When I originally was presented with the idea to have a B’Mitzvah, I wasn’t planning to do it. It just seemed like writing lots of essays with no reward. It meant a lot to my mother, however. She felt connected with her father, my Grandpa David, through Judaism, and unfortunately, he died before I was born. Though they never joined a congregation while my mom was growing up, she thinks Grandpa David would have been interested in our congregation and enjoyed celebrating with her. Our connection to Judaism means a lot to my mom, so I agreed to have a B’Mitzvah. But now that I’ve done it, I can see it’s more than just writing essays. The work I did has meaning.
I started the B’Mitzvah process during Covid, which created a lot of complications. First of all, I didn’t meet my mentor face to face for most of the process. I did most of my work during Covid, meaning we were stuck in Zoom calls and couldn’t meet in person. Also, I couldn’t do any of the community service that I was interested in because it was all shut down due to covid.
The first thing someone does in this process is interview their family. I interviewed my grandparents and my parents. When I went back to look at the family interview google doc, I had trouble finding it because I had forgotten it was called “Her mom killed the chicken”. When I found the document, I immediately remembered why this was. In my interview with my grandma (my mom’s mother, Alice), I learned that when she was little, she was given a pet chick that turned out to be a rooster. Her mom eventually had it killed because it was making too much noise and making the neighbors mad. When I typed up my notes, the document automatically got called “Her mom killed the chicken”. During these interviews I learned a lot about my family that I didn’t know, and probably still wouldn’t know to this day. My family values paper and family interviews are something I am glad I did.
As so much time has passed since I wrote my Role Model paper, I now think I would no longer choose MrBeast as my role model. I still look up to him, but not enough to be a role model. I chose him for several reasons, but I think a big factor was my own bias because I thought being a YouTuber was cool. I am still entertained by YouTube, but I would like to think I have matured past the point of wanting it to be my career. I still find all the other aspects of him admirable, but I think that bias is what sealed the deal on my choice of MrBeast as my role model. I think this is a great example of how I have changed over this year.
As I said in my main project, I originally wanted to write about how Hannukah has changed over time, but after doing a bit of research I changed my topic. The new idea was actually really fun to learn about and research, because I was so interested in the topic. It’s something I’m still curious about with other holidays, and I’m glad I chose that topic. I learned something that I was very surprised by and I want to share with more people.
The thing I want to talk about the most is this congregation’s unique B’Mitzvah format. While many other people read lines from the Torah for their B’Mitzvah, I didn’t do that. Writing these essays, while sometimes difficult, is meaningful. I learned from this experience. If I read from the Torah, I would just be saying words from a page that I didn’t understand. This made my B’Mitzvah process less of a drag, because I was interested in what I was writing about most of the time. This moment is a lot more important and memorable now that it means something more than just an abstract title.
It took a while to make this happen, and I want to thank everyone who made it possible. I want to thank my mentor, Amy, for helping me all along this process. I literally couldn’t have done this without her. I’d like to thank Rabbi Tzemah and Isabel Kaplan for helping me with my research and giving me great feedback on my papers. I’d like to thank my mom for actually getting me to write the papers. Thank you to Rebecca for the amazing music and being my KidSchool teacher for so many years. And thanks to all of you for coming.
