🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
The synagogue’s main sanctuary seats over a thousand people. The walls are dark wood, the doors gilded. Four stained glass windows let in the afternoon light. Onstage is the ark that holds the Torah scrolls. Beside it, our family friend’s two children sit in regal chairs onstage. The daughter swings her legs excitedly or nervously or maybe triumphantly. The son leans back in his chair, almost impassive or just playing it cool.
The sanctuary is about an eighth full, which is still a lot of people for a B’nai Mitzvah. The men wear yarmulkas and suits. Most of the women wear dresses. A low murmur of voices accompanies the organ music. My mother, sister, brother-in-law, niece, nephew, and I sit in the middle row.
The thought of my niece and nephew’s B’nai Mitzvah makes my chest tighten. They had it here five years ago. My brother-in-law is Jewish, and my sister converted; she’s very involved with the temple. At their B’nai Mitzvah, I was there but not there. It was during one of my worst episodes of serious mental illness. Unable to function on my own, I lived with my mother, existing so inside myself as to be completely outside what was happening around me.
Now that I’m recovering, I’m just a person sitting in the temple with other people watching a service. No panic or mania or crushing depression. No crisis.
The children read from the Torah. When they finish, they smile and look to their mom for approval. When others stand, I do too. I repeat and read from the Hebrew Bible.
At the end, everyone sings and claps while the children and family walk in a procession around the hall. It’s exhilarating to watch.
My parents essentially raised my sister and me agnostic with just a hint of atheism on my dad’s side. They sent us to Sunday school mainly, they later told me, to get us out of the house for a few hours. It puzzled me, all that talk of Jesus, and the activities we did like making the animals on Noah’s Ark from toilet paper tubes and the construction-paper crosses on which we wrote God never leaves me.
My sister eventually found solace in Judaism, but religion has never spoken to me. Until now.
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