Rituals, Jews, and an Ornery Cat
Experimental Fiction and Personal Essay
Tai Kersten
Dr. Sexson
23 April 2010
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The curtains peel back from a youthful dream revealing s sleeping man. This is you, a narrator tells the audience, and in a couple of secongs a radio alarm is going to sound.
“Good Morning,” says the wacky morning DJ, “and go get stuffed!”
Eight O’clock in the A-M and your morning alarm has already become belligerent. You try to reach for the radio’s snooze button but knock your glasses off the night stand. The morning ritual begins as it always does, with or without you. Your feet hit the ground and lumber off towards the shower without you. Everything else stays in bed. The radio continues to prophesize.
“… Your day is going to suck,” says the DJ through the radio. “You are going to be late for work because traffic is heavy. And then it is going to flash storm while you walk in to work so that you can enter smelling like a moldy shoe. Your boss will then hassle you…”
The steam from the shower unites the rest of your body. The hand starts scrubbing while the toes tap an inaudible morning rhythm. Slowly, the lights turn on inside your head. The brain starts thinking thoughts and your mouth starts humming. Turning off the shower, you wrap yourself in the downy womb of your towel. Good day, so far.
Throwing the towel onto the bed, you look at your reflection in the mirror and pinch your love handle- time to hit the gym. But now, you have to get dressed. Opening your wardrobe, an organized wall of folded clothes greets you. From striped button downs to tacky sweatshirts, each piece of clothing represents an investment or a Christmas gone by.
Canaletto had his memory theater, Einstein had his pipe, and you have your wardrobe. Each shelf is a decade gone by, girl friends who couldn’t resist that lime-green navy-blue tie, or that aunt who just figured that a reindeer t-shirt was going to look so precious on a thirty three year old man.
A year ago, you were thirty two, thirty two with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, a job in finance, and a cat. In fact, looking back ten years you realize not much has changed. Only then, you had a kitten. What a cruel arithmetic.
You are getting your boxers on when it starts. A dull pain builds in the gut and moves up to your head; some call this anxiety. As its intensity grows, the mind turns inward. You doubt your ambitions, your life, and your job. Doing as you always do, you push this to the back of your mind. The pain becomes a murmur. Some call this being a neurotic.
You find yourself sitting over a bowl of frosted wheat squares wearing a nice suit. From the time you were a kid your mom always told you to eat things with the word “wheat” or “grape” in them. This bowl of frosted wheat squares represents a compromise. Not as horrid as grape nuts and less boring than bran flakes, the frosted wheat squares have one side of dullness and one side of high fructose goodness. There’s a slogan there somewhere. But at least they have wheat in the name right? That means healthy right? That means you can eat these without guilt right? That mea-
You stop yourself. This is how you spend your time: pondering a bowl of cereal. What drama is there in that? What meaning? If only something dramatic could happen. What if someone killed your whole family? That would be very dramatic. You imagine yourself as Harrison Ford or Kenneth Brannagh de Hamlet, family dead, touring the east coast, shooting baddies in their legs, seeking vengeance against those who would dare bring tragedy upon a man of action such as yourself.
You conclude the rest of the morning ritual. Picking up a briefcase, you bend down to pet your cat. She glances at you and turns away, walking back toward the kitchen. The head's dull murmuring pain grows. Her escaping figure has caused emanations of sadness to trickle down your spine. An emptiness grows in your abdomen, a quivering marker of regret. Your life is becoming a litany of disappointment. You shudder and walk to the front door.
You head towards your car. It’s the same car you inherited when your father, a school teacher, drank himself to death: a blue Saab. You sit down and turn it on. Pulling out of the driveway you are narrowly missed by a red corvette. Asshole! I bet that guy loves his life! As you begin to accelerate towards the highway, you see your cat staring out the window towards the car. There is something you missed, you can feel it, you just don’t know what or where. Whether somewhere in the nether-regions of you life or in the blurred torn gossamer of childhood, there is a lack. You drive away like always, only this time, a feeling of unfinished business hangs in the vehicle.
☼
My first and most memorable experience with ritual is my Bar Mitzvah. A Bar Mitzvah is a ceremony marking a young Jew's entrance into the house of God as an adult. Since the true house of God is the universe, it is also the welcoming of a mature being into the lifescape. Likewise, it is expected that this person acts with an adult's confidence of purpose.
Sitting in the Temples’s office, my mother and Rabbi Michael stared at me awaiting my answer. I had been asked why I was having a Bar Mitzvah. Terrified, I ran through the reasons in my head.
First, there was the ceremony. Having a Bar Mitzvah was an important part of my development as a person. My experience in faith at this point could really only be measured by the numbers of Latkes I had eaten. I needed something more. My Bubby always said there were three important times in a Jewish man’s life: his Bar Mitzvah, his wedding, and his retirement. If I didn’t do this, she would kill me which would be undesirable since I had a lot of Latkes left to eat and a bit of developing left to do.
Second, there was the ego. I wanted to look cool and not be left out. All of my Jewish friends were on track to their Bar Mitzvahs and if I didn’t do this I felt that somehow I’d be less of a person if I didn’t follow them.
And then there was the third reason. We didn't talk about the third option.
Back in the office, I stared at my hands for a bit and then answered blithely with the un-thought-of third option. I told him I was doing it for the money. There was a brief pause and my mother sat stunned, nervously flicking her gaze between myself and the Rabbi.
Tradition dictated that guests brought money for the Bar Mitzvah-ed which caused many a joke amongst my fellow young Jews that we were doing all of this for a Playstation. However, articulating it to the Rabbi seemed a bit sacrilegious. After a long moment of awkwardness, he broke the silence. Chuckling, he told me that this was an acceptable reason and signed me up for my first advanced Hebrew class. His reaction confused me and I would continue to ponder it until eight years later when I was talking to a fellow Jewish friend of mine and member of my B-M class named Lorin.
In a coffee shop eight years after our services, I asked Lorin about his answer to the Rabbi's question. He answered that, out of nervousness,he had also told Rabbi Michael that he had received a similar reaction. Finally, realizing what the man had done, we laughed about it together.
Eighteen years prior to asking the same question himself, Michael had probably told the same joke to his Rabbi in a moment of nervous stupidity. We surmised that Rabbi Akiva did the same and Moses too. In reality, it was not an acceptable answer, but we knew this.
The joke conveyed an unfortunate truth and for this reason it had to be told. It was a part of maturing: put it all out there and figure out its efficacy along the way. In doing so, the Bar Mitzvah-ed became the Rabbi of the congregation for a brief moment. This made since because a Bar Mitzvah service was essentially a Sabbath service, like any mass at a Christian church, only with a few extra parts. These parts were a Torah reading, speeches and blessings from loved ones, and an annunciation by the service leader as they accepted the role of 'adult'.
The Bar Mitzvah was not important because of a statement of intent. You can go to the supermarket for a frozen pizza but if you come back with spinach, that is all the better.
The story of my Barmitzvah, or moreso, the beginning of my understanding of my Bar Mitzvah starts five years before I started the prayer for the reader’s kaddish. When I was eight, my parents put me into Taekwondo because I was being picked on at school for being Asian. There we practiced punching, kicking, and discipline under a stern old Japanese man named, Karlo Fukiwara. Most of all though, we practiced Kata. Kata is a set of offensive and defensive movements that have been placed in a linear order which one kinetically recites similarly to speaking a sentence. They are used to teach proper technique as well as train the memory.
The first time I recited a Kata in a TKD tournament, I received a bronze medal in my competition group. The heavy disk had a red, white, and blue sash and was imprinted with a tiger's face. There were three of us in the judging group so this wasn’t that big of an accomplishment, still, it felt good wearing that weight around my neck. To an eight year old, any metal medal marks good mettle.
The next day, in the practice gym, my Sensei took our medals from us and held them up and recited a speech he had given to hundreds of youngsters before us. He said, “These are meaningless by themselves. See those people you train with? These medals are theirs. These are also my medals. These represent the work you have put into earning them, they belong to everyone you have met thus far: friends, enemies, and your family alike. Especially your family. They represent all the work you have done and all the work you will do in the future. Do not think they belong to you. They don’t.”
After he finished, he shuffled up the medals and randomly handed them back to us. I received silver. That was a good day.
After high school, I ran into a young man who endured this same speech. He was not happy about losing his gold to humility. Even ten years down the line, the sensei was still shuffling little kids' medals. I think I finally understood the sensei's point which was dense of me since he had told us it rather explicitly. But that's the point of these kinds of lessons. To help us wade through the morass of life and build lighthouses where action can become accomplishment and thoughts true reflection.
The tournament was a ritual, a gathering of action that marked a specific moment in time constructed of hard long term work, memorization, and effort. It also tied us to something bigger than just ourselves, the life-stream that emanated through all human interaction and effort. The ritual was only a small part though. Its processes started deceptively early and ended only after our teacher humbled us and gave us our neighbor’s medal. Maybe it truly began at birth because all things led to that moment, and all moments pointed back to it.
I figure the money joke, just like the medal shuffling is an essential part of the actual explicit ritual. The music starts before the dance after the orchestra tunes. The bookend of the Karate tournament contains the lesson. The self aware joke before the Bar Mitzvah readies the young Jew to begin their odyssey into adulthood.
A few months after I met with the Rabbi in his office, I realized that it would be infinitely easier to just get a job rather than hold a Bar Mitzvah if money was my raison detre. My training consisted of multiple hours of Hebrew study every day, scripture readings, prayer memorization, rehearsing accompanying chants, and most terrifyingly of all: the speech.
At the end of a Bar Mitzvah, the young person is asked to speak about their ceremony and what it means to them. Aside from the torah reading itself, the entire opening and closing portions of the service are in support to this prepared statement of epiphany. It is written wholly by the new adult and it is defined by the portion of Torah that the young person is assigned to read prior to the speech.
The Torah is the sacred document for the Jews, the hinge on which the door to God opens. It represents over five thousand years of tradition, many lifetimes of trial and retribution. At the head of all synagogues is a Torah therefore at the head of all synagogues is a direct line to God. It's a pretty big deal. In all Bar Mitzvahs the adult-to-be must read a portion of the Torah determined based off of their birthday. And then they give a speech about that portion, explaining their interpretation of the piece.
Sitting once again in the office of the Rabbi's office, I had ingested nine weeks of Judaism classes and was well on my way to becoming a man. I had learned the beginning and ending prayers which accompanied the service and was well on my way to having the movements rehearsed and memorized in my muscles. It was August and my ceremony was scheduled for the following April 8th.
Facing him, I felt no fear, I was ready to receive my Torah portion which I would study and internalize throughout the next year. Supposedly, this portion would dictate to me the course of my life, allowing some insight into the adulthood God meant for me. The air whispered tension.
Shifting in his seat, it was Rabbi Michael's turn to be uncomfortable. Looking down at a piece of paper on his lap, he gave me a crooked smile and started talking. Finally, he told me my portion. My Bar Mitzvah was to be closed, and my adulthood opened, with a reading from the Tazria section of Leviticus. This segment, written by a consummate Priestly Writer somewhere, read like a prescription guide to the skin disease of leprosy. My upstanding life was to open with a triste about quarantining lepers. Awesome. Awe-inspiring. Awe crap. After the Rabbi finished speaking I sat stunned into silence.
You itch the eczema rash growing in your elbow pit as you take highway 19 towards liberty tunnel. The dull anxiety continues to hum in your gut. The Saab's clutch whines as you shift into third gear and accelerate towards city center. You took the finance advisory job in Pittsburgh after your Uncle started to show symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. His being the only other remaining male member of your family after your father passed away, you felt a kind of duty towards his survival.
Although, after he moved in with his girlfriend she took over his care. A wonderful woman and miracle worker, she has done much good for your family. That was five years ago, and despite her good will, she left you with nothing to do after she took up the role of caretaker.
Traffic is heavy as you enter the tunnel. Dammit, the radio was right. You are going to be late for work and your boss is going to hassle you.
Turning off the bridge you pull into the parking lot of a large glass building with a sign that reads “Edward Jones Investment Councilors” on the front. Walking towards the door you feel a slight drizzle begin to fall on and around you. Luckily, you make it into the building before the sky begins to spit. Greeting the pretty secretary as you walk past you head towards the elevators.
As the lift's automated doors open you are greeted with a scene you have seen every day five years gone by. Cubicles encircle a middle conference area. Each segmented office area holds a desk, a computer, and a phone. Men in ties and women in suits pace through the labyrinth, cell phones glued to their heads and pens scribbling wildly on clip boards. Just another day at the office: important people doing important things.
Ignoring your colleagues, you skulk to your desk hoping your boss, Reid, doesn't notice you. Getting to your desk, you boot up your computer and look at the briefs for the day. In college you studied English literature but your life took a one-eighty when your financial adviser offered you a spot in the company's training program called PASS.
You earned your Series 7 and 66 finance licenses in PASS training and shortly afterward you took a job as a stock broker at Edward Jones, earning 15k a month at the outset. As time went by, you forgot your Keats and Woolfe and Fry, replaced by bar graphs and market reports. Market reports like you are looking at now.
You remember the panic that had beset the country ten years ago as the markets turned downward into the recession that defined the opening of the twenty first century. This is when you were in college. Having read heavies like Greenspan and Buffet, you understood the what. Having read rogues like Roubini and Levitt, you understood the how. As time passed and you received your diploma and you looked into the panic stricken eyes of your peers as they marched into uncertain futures, you began to understand the why. You took this job out of fear for your future.
After the recession, over the next decade and a half, things turned upward. As equity grew so did the job market and as the government took steps to balance spending and regulate the various bubbles in the markets, a new age of prosperity grew in America. Having taken a large inheritance from your late father's estate right before college, you rode this economic tide into prosperity.
Now, though, it is someone else's turn. Reviewing the reports, you notice a gap in one of your client's funds. Her name is Marsha Hendrix, single mother of two. She received a large sum of money after her husband passed away due to complications with his pancreas. Determined to have a nest-egg when her children entered college, she contacted the company to invest in a low risk mutual fund.
You were assigned to her three years ago where you set out to use grow her small investment into a tuition. On a fifteen year plan, you set her up with a diversified Van Kampen mutual fund which contained an equal number of growth and aggressive options. In the beginning, you stressed growth out of caution since the rally had been going a long time and was bound to slow down, however, as the year closed and equity stayed in the bright green, the aggressive funds started looking juicy.
Your report notifies you that there is an IPO for a local bank. It is more aggressive than you usually recommend for your middle age clients but you think of the Hendrix kids holding their diplomas and you pick up the phone. As the line connects and you hear the buzz of a ringing phone on the other line, you also think of your squeaking clutch on your car-- if this commission pans out, you can get that fixed no problem. The phone goes to voice mail and you leave a message for Ms. Hendrix about an exciting new opportunity.
Hanging up, you survey the office for the first time since you got there. Reid paces about the cubicles, checking in on his brokers, micro managing his office. Although it is still bustling, the clock now reads noon and a half which means lunch time. You thank some God somewhere that your boss had not noticed your tardiness and grab your jacket and head for the door.
As you walk out of the building into the afternoon. The rain has been pounding the city all morning and only recently stopped. You look up at the parting clouds. Cornices of light stab towards the ground as segments of blue sky peek through the dwindling storm. A light breeze disperses the remaining light drops of misty drizzle onto your face and you are reminded of your past home.
You remember the mountains and the hikes you took outside of Livingston, Montana. The white snow on the craggy mountains and the winds that ate speech, leaving one with only the desolate beauty of the plains and their thoughts. A tug of nostalgia replaces the tug of stress in your gut. As though it were something undesirable, you push it away and head to your car. Although the beef here ain't what it was back home, you're thinking a good old fashion hamburger for lunch would do you good.
☼
Hebrew is a language without written vowels. From Alef to Chet, the rounded tones we associate with a,e,i,o, and u are nonexistent between written consonants. Instead, there are templates of vowels where consonants are placed in an iterative fashion. The configuration of the vowel template determines tense and plurality.
To an English speaker, where words are mostly constructed from free morphemes whose meanings are housed within the words themselves, the Hebrew system is terrifying. This didn't daunt me in the least at the age of 12. I didn't know any better. To me, the scary part of the Bar Mitzvah wasn't the Hebrew. It was the English part, the speech.
Rabbi Michael asked me if I wanted to change portions. If I waited a year I could have the portion where hero archetype Moses leads the Jews out of Egypt. My fellow Jewish man-to-be friend, Joey, was reading about a guy wrestling God. Lorin had Noah and his boat. I was tempted.
I was told that I could have a few nights to think it over. Over that evening's dinner, ravioli with a tomato sauce, my Mom told my Dad about my dilemma. Thinking for but a second, he told me to stop acting like a coward and just do it. Great. What support. He was a bearded Atheist Krishna to my Arjuna.
Growing up in a mining town outside of Pittsburgh, Dad was son to a coal foreman who taught with silent discipline and a protestant heart for living. Dad celebrated Christmas and grew up in Sunday church like most of his generation. After his mother died when he was in his twenties, he swore off God, started drinking, and became a science teacher who lived his subject. His love of corporeal challenge was second only to his hatred of religion.
When he found out about my interest in being Bar Mitzvahed he tried to talk me out of it, so when he told me to go head first into this portion it came as a shock. Over my ravioli, he lectured me about how Leviticus was going to make me a better person, that extracting blood from this stone was my new mission. Having been almost convinced by the allure of Moses, I kind of wanted to pour poison in his ear at that moment.
My mother, also taken by surprise by my father's new found backhanded support of the ceremony, proposed a deal. She told my Dad that he should do a blessing for me during that portion of the Bar Mitzvah service.
After the reading of the torah portions, the Bar Mitzvah service becomes a speech to the community by both the youngster and their support. Through this act, they offer their support in future times as well as demonstrate their fealty from past and in present to the young person. Whether from family or teachers or friends, those who stand at the head of the community, regardless of status as Jew or non-Jew, with the Bar Mitzvahed must say a prayer in Hebrew beforehand.
Not thinking twice, he agreed. In front of the whole community, in front of our entire family, and in front of my God, he was going to give a speech, offer me a blessing into my symbolic adulthood. He was also going to have to learn a modicum of Hebrew.
When I told Rabbi Michael about my plans, he was not entirely happy. Having an atheist at the synagogue's Bema addressing the community seemed to muddy the spiritual veracity of the service. This, added with my acceptance of Leviticus Tazria, made my service a bit nontraditional. Jews have trouble with nontraditional. But we were not ordinary Jews. We were Reform Jews, American Jews. Our families, our fore fathers, superseded orthodoxy. What's tradition without family? So Rabbi Michael pulled some strings with God and let it happen.
With my portion locked in, I began building my speech. At the age of Twelve, I had never ever written a single worthwhile thing. I had written book reports and a few essays about my family pet, an albino ferret named 'Dude', but I had not ever written a speech. Presidents give speeches when they enter office or win wars. The principle of my school gave speeches. Important people give speeches.
I started at the beginning. A Bar Mitzvah is the entrance of a person into maturity. This is a sobering and awesome prospect. The converse of maturity is childishness. Often maligned as an undesirable trait, childishness also brings a sense of curiosity that can propel the revelries of youth into adventure without mind to the effects of their actions. This can lead to great strife at the hand of the immature. Truth comes from the mouths of babes but mankind cannot stand much reality. And sometimes those babes get Leprosy.
Adulthood is the recognition and reparation of unintended harm brought on by childish innocence. It is a stage of life which is defined by discipline and control. The capital that adulthood trades in is language. Words are the blocks of thought and the precursors to pointed action. I learned Hebrew because it was the tongue of my transformation into maturity. I was called to the temple on April 8th by a new name, Herschel Ben Wexler or Herschel son of Wexler, signifying my symbolic transformation into manhood in the witness of the ritual.
The cleansing of the Leper was a transformation of everyone in a community. Concessions were made and the sick were re-named, 'unclean'. This early form of quarantine, although in a sense debasing, showed a community concern with even a Leper's spiritual health. Who received more care by a Rabbi than a Leper? Very few. This section was describing a ritual. Granted, it was incredibly disgusting, but it was showing the desperate climb to divinity that all people faced. In this metaphor, in that sanctuary, we were all Lepers in our own way. This was my speech. Ah! Eureka!
The speech was the articulation of my acceptance of my place in the community. However, my speech was absurd. I mean, come on, leprosy. Aside from reality, if there is anything that maturity can handle little of, it's absurdity. In 1979, Annie Dillard wrote an essay about an eclipse she witnessed in Montana. During it's occurrence people screamed in primal awe at its splendorousness. They understood it, predicted it, yet in the face of pure absurdity, the blacking out of the afternoon sun, they reverted to a primal state reminiscent to the careless revelry of childhood. I had to embrace this to write this speech.
My Hebrew was control, it was time to augment that. My mother tongue was to be how I justified my place in my community. English became a whip with which to tame my fear of the ceremony, the speech was to leash the absurdity of my subject. Ironically, I wouldn't truly see the real still point of this moment until many years later when I learned the importance of name. Still, at the moment of the ritual, the speech itself was my mission. Important people gave speeches. Missions make importance.
I wasn't important. Although I grew up as an only child with a Jewish mother, I knew even at 13 that I was but a small speck of conglomerated atomic matter hurling through a mostly infinitesimal universe. I had someone to thank for this.
My science teacher father once wrote a guest article in the Billings Gazette about hiking. His writing style was quite Spartan. He used words solely to create meaning. Using basic sentences, he got straight to his point without flitting around with poetic nonsense like a goose waddling around Tevye's barn. He fancied himself a humble man and tried to cultivate this trait in his son.
He started writing his speech for my ceremony three months early. Dad would sit at the dining room table after every dinner, staring at a piece of paper, trying to write. After scribbling a bit, he would curse, throw his pen somewhere, go pick it up, and then get a new sheet of paper to resume writing. Along with Dad, I had connived my grandmother, my violin teacher, a family friend named Jack, and my mom in to giving prayers during the Torah reading. They were all Jewish. As he prepared to give a speech about something he didn't understand in a place he wasn't welcome during a ritual he didn't support, I noticed a change in my Dad.
With each week he seemed to become more supportive and more strict. Instead of ignoring my Hebrew studies he took an appreciation to the language. Language became a catalyst for his growing appreciation, his growing maturity, of my faith. Slowly, I started hearing his along with my mother's voice when someone had to scold me for watching TV instead of studying scripture. Eventually, he became just as an important as my mother in the process. He was desperate to not let me down.
Clock appropriately punched and a day of work in the rear view mirror, you turn off Mercer Street onto your block. The anxiety has followed you and grown through your entire day. Like a boa constrictor, it has slowly wrapped itself around your trachea, burdening speech, thought, breath.
As you pull into the parking complex of your apartment, it spews venom into your ear: Reminding you of the secretary that you are too cowardly to ask out for a drink; Urging you to feel resentment for your boss, lamenting the roads of resistance you did not take against his petty demands. The disconsolate boa grips your chest and forces anger, fear, disunity to grow in your mind and body. Panic for your very existence settles into your heart followed by an even more terrifying feeling of simply...not...caring.
Walking into your apartment, you think about the Hendrix children. Good riddance, you figure, the world needs fewer people anyway, global warming and all. Each step iterates a new bitterness. You are a terrible salesman. Each step unravels you a bit more. Your Uncle doesn't need you anyway.
You walk up the stairs into your apartment complex. You open your door. It's very dark and quiet. This is going to be a dark night, both inside and out. As you have done a thousand times before, you throw on the floor the jacket you bought when you received your first commission and head to the refrigerator. Opening it up you look into the box and pull out a beer. Time to reset, to start over, to forget it all. You forgot to do something this morning. You missed the main event, probably your life. You stare at the front of the icebox a bit more and stand teetering to and fro, on the verge of tears won't come.
It's over. You're dead. Welcome, hollow man. This is how it ends, as they said, not with a bang but with a something else. You don't really remember. That was a long time ago. Don't really care.
Something brushes past your leg and makes a pitiful mew. It stands for a moment between your legs and arches its back to stretch and looks up at you again, mewing again. Standing in silence for a bit, its mew becomes a meow and it vaults up on two legs planting its front leg-ends on your shin. Sitting for a moment with begging eyes, it gets impatient and shifts its weight to its back. With a swift downward motion, it opens its paws, reveals a set of claws, digs them into your leg, and puts four very deep scratches into your skin. Your cat is hungry. You forgot to feed her this morning.
Her name is Leah II. She was named this after your mother bought her as a gift for you for your Bar Mitzvah's tenth anniversary. Leah was a character in the Bible who gave birth to twelve tribes of people or so you kind of remember from Hebrew school. Luckily, your cat was neutered shortly after you received her. But no matter, like any proper Jewish woman in your life, the lady was going to get what she wanted. If that meant she was going to leave a few marks, so be it.
Opening a can of food she continues to incessantly meow as if telling you how to open the damn thing. Slightly annoyed, you plop the contents of the can into a bowl and throw it on the ground. For ten years you have owned this fur ball, and for ten years you have fed her. For some reason, because of some distraction, you forgot to feed her. Leah II purrs as she munches on the food. You bend down and pat her on the head, briefly pausing from her feast, she accepts your hand and then goes back to eating.
Picking your jacket from the floor, you open your wardrobe and place it amongst the rest of your clothes. Stripping down, you take off your day. While brushing the teeth, you make a note to get a hold of Ms. Hendrix. Setting your alarm for slightly earlier, you vow to make it on time. Laying back, the crickets play to a dance hall of fireflies in the humidity of the west Pennsylvania air. Dozing off, you feel Leah II jump up on your bed, curling into a furry purring mound next to your feet. As your synapses are flooded with melatonin your soul chuckles a bit as a little pun comes to your head: ' I'd better brush my teeth or I might get Macavities!'
That night you dream of something you had not thought about in years. In your dream you are awake at some ungodly hour. Probably 3 in the A-M or something. This means that you are back in college, writing some paper the night before it's due. You are terrible with time. It is a currency you seem to have to much of at this point in your life. An irredeemable currency that spends itself. Well, at least you're young.
Your love handles are more affection lumps at this point. Hands, still covered in veins, the ravages of tobacco use and stress have not yet hit your body. Sipping on coffee, your young self stares at the dull glow of the screen. You nod with approval at the paper in front of you. Not bad, not bad for a kid. In two weeks you are going to receive your BFA in English Literature, you're not sure what to do with it, but you're damn sure it's going to make you happy.
Two weeks ago your mother called you to tell you she had a surprise for you. She tells you it is a gift commemorating both your graduating from college and being a decade out from your becoming a man a decade ago, whatever that means. Satisfied with your work, you think about your life, your choices, and things that need to be done. Two weeks ago, your stock broker approached you with a tentative job offer. As tempting as that is, you have been cultivating a curiosity with linguistics, a field you feel you can really be happy with. You promise yourself that if you take the other job, you will only stay there until the recession clears up and then go back to school.
You trudge away from the monitor into bed. It's a tiny twin bed for a college student. Drifting into sleep, you wish there was someone or something to keep you company as you drift away. The veil of consciousness floats up to reveal the beauty of dream. The mind begins to unravel. The stage is set; the curtains rise and a voice awakes you from your sleep into your dream. It says, “Good morning! And go get stuffed!”
☼
The Bar Mitzvah is the most ambitious undertaking I have ever faced. I studied harder, learned more, and impressed more people on April 8th 2000 than I have or had ever done since or before. However, today, as a 23 year old college student, I only think about it maybe once a month. When asked, I usually answer that I am an agnostic or atheist. Turns out the ritual itself was not all that important. However, every time I go back to temple to drop off something for my mom or help with a service, I hear echoes of my name, Herschel Ben Wexler.
Names are the first gift a child receives from their parents. Everyone has a name. To not have a name is to not exist. A name can transform a person, give them a calling or a model to follow. My father's name was Chris. He was an Atheist, and his name was Chris. Funny.
A shared aspect of all coming of age ceremony is the naming. It signifies not only transformation but a fundamental fluctuation of identity. I was called up to Temple by Herschel Son of Wexler, Wexler being the surname of my Mother's family. This is truth. If God exists, this is how it will address me in its kingdom. However, like all people, I am son of many names.
I was born in Korea in 1986 to the name, Tae Young Jeong. My parents Anglo-sized it on May 5th 1987 when I came into America. My American name is Tai Wexler Kersten, this signifies my nationality. Herschel son of Wexler is my spiritual name. In high school, my friends nicknamed me 'Lunch Box' after a popular pop-culture icon. In college I was named 'Tautological Tai'. This is a name for my peers and friends from that time. Even with this collection, I have slowly become cognizant of a new name.
My father did not finish his speech during the Bar Mitzvah ceremony because he started sobbing. He ended in mid sentence with a hug. I wouldn't see him cry until the death of his own father.
The ritual of adulthood does not end at the reception. The meal afterward is just sustenance until one becomes truly aware of the tendency their life will and must reflect. I was not the only one undergoing Bar Mitzvah on April 8th. My father also left matured from his experiences leading up to the ceremony although I believe his ceremony ended at a different time than mine.
My coming of age ritual ended when Christopher Kersten died on June 26th 2005. I held his head and straightened his hair as his chest convulsed with the last breaths of life. The final stokes of a battle with alcohol. He hiccuped and was gone. My mother, Diane Wexler Kersten, and I sat with him for a while. After she could talk, after our own convulsions of grief briefly subsided, she said the mourner's Kaddish over his body.
The Mourner's Kaddish is how all ceremonies end. It is how a normal Sabbath ends, how a Hannuka ends, and how a Bar Mitzvah ends. On April 8th, we said it for my Grandfather who had recently died. On June 26th we said it for my father. When I left the bed cradling his cold figure, I truly was ending my path into adulthood. I knew it, I was aware. I left my father as Tai Wexler Son of Christopher Kersten.
Memories are not enough to remember the tactile emotions of experience. Ritual grants us actions with which to relive an experience, regardless of participation. Through a ritual, a person relives every time that ritual has been recited through time. Reading, in a way, is ritual. Languages, as forms which have been influenced by the earliest civilizations, allow us to feel through the ages of time.
Humans instinctively construct language, thus they instinctively grow. Language is growth, and and language makes memory. The dead are the only ones who stop speaking. The scribes of story, the lords of the tongue, knew this. Hamlet's first act upon returning from England is to verbally spar with a grave digger or the last one to see someone before the earth takes them, presenting his own wit against the other, showing his new found will, clarity, and sense of purpose. In doing so he aligns words as action. Action is happiness and happiness is duty.
In a ritual, words hold extra meaning. Each word, each name, defies the Saussurian model. Signified comes loaded with its meaning and is itself its meaning. Today, a prayer is special, not for any particularly rhetorical reason, but more because of its root in tradition and past. Name can transcend even memory.
Death is forgetting. About a year after my Bar Mitzvah, we brought my Dad's father to Montana from his home town in Pittsburgh. His name was Harold Wexler Kersten. A few years earlier, Alzheimer's disease had stricken him. By the time the family brought him to Montana, so he could be near my Dad, Harold had entered the late stages of the disease. One summer afternoon, like we had done for many summer afternoons, my parents, my uncle who was visiting, and my self went to the home where Harold was kept under 25 hour care.
When we arrived, a worried attendant notified us that my grandfather had woken up confused and was being stubborn by not coming out for lunch. My mother, my father, and my uncle tried to go calm him down but failed because he didn't recognize him. I asked my mom, not knowing any better, if I could try.
I found my grandfather, a veteran of World War two, with his pants around his legs and soiled underwear perched on his knees. Looking up at me, he made no attempt at modesty. I asked him if he knew who I was. He did.
Helping him to the bathroom, I coaxed him into some clean clothes and threw out his soiled under garments. Telling him it was lunchtime I ushered him to the lunch table where my father and mother sat waiting.
Stepping back, he looked terrified facing down the strangers staring at him so intently. He had no memory of them. Instinctively, I did as I had done many times before at school with new friends. I made introductions.
Going from figure to figure, I re-acquainted my mother to her father-in-law, I told the old man the name of his first born son, and I re-introduced my father to his dad. It was a naming ceremony for a mind without memory. My father rushed out of the room before I could finish. My mother and I found him in the car, weeping. My mom asked me to step away for a moment and as I left the car, I heard her start to say the Shema, the call to prayer of her people, as she cradled my father's sobbing figure against hers.
I believe that was the end of my father's coming of age ceremony. When he was forced to reconcile the death of his childhood dependence. Later, after Dad died, my mom let it slip why my grandfather had recognized me over everyone else. My grandfather on my Dad's side never approved of Christopher's decision to adopt an Asian kid into the family. Having been a veteran of the second World War and a traditionalist , this had always been a place of contention between my dad and his father.
I figure the joke was on Grandpa though. When he lost his progeny, it was me who helped him back. I named his children for him. For that moment of his life, I became his Rabbi. The ritual of my Bar Mitzvah, my ritualistic path to adulthood, truly began with an old Japanese man stealing someone else's medals, gained movement from the ritual itself, gained purpose from my grandfather, and ended with the death of my own father. To me, adulthood as call to duty would be inexorably linked to the givers of language, the authors of my name, my authors, my family.
A few months ago I tasked myself with digitizing photographs of my family. From a moldy chest filled with photo albums I brought out reams of pictures going back over a hundred years. It was there that I witnessed many things staggering. In those photos I found my grandfather's Bar Mitzvah, my parent's wedding, a picture of an Aunt standing in front of her first house. I found documents dating back to the earliest decade of the twentieth century when my Jewish great grandfather came into the United States. He never had a Bar Mitzvah, but he was 13 when he stood on Ellis Island and received his certificate of citizenship. Printed on it is his name, Herschel, the same name with which I was called to the Bema during my own Bar Mitzvah. I found this under an album with pictures of my mother playing with her sister outside a tenement house three miles from Philadelphia's city center.
I am aware how absurd this must sound how dumbly nostalgic, also, I am adopted. But no matter, this is mimetic, more important than blood and bigger than genetics. This even goes back past Herschel. With every movement, every mundane ritual I am a living vessel of their legacy. It is my responsibility, my duty, to them and to myself to honor their trials and their dreams. There is no compromise here. The ritual is more than a reenactment of tradition or a passage into some ephemeral sense of adulthood. It is a reunion for those billions gone whose experiences have given us today's blessings. Joyce's God is in our shared experience: mundane, transcendent, or otherwise. The ritual marks a moment where the ghosts of all those who stood resolute in trial and sought beauty in comfort meet to proclaim their existence and insure their remembrance to all who follow.
