Chad Gadya

I'm a Schmuck at My Own Bat Mitzvah

    If I had known that going to my Bat Mitzvah would lead me to battle Biblical vampires, stumble upon a place that the Angel of Death shuns, and almost die every 3.14 days, then I would have stayed home. Being grounded would have been preferable to what I went through. Being grounded and chastised by my mother would have been a bowl of warm matzo ball soup compared to the bitter herbs that I endured.

    As it was though, I was excited for my Bat Mitzvah. I was humming softly as I spun around in my bedroom, lifting my small, white goat named Marzipan off of my bed.

      "I'm going to be an adult!" I sang. "I'm going to be an adult."

      My goat gave me a baleful look and bleated, prompting me to set her down on my pillow. She curled up on it in a heartbeat, her eyes beginning to close. While she may have been the runt of the litter, she was the pampered early Bat Mitzvah present from my mother.

          I had all of my morning chores complete and nothing good to do to eat up my time. I spun around the room, lifting my hands in the air and pretending to fly like an angel. I was flapping my arms around like a demented bat when my mother opened the door and I jumped back to avoid the door. This resulted in me jumping backwards.

     I gave my mother a winsome smile. I had taken extra care to look nice today: wearing a special dress that my mother bought for the occasion, donning heels at my mother's insistence, and even putting on some makeup for the first time to hide my acne. As it was, I thought I looked polished, but my mother sighed when she saw that I was still playing like a child.

      "When will you grow up?" she sighed.

     "Maybe today!" I said brightly.

      "You cannot grow up in one day," my mother said. "Are you ready?"

      I nodded, my heart skipping in excitement. I gave Marzipan a small kiss on her head and she bleated.

        "I'll save some food for you," I said, winking.

       I followed my mother out of the house and into her beat-up car. My mother had the money to purchase a new one, but she cared little about "showing off piles of green paper" as she put it. Instead, the money we had went into our land.

     I would not be bragging to say that my mother runs the most beautiful and unusual farm in America. Our small, snug red-brick home was nestled in a clearing. Small, short grass was maintained by our herd of goats and surrounding that clearing was a grove of etrog trees on one side. During the summer, their citrusy smell would waft through my window and into my bedroom, making me hungry for toast with etrog jam.

      Growing etrogs is risky because so many of them fail to meet the criteria to be used in the Sukkot ceremony. To supplement our income, our herd of goats- or living lawnmowers as my mother dubs them-produce milk. We also grow frankincense, myrrh, and Biblical persimmon. We even have a bee hive and no, they have not sued us yet.
    As I perched in the back seat of my mother's car and imagined flying like the raven that was circling our house, I thought of how excited I was. Today was my special day and I did not want anything to go wrong. I had picked out the songs months in advance and refused to participate in the hyped up chair ritual. This was a Bat Mitzvah-not a wedding-and I was not going to get hoisted in the air like a bride. I did not want to end up severely injured at 13.

  As we pulled up to the synagogue, a question popped into my mind and without thinking, it fell from my tongue and into the air.

      "Mom, why don't we have a chariot instead of a car?" I asked. "You're always trying to live a simple life and cars are too complicated. They break every four months!"