My DMV Bar Mitzvah
I saw him from across the room. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old. His curls cascaded out of his black felt hat, down his pimply face, bobbing up and down as he wandered aimlessly through the puffy-eyed hoard. It was about noon on a Friday and the Department of Motor Vehicles was buzzing with no-nonsense New Yorkers. As he approached, I made my move, a subtle signal to him that I would be receptive to his inevitable advance. I had the look, he just had to notice me. He could give me something that I had been denied my whole life. I unbuttoned my shirt one button more than I normally do, exposing not only a thick rug of curly dark chest hair, but also my Star of David pendant, a masculine, cold, stainless steel necklace, the likes of which are given to Israeli soldiers on the front lines. And just as I suspected, he began making his way toward me, like a moth to a shining blue lamp, compelled. “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” he said.
Playing it cool, not wanting to come off as desperate I told him my mother’s side of the family was, but we weren’t that religious. This was enough for him, I knew it would be. Quicker than you can say I’ll have the pastrami on rye Shemuel was leading me by the wrist through the crowd. I had time to kill and I couldn’t think of a better way than to check a major item off my bucket list.
“Have you had a Bar Mitzvah?” he asked.
“No.” I replied.
“Do you want one?”
“Yes. A thousand times yes!”
The second the words left my lips, he was wrapping my fingers and arms in the oddly erotic leather straps, known to Jews as tefillin, and to my friend from West Virginia as “that Jewish S&M looking stuff”. It wasn’t the most traditional setting for a Bar Mitzvah, there was no band, no DJ, nobody to give a speech about how proud they were of the man I was becoming, but it was something, and I was elated.
I grew up in a barely culturally Jewish household with a recovering Catholic father and a Jewish mother, who described herself as “more of a Buddhist” than anything else. Needless to say, religion was, and continues to be, an uncomfortable subject for me. I don’t believe in God and I never had, none of the Jews in my life did. In fact, I had forgotten that there were Jews who believed in God until I moved to New York and saw the large packs of Hasidic families roaming around Brooklyn, a wildlife refuge for the ultra-orthodox. Yet, I always felt like a fraud calling myself a Jew because I had bagels once a week and attended very abbreviated Passover Seders at my grandparent’s house that ultimately boiled down to four glasses of grape juice, a matzo ball, and front row seats to horrific arguments about my mother’s choice not to circumcise her two sons, a detail I spared Shemuel that day outside the DMV, for fear he’d renege on his end of the deal. Yahweh would understand, I told myself.
In full view of the DMV and the adjacent Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, wrapped in leather, with a little black box strapped to my head I mumbled the Hebrew words Shemuel mumbled into my ear. The whole was oddly sensual. I wouldn’t say I was aroused, but a rush of excitement shot through my body as I mispronounced these ancient words whose meaning were a complete mystery to me. Maybe it was the rush of getting away with something, like I was just handed a diploma from a school I was only accepted to in the first place because my mom was an alumnus. I knew I was still a fraud, but I had one more defining characteristic of the real thing. If I were an old vase on the Antiques Roadshow, the expert would tell the poor old woman who I belonged to that I was a beautiful piece, a good looking forgery, but not the real deal. I wouldn’t be insured for much, but I’d be nice to keep around the house. I could live with that.
He couldn’t have looked more excited. Neither could I. How many people could he have possibly expected to be game for what was objectively an absurd sight to behold at the DMV? He hit the jackpot with me. When I had finished, Shem hugged me. A real hug, not a one-armed side hug. Not a butt-out quick hug. A real hug. “Mazel tov,” he said “You’re a man now.” We parted ways, I back into the DMV to wait in line, and he, I imagined, going back to Crown Heights to brag about the 25 year old man looking to capture a bit of the Jewish experience while running his errands for the day. “Mazel Tov!” they would all say, “What a mensch you are.” I truly believed that he made me a man in the eyes of God, but I made his day, maybe even his week. “Mazel Tov, what a mensch you are” I said to myself.
