it, I also know I won’t. I can’t get over them (which is not really the right way to put it, I know) until I get over myself, and I just can’t get over myself.

After it was all done—after S. and the other b’nai mitzvah, R., had given wonderful talks about heroism and how women can support women in the Trump era—Sandy and I walked across the street to the reception, where I ate Shelsky’s bagels with smoked whitefish salad and struck up a brief conversation with a woman from Concord, Massachusetts. I had just finished my coffee when I looked around, didn’t recognize anyone, and realized: We were at the wrong reception—the one for R. rather than the one for Sandy’s friend S. Whoops! If things had gone a different way earlier, this would have been the mistake that would haunt me for years to come, a stupid little thing that I would recall with shame undiminished when I’m 80. Instead, the deeper failure will remain with me: a failure to be present, to celebrate, to mourn.

Perhaps one day I’ll get another chance. Some other kid will turn 13, or I’ll bow to the pressures of more observant friends, and I’ll find myself in a synagogue again, with the same opportunity to be and do that I squandered yesterday. Will I finally find a way to open my mouth in song, in prayer, in grief? I will, maybe, someday, inshallah. 🪨🪨🪨

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