Part 2:

A Bat Mitzvah (sort of) at the Western Wall

Thirty eight years ago I went to Israel for the first time. I was thirteen, and, while I was interested in seeing the country, I was most excited about a second Bat Mitzvah at the Kotel HaAravi, the Western Wall of the ancient Temple that lies at the center of the Jewish religion. I stayed up nights worrying about what I needed to learn and whether I was certain of the portion I was supposed to be studying. No one from the tour volunteered any information and I was too socially awkward to ask questions. I wonder if I had been comfortable enough to approach my teachers if they could have primed me for what I would find.

Once we arrived, my mother and I passed through the womens’ section. I slipped a note into a cleft between two bricks. I can’t remember what I wrote, but it must have been important to my thirteen-year-old self. There is a fuzzy spot in my memory in which I remember watching with fascination the different ways that people prayed. There were women in headscarves with their faces buried in their siddurim (prayer books) shokeling (a bobbing, shaking motion) and whispering. Behind the thick wall that divided the sexes, men wearing tallitot and tsitsit with sidecurls and full beards shokeled in different ways. I recall watching one very thin man leap up into the air, land in full prostration and with one single wave like motion, bob back to his feet, over and over again.

From there my memory skips to the room where I sat with the other B’nai Mitzvot and their parents. The rest were boys dressed in blazers, kippot and bright new tallitot with beautiful blue stripes, embroidery and fringes. I remember at that moment the thought that I should have brought a scarf or hat, despite the conflicting messages that I had received about girls and women covering or not covering their heads like men did. At that moment I stumbled into one of the many conflicts around gender in Judaism - that despite the clear requirement for human beings to cover their heads as a sign of humility before G-d, that a woman only covers for the sake of modesty, and not to express a relationship with the divine, as if she were, somehow less of a human being than a man.

A man with a black beard came into the room and called all the boys to him. He told my father that I should wait there. So I waited. I can’t remember now whether I could hear anything, but I imagine now that I could hear the boys chanting in the mens’ section.

After what felt like an eternity, the man returned with a certificate that claimed that I was newly Bat Mitzvah, despite the fact that all I had done was sit in a room. Whoever printed the certificate had also misspelled my name. I remember something like a wall breaking inside of me as I became fully aware of my powerlessness and voicelessness among my people. I don’t remember the rest of the trip, although I do recall that the misspelled certificate landed in the trash before we returned to the States. That was the moment that I left Judaism.

I switched to a public school for tenth grade, around the same time that I discovered Reclaiming-style Witchcraft. It was a movement created by Starhawk, a woman who had originally wanted to be a rabbi in the 1950s. I found an authentic spiritual practice in Witchcraft for a long time.