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            by Nate Levin

 

            My head screamed with information. It was a Monday night and I sat in my room in my big green chair frantically flipping through sheets of paper and practicing my Torah and Haftorah readings for Saturday. There were pages and pages of confusing Hebrew letters and lines and lines of singing tropes.  Worst of all, I was supposed to give a five-page drash (a speech analyzing the Torah sections I would read from) in addition to everything else. It would be my Bar Mitzvah on Saturday, for which I had been preparing for over a year, and I certainly did not feel ready.

 

With a marked up prayer book in my hands and a torn blue Kippah on my head, I stared blankly at Chapter 3, verse 13 of the book Deuteronomy over and over again, trying to understand just why G-d hadn’t let Moses into the land of Canaan. It didn’t make sense. Why would a man who had led the Jewish people out of Egypt, slavery, and oppression, through 40 years of wandering in a desert, and then into freedom, happiness and peace, be denied admittance to the Promised Land only because he struck a rock with his stick? I was perplexed. I began to think about the good parts of my Bar Mitzvah. I would see all my relatives and friends from around the country. My Dad’s Aunt and cousins who lived in Seattle have had major family problems in the past, and still refused to talk to each other. I hoped that my Bar Mitzvah would recreate the family bond between them. They would have to see each other, and they would have to talk. I beamed at the thought of having my cousins, my aunts, and my uncles all together at the same time. My grandma couldn’t come, however, since she had to have surgery that weekend. I could deal with it.  One glitch in the whole event wouldn’t bring it all down. I couldn’t stop wishing that I was at the moment in time, five days later, when I had just finished my service and all I had left to do was await the party that night.  I don’t usually get very nervous before events, but I was nervous. A drop of sweat curled off my nose and splashed down onto page 899 of my prayer book. The more I read section 3.13, the more I didn’t understand it. All the words churned around uselessly in my mind. G-d. Moses. Canaan. Prophet. My back slipped further down the green poka-dots on my chair as I stretched out and my eyelids began to slide shut. This was a comfy chair. I closed down my brain, wishing for Saturday to come tomorrow, so I could get this part of my life over with.

           

            “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!” The air split under the intensity of the noise. My windows rattled and my heart stopped. I sprang straight up in my chair and with my eyes three-quarters of the way open I glanced at the clock. It was twelve fifty-nine. Of course, I thought, my little sister Mia was screaming again. I had the only family in the world that stayed up until one o’clock every night. She ran up the stairs and burst into my room, barging through the door. “NATHAN! MOMMY SAID TO DO YOUR BAR MITZVAH STUDYING ONE MORE TIME!”

“Jesus Christ. Why do you have to scream? Every other ten-year-old in this whole entire country is asleep.”

“DO IT!” she yelled and scampered off down the stairs. I was also the only boy in the world whose sister has more control over him then he does over her. I had to obey or else my mom would get upset, and I did not want that. I went back to work, chanting and memorizing, chanting and memorizing. I heard footsteps slowly coming up the stairs. It was my mom.

“Nate.” She always spoke in a disciplinary tone.

“I’m doing what you asked, so please don’t bother me.”

“I came up to tell you, your grandmother just called from New York. She’s going to be there on Saturday. Her surgery was canceled.” The last puzzle piece fell into place. It was exactly what I had been hoping for in these last few months: a complete family reunion. The party, the music, the joy. Overwhelmed, I was shocked back into reality when I remembered that I still had to write my drash.

            The night felt like it would never end. I spent the next couple of hours mulling over Chapter 3 of the Torah until I was finally fed up with Judaism as a whole. Slamming the book shut on my desk, I tucked myself in under the covers and clicked off my reading light. There were five days left.

           

            My eyes snapped open. Six AM, Tuesday morning. A strange, eerie feeling seemed to waft through air as I sat up in my bed. Silence. There was definitely something going on right now, and I had no idea what it was. I slipped out of bed and opened the door to my parents’ room. Asleep. While walking back into my room, a sharp noise broke the silence. “BRINGGGGGGGGGG.” Who would be calling this early? “BRINGGGGGGGGGG.” I picked up the receiver and held it’s cold plastic body to my ear.

            “Nate?”

            “Yeah, it’s me. You freaked me out.” My friend Arik was on the other line. “Why are you calling so early?”

            “Listen. You need to turn on your TV. You have no idea –“

            “What?”

            “Just turn on your TV,” he said. “Bye, I have to go.” Click. I went downstairs, wondering what my friend’s problem was. I don’t normally watch TV, and it was way too early in the morning to be calling people. The green button on my remote control felt even colder than the telephone receiver had. Half awake, I pressed it down and glanced at the television.

 

            The world stood still. On the screen, a tiny white speck flew into a colossal grey structure. My living room lit up orange as glowing flames plummeted out of the structure. Small objects jumped from the windows and dropped into eternity. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t silent anymore. Women were shrieking, sirens were screaming. The reporter was even crying on national television. I ran upstairs and woke up my parents and my little sister. Together we all watched as the towers plunged to the earth and two of the western world’s greatest symbols tumbled over themselves at the heels of the Middle East.

            To say the least, I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do. My mom and sister were crying and my dad was making phone calls, but I just sat in my couch, staring at the replay, over and over again as the planes hit the towers, and the towers fell down. Luckily, I didn’t think I knew anyone who would have been in the World Trade Center. I couldn’t figure out how this event had affected me personally. Then I saw one of those scrolling messages on the bottom of the TV. President grounds all flights. Airports shut down. I was slapped in the face when suddenly I realized that my uncle, aunt, cousins and grandma had all been planning to fly out that day. I would have no family at my Bar Mitzvah.

            In the afternoon, I received a phone call from my Rabbi. While tears rivered down my face, we had a discussion about what had happened only a few hours ago. “I can’t do this anymore.”

            “Nathan,” he told me in his soft but straightforward tone, “I know that you’re upset and in shock right now, as am I, but I need you to listen to me. You are going to be able to pull it together. Last week as I was traveling back through LA after leading a Shabbat service, I noticed a giant billboard on top of an old warehouse. It was all black except for the lettering, which read, ‘Do not put a period where G-d has only placed a comma.’ I thought about this for a couple of days wondering what it meant. I was in the dark until last week it dawned on me.” For a moment there was silence on the other line. “I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that a professional baseball player has just won the World Series and that night he gets drunk and is driving home when he hits an oncoming car and is paralyzed for life. At one moment he thought he was on the top of the world and placed a period there by assuming he would be ok driving home drunk, but at the next moment everything drastically changed. He should have realized that life can alter in an instant, and that thinking you’re invincible is placing a period where G-d has only placed a comma. Nathan, this applies to you in the same way right now, just at the opposite end of the spectrum. I wouldn’t be so upset as to place a period in your life right now. I was faced with the decision to cancel your Bar-Mitzvah and postpone it until later this year, but I decided against it, because I think that you have the strength to go up there on Saturday and lead the congregation. We need you.” Taken aback by what I had just heard, I stood outside on my front porch looking at two small kids playing on the sidewalk. They were too young to have any inkling of what had just happened, and ran around in their own worlds smiling and laughing. I thought to myself that if there were at least two people in this country who were still happy, then maybe I shouldn’t be placing a period at this moment. I returned the portable phone to my ear. “Rabbi, I think I can do it. I’ll see you on Saturday.” He gave me permission to set up a video camera hidden in the corner of the synagogue so that my family who couldn’t come would be able to watch later, something which he had never allowed before.

            Over the next few days, I worked in the lonely silence of my house finishing up my practice. With the fall of the twin towers had come a realization that stressing out over something as simple as writing my drash was insignificant when compared to what had just occurred. I had made a decision along with my Rabbi to not include anything about September eleventh. We determined that he would address the issue in his own separate speech, and that I needed to provide continuity in a time of such instability by giving a traditional drash. I hoped and prayed that by some chance, the airports would reopen for Saturday. I felt like a criminal who had just been sentenced to death, and there was nothing I could do to change it.

            September the fifteenth came, and my relatives did not. But I didn’t stand in the synagogue alone. The room was filled with so many people that the doors to the courtyard had to be opened up so everyone could fit in. An ordinary service had about 200 people, but on that day there were 400. Humans need a source of comfort after such a traumatic event, and religion is what many people turn to. I was nervous at first about getting up in front of this huge group, but I realized that it was my duty, and that these people needed to hear my voice calling out the words of the Torah that day. The ceremony itself went by lightning quick as I sang and recited my drash in the front of the room for the shortest four hours of my life. I don’t remember what I was thinking during that time, but I do remember what I saw when I glanced around the room. Half of the people in that tiny synagogue were crying, looking back at the ones they lost, while the other half smiled trying to enjoy the present and looking forward into the future.

            After my service was over, a woman approached me, and smiling through her sobs she told me that she had just lost her son who had worked in the twin towers. But, she said, my Bar Mitzvah had shown her that there is still joy even in tragedy. Her son had only been ten years older than I, and I had reminded her of him at a younger age. I felt sad and happy at the same time. Life must continue, I thought, and even when things look so dismal as to place a period, we must remember that it is most likely only a comma.

            That night I danced as hard as I could with my friends at my Bar-Mitzvah party, and two months later, I sat in a gigantic black limousine heading toward San Francisco with all my relatives who hadn’t been able to make it. We were watching the tape of my service, drinking sodas and laughing hysterically. I remembered that only last September had I felt like life couldn’t have gotten worse, like I was stuck at the bottom of a pit and couldn’t climb out. Falling back into the comfort of the sleek leather seats, I closed my eyes, letting the sound of laughter soothe my mind. Life can change around awfully fast.

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