Forty-four years ago today, I became a bat mitzvah with a dozen other girls around my age. It was Shavuot, a lesser holiday among secular Jews, a fitting day, I suppose, in a Conservative temple, to consolidate the celebration of the coming of age of the lesser sex.
Though I had attended Hebrew School twice a week for years, I don't recall knowing all that much about the significance of that holiday. To this day, I still associate Shavuot with my bat mitzvah and the long purple and white dress with the wide purple ribbon that formed the dividing line between my flat chest and my protruding belly. (It would be a few years before the protrusion and concavity rearranged themselves, still more before gravity would lead the two to intermingle.)
It would be over a decade before I travelled to Israel, before I was finally able to put some of those Hebrew School stories and news reports into context. My memories are like sound bites. The eerie discomfort of standing within what seemed to be spitting distance from the demilitarized zone of the Golan Heights. The heart stopping sonic booms of Israeli fighter jets patrolling the border as we scaled Masada. The indescribable first glimpse of Jerusalem as we emerged from the winding sub-sea-level roads. The glorious Dome of the Rock, open to the likes of me on a very limited basis, and only if I removed my shoes. The ghostly echoes of Yad Vashem. Had I thought it was possible, I would have gone back, spent time on a kibbutz, wrap myself up in that mystical patch of real estate for which so many have given their lives. Back then I didn't realize how much was possible.
My youngest daughter landed there, yesterday, only minutes before the CNN breaking news banner told me a plane had disappeared. I already knew she was safe, but those few moments without details reminded me how vulnerable I feel. How vulnerable we all feel, these days. It's difficult to find good news in a report of a plane carrying almost seventy people being lost, other than the knowledge that my daughter was not on it, and that nobody mentioned Trump for hours. (He did not disappoint -- with a particularly presidential tweet -- something about terrorism being bad.) A little vague, but I'm sure he'll hash the details out when he hashes things out over kimchi with Kim Jong Un.
As is always the case, I cannot know for sure that my kids are safe and I have less control than ever, but I keep the faith. I will never stop worrying, but my daughter is thrilled to have arrived in Israel, and I am thrilled for her. From what I hear, it is quite a different place from the one I visited more than thirty years ago, but the world is, as a whole, quite different. I love the thought of her walking the same streets I did (not to mention a few more famous characters), of her having the same feelings of awe and wonderment and, ultimately, understanding. She will see, as I did decades ago, as her sister did more recently, and as countless others have, why this place means so much to so many.
And, as I reminisce on this throw back Thursday, I smile when I think about how history repeats, even though neither of my daughters would ever have been caught in a long purple dress with a purple ribbon slicing an oddly shaped pre-pubescent body in two. I smile (despite all my worrying) about how all the planets and stars will align next Wednesday. Hump Day. Her birthday. Camel ride day. How we used to laugh out loud at those commercials.
What are the odds? A fitting day and a fitting way for my daughter to turn twenty, to experience the adventure of coming of age in a strange time and a strange place.
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