Jolie Elins
October 12, 2013
This process has been very, very long. I am 14 now, and I started my Bat Mitzvah preparations at age 11. Three years of work has gone into this. At first I wasn’t sure how much of myself I wanted to put into this process, but as I’ve completed each step I’ve found myself becoming more invested, discovering more about myself that I didn’t know before, and I’ve changed in many ways since the beginning of this journey. I thought the experience would be limiting, and I just wanted to get this finished with and go back to sleeping through the weekends.
When I had to begin with the family interviews, I was a little discouraged. I don’t have many relatives, and it was difficult to keep track of all the information. The first step made me think that everything would be this confusing, and I stopped working for a while. Then I started working on my values paper. I started out just writing down some things I thought I could write about easily, but then I started really thinking about my values, and it not only helped me write the paper, but it helped me discover more about myself.
I thought that I would feel sort of weird, writing about myself and what I believe, but it was entirely different. These were things that I hadn’t even known about myself, and I was grateful to this entire process for helping me discover them. When I came to the fifth step, I knew my Bat Mitzvah would be a little different from my friends. I had decided on a role model that neither my mother nor my mentor really liked. Lady Gaga. I had just started the high school application process, so this particular paper was taking a very long time. I started to slowly just stop doing any Bat Mitzvah work, until I didn’t know how to start again.
I was stuck for months until my mentor tried a new tactic. She told me that I could use Lady Gaga for my paper, and that she would fully support me, if I could come up with reasons, values we shared, and put it into a paper. Well, let me tell you the paper was done. It was at this point that I was supposed to start thinking about a major project.
The idea of no real limits scared me and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Rabbi Peter told me it could be absolutely anything as long as I could relate it back to Judaism. The open-endedness of it scared me but I’d learned from this process to just think about myself and then put it into words or actions. I decided to make a movie, as I have always been really interested in filmmaking, and I wanted to make it about someone I admired. I found Gertrude Berg. She could’ve been in my hero role model paper, right along with Lady Gaga.
This entire process has been an amazing experience. I’ve become closer with people and learned more about myself than I ever thought I could.
I want to thank my mother for helping me with this entire process, my mentor Renee Fields for never giving up on me, Dan Wyman for his beautiful music, Helene Fisher for her help and encouragement with my major project, Rabbi Peter Schweitzer for his guidance, and Isabel Kaplan for her patience and hard work both on my Bat Mitzvah and on the B’nai Mitzvah program. (I also want to thank her for stepping in at the last minute for Rabbi Peter.)
