The most significant event in my life at the time began one weekend. My mother and I drove to the Synagogue to have a meeting with the cantor. I was 12, meaning I would have my Bar Mitzvah soon. Normally, we would meet with the rabbi, but our rabbi had been new to the synagogue. Our synagogue had not kept the same rabbi for a while. After the primary rabbi retired a few years earlier, we had changed rabbis twice. But the cantor had been the same since I was young. In his office, with his desk directly in front of the door and a couch and a table on the left, we were going over the documents we needed to sign and the responsibilities that I had as the bar mitzvah. We could tell the cantor had done this countless times; while we were going over the documents, he would sign them while the paper was faced toward me. The responsibility that I now had only hit me when he asked me to try to read the beginning of my Torah portion.

From then, I had started to go to the mitzvah study group held at the synagogue on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Everyone that had a mitzvah coming up had gone. Each day, we would begin with a mock Saturday morning Shabbat. Two or three people who had their mitzvah coming up in the next month would go up on the bimah, or the stage, to lead the mock service. The service is followed by the cantor or the rabbi talking about a specific topic that relates to growing up or the responsibilities that come with it. Lastly, each student would meet with a rabbi or a tutor to learn specifically of their Torah portion.

When I recollect these classes, I vividly remember one day. We sat in a circle on the carpeted ground in front of the bimah, and the cantor takes out a zip lock bag. He tells us to take one and pass the bag around the group of kids sitting in a circle. Inside the bag were small pieces of brown and tan yarn, maybe the length of my index finger. He told us to associate something that we would like to remember to the yarn and tie it onto a finger, as a visual reminder. I lightly tied mine on my lift pinkie finger. I connected the importance of my mitzvah to the yarn and used is as a reminder that it’s something that I cannot procrastinate on. Unlike others that were there the same day, I kept the yarn tied onto my finger until the day of my bar mitzvah.

In January of 2014, I remember a day when one of the other rabbis called me and a girl who shared the same mitzvah date into her office. She had a collection of those little erasers that looked like animals. She had them neatly organized on the top of her desk and filing cabinet. The meeting began with her giving us one each. The purpose of this meeting resembled a pre-game speech that hypes up the players. She wrote a short, but encouraging message that was written in a big font to make seem longer than it was.  The message said something along the lines of, “Welcome to my bar mitzvah. Today, I am going to amaze you with my awesome Torah chanting skills. Please sit back, fasten your seatbelts, and be prepared to be thoroughly and totally wowed by my radical skills.” She printed it out for us to put in the front of our binders so that we would see it often.

Around this time, my procrastination had caught up to me. I had only memorized three-quarters of my Torah portion. Somehow, I pulled it off. On the day of my bar mitzvah, I lead the service smoothly. My only regret was talking a bit too fast, as I do when I get nervous. Most of the nervousness was gone by the most important part, a speech describing the Torah portion and an overview of the learning process. The latter was similar to an Oscar acceptance speech. It’s the most emotional part for everyone involved. This also caught me off guard, but it did not impede me from delivering it to my satisfaction.

Through this journey, I had interacted with the congregation more than the past ten years. Before all of this, I did not enjoy doing what was necessary to be a member of the community: I hated going to Sunday school every week and thought the Shabbat service my family went to once a month was a waste of time. My bar mitzvah put me closer to the congregation and made me the Jewish adult - that never had to go to Sunday school ever again.