I am truly humbled by the overwhelming response to my daughters’ bnot mitzvah. We had over 2 dozen family and friends who came out for the service.

Firstly, a public apology for the length: 3 hours, a whole hour longer than a normal service— I knew it was going to go longer than our usual service, but I truly didn’t know that long. I don’t know how we could have estimated that badly. And it wasn’t any single thing on the agenda, either. It was just lots of little things: too many people all trying to cram into that tiny VW Beetle. We went an hour over, five minutes at a time.

However, I was truly impressed with what my daughters accomplished and how well they performed. All their practicing clearly paid off. Now, I helped them practice their Hebrew, and I know what they did, but I couldn’t have gotten up there and done it, because I’m just not that good. And they delivered their speeches with power, confidence, and a bit of panache. I told them—and not just as a proud father—that it was one of the best bnai mitzvah I had ever attended.

But all the work I put into my speech over the past two weeks also paid off.

Or Maybe I Need to Learn to Talk Like John Moschitta

… or Paris Geller.

My mind goes back to one episode of Gilmore Girls (“It Should Have Been Lorelai”, season 2, episode 14—and no, I didn’t know that off the top of my head) when Paris was trying to coach Rory for a debate, and trying to get her to up her wpm. (And Gilmore Girls, if you remember, was all about increasing the wpm.)

I finally sat down and turned my sketchy notes into a first draft of my bat-mitzvah speech: 1014 words. At 125 words per minute (a reasonably average speaking speed), that’s over 8 minutes of talking, which is 3 minutes too long.

So I need to cut about 40% of those words. Or else maybe I just need to learn to talk faster.

(However, I’m thinking I’ll clean up and post the full version of the speech in these pages, in a couple of weeks after the bat mitzvah is done.)

Do You Remember the "Internet"

As you may know, I’m not Jewish. My wife and kids are. From a spiritual perspective, I’m a Gentile living in the land of Messiah. And I’m satisfied that that’s where I belong, at least for now. But none of the unusualness of this increasingly common situation is going to keep my girls from becoming bnot mitzvah. And that means a bunch of my Gentile relatives and friends, who have never been to a bat mitzvah and don’t know what to expect, are going to come to my girls’ bnot mitzvah… and still don’t know what to expect.

When I first started attending synagogue with the rest of my family, I also didn’t know what to expect. Fortunately, I found the people at Ruach Israel friendly and accepting. But the liturgy overwhelmed me a little (despite the fact that I already knew a little Hebrew), and I didn’t know what the rules were. And it wasn’t until years later that I had learned enough to begin to truly appreciate some of the magic of the weekly Shabbat Shacharit (or even knew how to spell “shacharit”).

So this post I’m writing primarily for those friends and family who will be visiting for the bat mitzvah, to give them a heads-up on some of the things I wish I had known six years ago.

This morning, I napped while my daughters attended their bat mitzvah lessons. I’ve been exhausted after watching just about every bar-mitzvah themed TV episode ever produced (though some of them at 4x speed, just because the shows themselves were so stupid). Nonetheless, this exercise has revealed to me one important fact: the bar mitzvah is the only ethnic ceremony in the universe not depicted in Star Trek.

Now, television, over the years, has become much more relaxed about the bnot mitzvah. Culminating in the recent “Karen does her first bar mitzvah” episode of Smash. (Which reminds me, I need to make sure everyone who’s coming to my girls’ bnot mitzvah knows the words to “Hava Nagila” so they sing it.)

One of my favorite TV-watching activities is to figure out the inaccuracies and inconsistencies, especially as it applies to real-life culture. Here are some notable bar-mitzvah episodes:

Sometimes so many things get going on, it’s hard to keep track. One big project coming up is my girls’ bnot mitzvah.

For those of you not in the know (which included myself up until recently), that’s “bnot mitzvah,” which is more than one bat mitzvah. So each of my girls is having a bat mitzvah. Both of them together are having two bnot mitzvah. Kind of like “culs-de-sac” or “attorneys general,” which lots of people also tend to get wrong. I thought more than one bat mitzvah would be “bat mitzvahs” or “bat mitzvot”… because the plural of a Hebrew “-ah” word ends in “-ot” (or “-os,” in Ashkenaz), which is why the plural of matzah is matzot (or matzos). But none of that is relevant here, because the plural of bat is bnot, so the plural of bat mitzvah is bnot mitzvah, and that’s that. That’s also enough grammar for today.