When to Say Amen

Though she may not recall the Hebrew she spoke at the bimah—the altar—every Jewish girl can conjure an image of the dress she wore to her Bat Mitzvah. Navy blue or shell white, cut off right above the knees, chosen after weeks of quibbling with mothers, aunts, grandmothers, because none of the options were just right. She will also never forget the prayers she stumbled over, the unfortunate hotel her grandmother was put up in, and the bagels that were a touch stale by the time the service came to a close. “We were so proud,” her parents will say over family dinners for years to come. “Just so proud.” They praise their daughter, of course, but also covertly themselves for keeping their heads on straight throughout the whole production.

My own Bat Mitzvah was no exception. The occasion found us on a rare sunny Seattle morning, a delight that left us cheery but admittedly a little disappointed to be spending our unicorn of a Saturday inside. When I stepped inside the sanctuary, long before the first guest would arrive, I found myself embraced by the unexpected warmth of the room. Pools of light spotted the ground, filtered through dramatic stained-glass panels. The scene evoked a holy assuredness, which I commanded myself to embody as I paced the room.

An hour later, relatives, classmates, and friends of my parents—some of whom I barely recognized—filed through the twin oak doorways. Already perched atop the stage, I watched them roam the pews, settling into familiar clusters. Suddenly, a gentle hand laced its fingers through my own. I recognized my mother’s soft palm even before I turned my head. 

“You ready?” she asked. Sensing my nerves, she spoke with a leisure that comes naturally to neither of us. 

“Guess we’ll find out,” I joked, countering her sincerity with a practiced nonchalance. My gaze averted hers, glued instead to the ever-present scab on my left knee. I tugged at the hem of my dress.

“Here, look at me.” My mother’s voice was gentle. She reclipped a rogue shoulder-length curl behind my ear. I rolled my eyes and turned to face her seated frame. Her sandy pin-straight hair was just a touch lighter than usual. The result of a recent dye job, perhaps, or a mirage that brought her color one shade closer to mine. 

“Breathe,” she reminded me, as she so often did.

The service was, frankly, nearly indistinguishable from the seven other B’nai Mitzvah my seventh-grade class sat through that spring. Besides, the melodies that once rolled from my tongue now escape my memory. But I promise that I hit the canonical moments. My dress was blue and lace and itched at the seams. I forgot the words to at least two prayers and confidently continued in a language that was certainly not Hebrew, but far enough from English for anyone but the Rabbi to notice. And, in a most compelling addition to the classic proceedings, I strummed “Tikun Olam” on my ukulele, accompanied by my musically gifted and relentlessly improvisational father. He accidentally knocked his guitar into the bimah a couple of times.

As the service closed, my mother cried, my father tried to pretend he didn’t, and I went home for an afternoon nap––hungover from a self-important glamor that was rapidly diffusing with the daylight.

That evening’s events also proceeded in the traditional fashion. I sat at the end of a pristinely laid banquet table, one of many lining our neighborhood’s Russian Community Center. My mother and I had toured the venue three months prior, awkwardly interrupting a Slavic line dancing class to inquire about rental fees. She had done wonders to the place since, the walls now blooming with ribbons and florals instead of flyers for poorly attended youth talent shows. My mother now looped through the aisles, proudly attending to the buffet in a sparkling champagne v-line gown. If she’d been equipped with a clipboard and a pen to secure her updo, I could’ve mistaken her for the thirty-something party planner she had hired as her right-hand woman. 

But if my mother was in her element, I was far from mine. My face flushed with embarrassment as a slideshow of childhood photographs put to The Beatles’ Abbey Road rolled on a rented projector for all to see. A boy in my middle school class––who I swore I was hopelessly in love with––jestingly poked my side when my nude toddler self was broadcast onscreen.

“Ooooh, whereee are your clothesss?” he teased. “Why are you nakeddd?”

My classmates, arranged along the banquet table, giggled between contented bites of roasted summer squash and bacon-wrapped dates. I squirmed in my seat and whispered a futile prayer that the slideshow would end immediately. Desperation made a believer out of me—briefly.

Thirty minutes later––when the dancing commenced––I was in the spotlight again, no longer a grainy image of the childhood I was so eager to outgrow. For the rest of the party, God didn’t cross my mind.

The end of the night was punctuated by my mother’s drunk best friend, Laurie, who compelled me through haphazard scribbles in the guest book to “dance my ass off.” That, I most certainly had. For two nonstop hours, I was spurred on by a dizzying mishmash of ABBA, Maroon 5, and the Jewish Orthodox Maccabeats. With the DJ now long gone, my father helped Laurie into our family Mazda, halfheartedly insisting on escorting her home. As he drove, my mother held his hand over the center console, tracing circles with her thumb as an apology for the raucous middle-aged liability in the backseat. 

“Turn the music up!” she exclaimed, starting for the radio dial.

“No,” my parents said in unison. If I had been awake enough to speak, I would’ve cheered at their refusal.

I watched Laurie’s glasses slip down her slender nose as I melted further into my seat. Kitten heels loose around my ankles, I soaked in the residual bloat caused by one too many Italian sodas. I replayed the day––or a partial version of it—behind bleary eyes.

I conjured the rows of smiling faces beaming at me from my gleeful audience, but not the crosses that hung from so many of their necks. When my aunt, a quilt maker, complimented the woven tapestry that hung behind the Torah ark, I hadn’t mentioned it hid a ten-foot crucifix. I massaged my fingers where they had clasped the chipped wooden bimah to calm my nerves, forgetting the Bibles that were carefully concealed in its belly. 

That morning, when my half-Christian family ducked through the sanctuary’s unassuming doors, ready to bear witness to a Jewish girl’s coming of age, had they noticed the sign tacked onto the brick façade? The one that read “Madrona Grace Presbyterian Church” in blue and yellow letters. 

Too young, too innocent, too exhausted to consider the contradiction, I wandered into an untroubled sleep.   

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I had never before witnessed such an outburst at the mention of Jesus Christ. The letter came as a shock to me, a simple postcard hand-delivered to my family’s cabin door by Aunt Daisy, my grandmother’s sister, during our annual family reunion at Silver Lake Resort & Campground. 

Aunt Daisy is the faux Texan of the family, a woman you’d never nail as a Los Angeles native. After spending the past several decades with her wife in Austin, she is armed with all the southern classics: a closet full of checkered button-downs, a deeply Christian spirit, and an unabashed love for Donald Trump. Her character sheet reads like a stand-up routine, as did the letter I thumbed carelessly over breakfast, which went something like:

Dear Lucy,

I am so proud of you and your coming of age as a young woman. It was an honor to watch you deliver such beautiful words and melodies––you were a powerhouse on that stage. I also hope you someday let Jesus into your heart.  

May God bless you,

Your Aunt Daisy

She certainly also slipped in a verse from the Gospels in closing. I asked my mother if she remembers what it was. Her retrospective summary delivered via iMessage: “She was trying to connect with you and wanted you to find Jesus. I think I blocked it out!”

But seven summers ago, when I ambivalently brought the letter to my mother’s bedside, her response had yet to develop any humor about the situation. Slamming the screen door behind her as she marched across the campground to Aunt Daisy’s cabin, she vibrated with fury. 

My mother’s family has reunited annually in this corner of the Eastern Sierras for over a century. My great grandfather’s favorite fishing spot—to my dismay and amusement nicknamed “Grandpa’s Hole”—has backdropped generations of Smith family engagements, cookouts, and parties with no motivating occasion except for a shared amazement that we still do this every year. And, for as long as I can remember, Aunt Daisy and her wife have staked their claim to Cabin 12 at Silver Lake. Every day, they welcomed the early risers with griddled pancakes and greasy bacon. The smell wafting from the kitchen never failed to entice my uncles into a lazy morning meal, even if the trout they meant to catch were hungry for their own breakfasts at those very same hours.

The one-story cabin nestled unassumingly between those of my third cousins and second cousins twice removed. It was now—likely for the first time—being raided by a very angry Jewish woman. I perched barefoot on the plastic Adirondack chair out back, half-listening to the muffled confrontation that ensued, a little shocked but amused. 

“Heather, I meant only to inspire her to think, to choose, to ask the important questions. You know this, of course. You know our family.”

“Daisy, please, this is so inappropriate. I—” 

The wind picked up, rustling the acacia leaves and interrupting my poor attempt at eavesdropping. In the stillness that settled, I was left mapping out my family geography.

My father: raised in weekly attendance at a New Jersey synagogue, whose mention evokes complaints about the insipid tedium of his Jewish education. Not quite religious in his adulthood, but protective of the time our family sets aside for our weekly Shabbat dinners.

My mother: raised as a member of a close-knit Presbyterian church in a Seattle suburb. A former altar girl and avid Bible study member, she outgrew her religion in young adulthood, stubbornly cutting her hair short and travelling the world to the tune of her mother’s protests. She had converted to Judaism the summer before, electing to pursue a Jewish education every Wednesday evening after she finished charting her oncology patient visits for the day.

And finally, me: Bat Mitzvahed only two months prior at Madrona Grace Presbyterian Church––which our synagogue rented out on Saturdays––reciting Hebrew prayers that I could barely translate before a split audience, half of whom were wearing their yarmulkes inside out. Currently spending my summer in eastern California, fishing, barbecuing, and sneaking sips of beer under the table with my mother’s dubiously evangelical extended family. At the moment, a passive listener to a heated custody battle over my faith.

We gathered around picnic tables for our annual fish fry dinner that night––all twenty-six Christians and three Jews of us––pausing customarily to say grace. My great uncle Carl began the prayer with a zeal channeled from his round belly: “Dear Father who art in heaven, please bless us and the meal before us, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord.” The hem of Uncle Carl’s oil-spotted tee-shirt rose and fell with a breath that flowed through his stocky frame. As my left hand linked with my cousin’s rough palm, and my right with my grandmother’s smooth one, I closed my eyes on cue. I mouthed only the first syllable of a practiced “amen” before the word got stuck in my throat.

It felt like catching myself in the act. It was far from secret that I was no believer in the Holy Trinity; what then compelled me to join the fray while God supposedly blessed our picnic table full of fried trout? Respect? Tolerance? Or––the answer I prayed was the wrong one––did I secretly want in?

Most years, I stuffed myself silly with buttery rolls and mayonnaise-y slaw, but this year’s fish fry tasted only of guilt. A guilt that I might envy this religion, a religion I did not claim, more than I cared for my own. 

This religion boasted days on the lake, clandestine sips of beer provided by a tipsy uncle, late nights spent listening to older cousins argue about libertarianism and sex and everything else foreign to me. My religion offered tedious Hebrew classes on Tuesday evenings, trips to the humid Jersey suburbs, stuffy Kol Nidre services I spent hoping someone in the crowd would faint just for the excitement. 

With his chin tucked and boots planted in the gravel, Uncle Carl could command an audience with praises of his God. I stumbled to explain what exactly the Hamotzi meant, let alone why we always passed a loaf of bread around the table after we recited it. Would it ever feel so effortless? Would it someday just “click?” While I sat pondering if life was easier under a Christian God, Uncle Carl cracked open his fourth beer.

I never discussed the letter with Aunt Daisy, and to avoid aggravating my mother, rarely rehash the drama with her either. Nowadays, I occasionally slip the story into dinner party small talk—but I most certainly never mention how my aunt’s attempt at conversion nearly enticed me, if only for a moment.

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After a childhood spent struggling to answer the Four Questions of Passover––the Mah Nishtanah––I was finally given the stage to ask them. Though the Passover Seder has no formal clergy, rarely is it led by the eldest daughter of a family, the duty instead falling to the patriarch. But in my senior year of high school, I nominated myself for the role. My father gleefully obliged, content to relinquish responsibility for the complex twenty-person ritual dinner. My mother, too, offered little resistance. Though my father championed the Seder’s theatrics, she was always the one to lay the tablecloths, manage the food, and plan just about everything else. 

So, stationed at the head of the table for the first time, I called on my father to answer the final of the Four Questions. The task was traditionally reserved for the youngest child at the table, to highlight why the nights of Passover differ from all others. At my Seder, the responsibility would fall upon the lanky bald man wearing too-short rose-colored trousers that his wife let him pull them out only for special occasions.

“On all other nights, we eat sitting upright or reclining,” I began with a grin. “So, father dearest, why on this night do we all recline?”

“Because we are free people,” he answered with a flair unstifled by his demotion to a chorus role. “Free people who recline to celebrate our liberation after generations of enslavement.” Awash with a newfound tipsiness, I had a sneaking suspicion the reason we lounged also had something to do with the Seder’s divinely mandated four glasses of wine.

By Jewish law, I had entered adulthood five years before, when I clumsily recited Torah in my itchy blue dress. In reality, today was my very first day on the job. Not as a believer, but as a steward. I was changed by my chosen responsibility to the corporal table of twenty who sat before me. I let the image of the man in the sky untether and float into afterthought, realizing for the first time that the God-shaped hole in my faith had been filled by ritual itself. “Dayenu,” goes the Passover song of gratitude. “It would have been enough.” Tonight, our cacophonic harmonies and shared smiles more than fulfilled that affirmation.

So, despite the Biblical command to relax, I sat tall, reciting the story of Exodus with a tenacity I hadn’t felt behind the bimah. Three thousand years ago, Moses parted the Red Sea and freed the Hebrews from Pharoah’s wrath. Tonight, I remembered the correct tune of the Kiddush. I would’ve weighed them as equally impressive feats. With no rabbi to guide my still stumbling prayers, no divine authority above my own command, I had somehow convinced my guests that I knew my way.

Invigorated by the warmth of my audience’s attention, I began to recite the Hamotzi: “Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz.” Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who brings forth bread from the earth. My focus turned upwards as I closed with an “amen,” this one freely spoken.

Just over the flames of the waning candlesticks, I locked eyes with Jackson, a dear friend, devout Christian, and always curious companion. Jackson was a good sport, having spent the night with his tortoiseshell glasses and mop of curls buried in his Haggadah––his prayer book––attempting to make sense of our practice. He mouthed the sounds of our melodic prayer, as though chewing on rubber. I wondered if he knew that I too was reading from the transliteration, a compromise of English and Hebrew, not from the traditional text I was perhaps supposed to.

We reached the end of our meal with the sunset, bellies full and hearts at ease. I finally found myself reclining into the expected posture, delighted to relinquish my authority in exchange for quippy gossip with my neighbors. My checklist was complete: the bitter herbs dipped twice in salt water, the matzah smothered with sweet charoset and devoured in turn. A curiously placed orange now stood alone on the Seder plate.

“What does the orange mean?” my mother asked, a twinkle in her voice. The buzz of the room settled.

I straightened, ready to repeat the story I had heard her tell every year before. “Once upon a time, a rabbi said there’s as much room for a woman at the bimah as there is for an orange on the Seder plate. So now, we do both.”

Makeshift we were, my Seder and I––woven together with thread stretched thin in a few spots. Uncle Carl, likely watching football from his couch 1,000 miles away, had unknowingly instilled in me the voice of authority—a voice that once compelled me to recite a Christian grace, a voice I could nonetheless channel before my Jewish people. As we cleared the table of our now empty plates, my father squeezed my arm in passing, as if to say “You kept your head on straight. You carried the torch.” My mother flitted around the room as she always did, gathering coats and goodbyes as guests gathered by the door. She chatted freely with my friends, particularly attentive to Jackson, who stood at the doorway in his politely ironed crewneck, not quite ready to leave. I wondered if she was telling him the story of her first Seder, when she too had belonged to a different God.

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I cried on Christmas Eve. I should have prepared myself, should have known that the organ’s echoes and my mother’s damp eyes would make my own misty. Earlier that evening, we had done what we always did––shared a lazy, laughing meal of Chinese food in classic Jewish Christmas Eve fashion. Then, coats tucked and hair smoothed, we followed my grandmother to church, to pray beside her in the same pews where she once sat with my mother in her lap every Sunday.

I wondered if anyone else had come straight from lo mein and egg rolls. I chuckled quietly at the thought and reached for my mother’s hand. Fingers intertwined, our flushed cheeks dried in unison as the final notes of  “O Holy Night” rang out. A song, written by an atheist and composed by his Jewish friend. In that pew was my entire world: a convert, her ever questioning daughter, and a strange Christmas carol that, against all odds, belonged to us all.

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