our daughters, ourselves

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Bat Mitzvah of a girl almost wholly unrelated to me. She is the cousin of my boyfriend (as you can imagine there's a significant age difference between him and his cousins), and although I have met his aunt and uncle, the celebrant's parents, on several occasions, I had never met her before.

The way the event went down was this: 3 hours of Temple services and pre-services preparation, followed by 3 hours of napping and other bed activities with my boyfriend, followed by 3 hours of a reception that included dinner and dancing. I had several observations about the whole experience.

First, let me remind you that I am a second-generation lapsed Jew. What this means is that my father, who is the Jewish side of me (yes I know that means I'm not a "real" Jew since my mother isn't Jewish, but my grandmother made sure I was converted before my parents spirited me away to Canada in my infancy), moved away from the Jewish community, probably during his hippie college days, and as a result I grew up with Hanukkah and Passover and some other knowledge of the Jewish faith and practice. I have never been an active member of the Jewish community, and the main source of my exposure to Judaism is through my extended family on my dad's side: various events like Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, weddings and stuff like that. While this exposure has never been frequent, I believe I have always gotten something out of it, maybe like a sense of belonging coupled, oddly enough, with a feeling of regret and alienation. It sounds weird, I know.

I've never minded going to temple, and while I don't believe in the Judao-Christian god myself, I feel I can be there simply because I am a Jew, I'm part of that tradition, and should I ever choose to turn toward it, I will be accepted unquestioningly. I also respect observant Jews, because my experience with them has most often been that they are content to practice their faith without attempting to foist it upon me, which has always been my problem with organized religion. I'm sure there are proselytizing Jews out there, but I've never met them. Anyway, so my experience with temple has always been that you go, there is some singing and some group prayer and some words of wisdom imparted by the rabbi, and there are long sections in which the faithful are more or less alone with their thoughts and prayers, in a hushed and supportive environment, and these periods are often interspersed with or followed up by celebrations for members of the community. Like I said, I usually come away from it feeling mostly good.

The temple my family attends is a Conservative temple. The temple I attended with my boyfriend and this branch of his family was a Reform temple. And the tone and experience was quite different. The temple I'm accustomed to seems more serious somehow, more spiritual and more real. This temple seemed to be more about making the point to others that yes, we are spiritual, which seems to go against the whole concept. The expression of faith is simple and complicated: it seems to me that if you truly are faithful, you simply live it moment by moment, like breathing, you don't need to stand up and thump your chest and demonstrate it for all those around you. When it is genuine, faith is quiet and personal, not shouted from the rooftops.

Perhaps that is why it was so nice to go back to my boyfriend's apartment afterwards, and just lie down with him, talk to him quietly and feel him next to me, to express our feelings for each other privately and intimately. That seemed to me to be much more spiritually fulfilling than reciting lines out of a "draft, not for distribution" prayer book at intervals directed by a rabbi. Of course, I'm not going to deny that indulging my carnal desires was fun too, but I don't think it was wholly separate from the deeper emotional experience.

Moving from there to the fancy resort where the reception was being held was yet another jolt. There, we ate fancy grilled vegetables, steam-table meats, sushi and strawberry cheesecake, kissed and hugged various relatives and chatted amiably about... what? exactly? I have no idea what I talked to anyone about. Mostly I watched the little girls stomping about in their high heels and gauzy frocks, running here and there in packs, screaming excitedly when the DJ put on their favourite pop songs (98 percent of which I'd never heard before in my life). I spent a lot of time thinking about my 9-year-old daughter, only a few years away from this madness herself, and wondering how much of it she would get sucked in by.

When I picked her up, after her weekend with her dad, I described the event and I asked her whether she thought she would have had a good time, because I had considered taking her along. She shrugged and said, "meh, I dunno," and went back to her gameboy. I think I made the right decision in leaving her out of the whole thing.

I called this post "our daughters, ourselves," because I had a lot of observations about how the parents of the Bat Mitzvah girls (there were two of them at the temple that day) presented themselves and their girls and the relationships between them. And of course I am constantly thinking about my own daughter and the influence I have over her and the person she is becoming. And I got caught up thinking and writing about other things, but I haven't changed the title. Perhaps I'll write more about that other stuff later.