A couple years ago, Jones Day litigation partner Mark Herrmann wrote The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law. Published by the ABA’s Litigation Section, this tiny volume repeatedly advises that success in the world of law requires a complete and absolute commitment of time, thought and psychic energy. At one point, Herrmann tells us,
There’s one other thing they never told you in law school: this profession will eat at you. Suppose you’re defending a case that’s going terribly, and you see no escape for your client. You’ll think about that case all day, every day, trying to find a solution. The case will follow you home every night, invade your thoughts when you’re taking a shower, disturb your sleep when it appears in dreams. Suppose there’s a miracle. You come up with a theory for summary judgment; the case is defensible! You’ve won back your mind; you no longer stew about the case every waking minute. At your firm, this means you no longer have enough work.....
The last words in the book are that it is offered as a labor of love, and no doubt it was so for Mark Herrmann. But I’d rather have the labor of love I experienced over the past month than partake of Herrmann’s hard-bitten world in which he cautions young lawyers not to be stupid, replaceable or irrelevant. My experience had nothing to do with the law and its memory will remain in my heart long after my finest courtroom victory fades from memory.
Two weeks ago, my beautiful daughter experienced her Bat Mitzvah. In the month leading up to the experience, I shifted from a supportive, but not overly involved dad, to a man who became filled with the awe engendered by timeless tradition and a wonderful young lady’s coming of age.
Like most of my Jewish contemporaries, I had a Bar Mitzvah when I turned 13 and my only memories of the process were that it was something I simply had to do and that it really didn’t have all that much meaning for me. I think that is true for most not-terribly-observant Jews in our culture. Yet as my lovely daughter hit the homestretch of preparation, I began to spend more time immersing myself in her process.
The wonder began when we sat down with the Rabbi for the first walk-through a month before the ceremony. Dani is a pretty private person, preferring to study on her own with the door closed. So, when she began to sing the prayers with her sweet voice in flawless Hebrew, I felt an odd warmth envelop me. I was also quite amazed that I could follow along with her, reading this ancient alphabet, though I hadn’t studied it for over 40 years.
I remember that during my Bar Mitzvah, I had to learn and chant a several-paragraph portion from the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). What I vaguely knew as a boy, but learned more fully now, was that Jews read a specific portion of the Torah during a set period of the year, so that on a particular day in the fall (the holiday Simchat Torah), the last words of the fifth book, Deuteronomy, are read, followed by the first words of Genesis, as the cycle is renewed. Every person has a section or parasha that corresponds to their birthday, and this is the section a young person learns and comments upon at their Bar/Bat Mitzvah.
Each synagogue has its own scroll containing these five books in a lovely Hebrew calligraphy. Many are huge things, but the one we used was relatively tiny — the parchment maybe a foot high. It had a special history. This scroll had been found in a warehouse in Czechoslovakia after the end of WWII. It was a student’s Torah scroll. The Nazis had stored this and many other “artifacts” of what they believed would one day be a vanished culture for use in a future museum.
One evening our family went to the Rabbi’s office and unrolled the scroll, so Dani could get used to the script from which she would be chanting. The panels were hand-justified on both sides. The writing was beautiful. We were gazing at a document that had been unchanged for thousands of years. I felt embraced by a timeless world.
Most cultures steeped in ancient rhythms mark an important point in both the annual cycle and the passages of an individual’s life. Coming-of-age rituals are just one of these celebrations. The Bar/Bat Mitzvah serves this powerful function in the Jewish community. It is the opportunity to honor this person whom we love — who brought us such joy as a child — and to acknowledge their evolution into young adulthood.
Celebration is for the community as well as the individual, though. It allows us to come together and share our love for this one person — to recall the special joys that childhood brings and to set those aside and see this person in an entirely different way. Those of us who have loved our little children to distraction wish to capture that joyful spirit, innocence and unutterable sweetness in amber, because there is a way that a child’s life-force energy touches us that cannot be duplicated.
Yet, life is always about change — always. Maybe one day science will find the key to arresting the aging process, but until that time comes, birth to natural death is guaranteed for us all. Again, this Bar/Bat Mitzvah celebration is our way of honoring this adult-to-be.
As a parent, what a wonderful opportunity. This young person stands before you — she who it seems only yesterday was walking between you and your wife, pleading “swing me” — and sings the ancient Hebrew prayers with confidence and grace. She gives a brief talk of her own composition, interpreting a passage of the Bible and its personal meaning for her. I remember the evenings over the last month when the three of us sat at a table and she practiced, and I was amazed at how much Hebrew I remembered after all these years, and we coached her in her talk (her first of any importance in front of discerning adults), and we talked about the meaning of the whole affair.
My brother and his wife came from California to join us in celebration. The adults and young people who had known our daughter and watched her grow up into the lovely young lady she is sat in the front rows of the intimate setting my wife had chosen for the service. After all, because Jews have for centuries been forced to worship without temples in many cultures, a place like the old Stimson Green Mansion served as an intimate, and appropriate, setting for a family to join together and envelop her with love.
The parents make a brief statement to the young person after they have given their Bible interpretation (their d’vor Torah). While my wife is far happier relating one-on-one with no audience, I tend to be a bit long–winded and have always felt comfortable expressing myself before others. Thus, it was a gift to be able to stand before 60 people and tell my beautiful daughter that I was proud of her for the kind of person she is — her intelligence, incredible competence and delightful sense of humor. What a moment! The month’s utter immersion in this process was a labor of love — the kind of labor of love I hope Mark Herrmann has experienced and which his associates will be allowed the time to experience.
