My Son's Non-Bar Mitzvah

I wasn't always a rebel. In fact, perfect behavior was my goal for many years. Until things started to mess up my brain and I started to see hypocrisy everywhere and I decided it was all fake, all of it. The religion, the God, the delusion that God actually cared about the Jews he sent to concentration camps to suffer and die. What a joke! That's what you do to your favorite people on the planet who you love?

God certainly had me on his death line from a young age and I hated Him, because how could I love anyone who hated me and my family so much. I couldn't fathom how my parents still loved God, prayed to him, felt loyal and protected. I was certain there was something wrong with their thinking. Just the concept of God made me feel completely unsafe.

I lived on a farm as a child and attended public school where God was not discussed except for daily The Lord's Prayer. I just mumbled it. I didn't think it made a differenc either way since no one called God listened to my prayers anyway.

I attended Orthodox Jewish School from ten through high school, after the farm. My deity dilemmas there had more to do with the weekly and holiday Orthodox services we attended. We had a holy roller rabbi, all thunder and lightning, a tall, majestic figure of a rabbi who harangued us about our sins and how we would suffer, more of the nasty crap I tortured myself with as a post-Holocaust child.  He also surrounded himself by not the most religious (like my father) but the wealthiest Jews in the community, who added buildings to his school and paid for his Lincoln Continental.  He was everything I imagined God to be and I wished he were dead. Otherwise, how could I continue to sustain my own existence in such an evil world?

During my college and post years I changed completely. I'm still vaguely culturally Jewish with an aetheist heart.  I try to hold onto the one thing I love about Judaism "Tikkun Olam: The Repair of the World or Social Justice."  I sent my children to a Reform Jewish school for  a few years that was purely focused on social Justice.  But they still had some of the rituals, the candle-lightings, the Torah-readings, and, of course, that rite of passage "The Bar Mitzvah."

None of us were comfortable with the Bar Mitzvah, signing on for beliefs we weren't sure we believed, so my kids were the only ones in the school who didn't have one and as a potental Bar Mitzvah Mother, boy was I relieved.  That was when they were thirteen.

When they were seventeen, being small classes, they each gave a speech. The speeches were cute, about episodes of high school they would miss. The emphasis was on the school itself, as if it existed in a vacuum.

This was the year after 9/11. After all the cute tear-jerker speeches are done, up clumps to the stage with the rhythm of Darth Vader  my quiet, shy, brillliant bookworm of a son whose first words at this Jewish graduation was "There Is No God." He and his class had witnessed 9/11, mentioned by no one else.  And he was not the only in the class with grandparents who survived the Holocaust. God does not exist, he said simply, for if he did, the world would be good. So simple, I believed it at five, but kept it a secret for most of my life. My seventeen year old told my truth to the world that I never could have spoken in the life I had been forced to live. I was so proud I had gotten to give him a life where he had the sort of freedom I lacked.