My Daughter, the Bat Mitzvah

Originally posted in January 2021.

This coming Saturday, January 23, I will place my hands on my daughter’s head, and say five words in Hebrew: “Baruch she'p'tarani me'onsho shel zeh.” 

Heloise is turning 12, and will become the first family member in over a century to mark such a birthday in a synagogue.  She may well be the first girl ever to do so; though “bat mitzvahs” for girls have been practiced in Orthodox Judaism since the mid-19th century, they were not common until the 1920s – well after my father’s family had slipped away from their faith.

My great-great-great-grandfather was Shimon Schwitzer, a judge in the beit din in the small, nearly entirely Jewish community of Lundenburg.  (Then part of the Habsburg Empire, it is now known as Breclav, and is in the Czech Republic).  Shimon was the son of an Avraham, and so on back into the recesses of history.  He gave his first-born son a Jewish name, but that name is lost; born in 1819, my great-great-grandfather grew up, took the Germanic name Heinrich, and moved from little Lundenburg to glittering Vienna.  Heinrich married a fellow assimilated Jew, and they gave their children fine, Teutonic, very non-Jewish names: Berthold, Ludwig, Maria, and Hugo.   

Hugo was the great-grandfather for who I am named, and he too married a woman from a secular Jewish family.  As best we can tell, neither the original Hugo nor his siblings nor any of their descendants darkened the door of a synagogue throughout their lives.  Eventually, my own grandparents took the next logical step and converted to Catholicism; my own father was baptized at birth. 

A conversion was not enough to save ethnic Jews from Hitler, so the family fled Austria for England, where daddy was handed over to the Jesuits for much of his youth.   

As my papa told us many times, his own parents never told him they were Jewish; his mother had been a Communist in her youth, and the story with which he was raised was that they had fled Nazi-occupied Austria for political reasons.  Daddy did not learn he was ethnically Jewish until he was in his mid-20s.  The great philosopher Karl Popper was a close family friend, devoted to my grandmother since they had been teens in Vienna; it was Popper who broke the truth to my father in 1960, while the two men took a vigorous walk around Oakland’s Lake Merritt.  As daddy told it, the next day he placed the most expensive transatlantic phone call of his life to confront his mother, who admitted that Popper had been right.  My grandparents saw Jewishness, not wrongly, as a deadly liability from which they wished to protect their children.  Daddy said he understood, but that he thought that finding out at age 25 from Karl Popper was leaving things rather late.

My father came to a synagogue once in his life: in September 2005, for my wedding to Eira.  He sat by my side in a room full of men as I signed the wedding contract (ketubah); following Orthodox tradition, he walked me down the aisle to my bride.  Daddy was already suffering from the cancer that would kill him nine months later; in the photos, he is gaunt and in pain, but also beaming.  The rabbi who married us told me that something in my father’s soul was being restored in the last year of his life; after daddy died, I said kaddish for him in a Santa Barbara cemetery, and, a year later, said it in Jerusalem.  It had been a very long time since such a thing had been done for any of us.

My father married my very WASPy mother, and so I am (like newly-elected Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff) a patrilineal Jew.  To the Orthodox, I am a Gentile, as Jewishness descends solely through the mother.   Reform Jews accept descent through the father, and in their eyes, I am a Jew – as are my children.   I did start the process of a formal Orthodox conversion, but dropped out at the last minute, preferring to remain an outsider, nose pressed against the glass.

Unlike me, who was raised an agnostic and later converted to Catholicism, my children have been raised in Judaism.  My son had a brit milah when he was eight days old, the first Schwyzer to have been circumcised by a mohel since Heinrich was born in 1819.  His name, David, was chosen for him not by his parents, but by our rabbi.  Heloise’s second middle name, Raquel, is for Rachel the Matriarch.  My daughter has been readying herself for this weekend’s bat mitzvah over half her life.  Since hers is an Orthodox synagogue which does not see her parents as fully Jewish, her bat mitzvah is also an act of formal conversion.

The phrase I’ll recite over my daughter this coming Saturday means in English, “Blessed is He who relieves me from punishing this child.”  That sounds severe, and it is normally taken to mean that a father will no longer be held responsible for the transgressions of a son or daughter who has been so blessed.  Just as in many American jurisdictions, juveniles can be tried as adults for certain crimes, in Judaism the bat mitzvah (the term refers to the ceremony but also to the child herself) is now accountable for her choices in a way she wasn’t before. 

There’s another way to look at it, one that a Black Sheep like me prefers: until the bat mitzvah, the child is punished by the father’s shortcomings and failings.  My children have suffered enormously thanks to my recklessnesses and indiscretions.  (This isn’t guilt talking; this is simple fact.)  Once she has passed through this ritual, my daughter can begin a new stage of reckoning with her childhood, and she can begin to chart a new course for her life that brings her out from under the chiaroscuro of parental influence.  I will always be her devoted father, and Eira always her loving mother, but after next Saturday, Heloise Cerys Raquel will move to the next stage of differentiating herself from us. 

I haven’t just handed Heloise a set of hard lessons early in her life; I have also dreamed so many dreams for her.  Starting next week, my daughter begins to take greater command of her own dreams.   One of those dreams, it seems, is to return to the faith of her fathers.

Her Torah portion is “Bo” – which can mean, depending on how it’s used, either “Go!” or “Come!” in Hebrew.  It’s the story of the final three plagues, the Passover, and the beginning of the Exodus out of Egypt.  It is a good portion for a headstrong child, as it is a story about leaving behind comfort and familiarity for the unknown and the uncertain.   The penultimate plague, in case you’ve forgotten is the plague of darkness.  All of Egypt is cast into the black, but the Israelites still had light.  I’ve battled darkness all my life, and surrendered to it time and again.  It is a happiness to think that come next Saturday, my daughter will step out of that shadow and draw closer to the light. 

That’s my own self-loathing talking, of course, and this bat mitzvah is about Heloise, not her father.  She’s been taking lessons from a religious teacher in preparation, and she’s written a speech.  Though I helped with an earlier draft, Heloise has rewritten it – and told me that this time I can’t help. 

“It’s going to be a surprise, daddy.  And afterwards, we can talk about it.”  A bat mitzvah child is not just a student of a parent, but a worthy interlocutor and equal.  I know what next Saturday means to me, but I stand ready to be surprised and humbled by what it means to my first-born.