Noah's grandfather, Methuselah, died at the ripe old age of 969. Noah himself lived to be 950, Enos celebrated his 905th birthday before expiring and Lamech blew out 777 candles before he died. Standing out from the crowd was Enoch, who died in his prime at only 365.
What did they do in all those years? We, with an average lifespan of 82 years, manage to accomplish more than they did in centuries. Nowadays, ideas form at dizzying speed; our collective knowledge grows exponentially; planes take us swiftly from here to there. What I can do in an hour on the computer, Mahalalel couldn't complete in his entire 895-year life.
Then lives became shorter. Some say that life expectancy declined dramatically after the great flood in the Book of Genesis. "My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for that he also is flesh; therefore shall his days be a hundred and twenty years" (Genesis 6:3). So along came disease, poverty, wars and other things that shortened our lives. But then came science and made our lives longer again.
Today, humans often live two or even three lives – we divorce, remarry, leave careers, start from square one, undergo complete transformations. We are born, and die and are reborn and die again for a lifetime.
When the years of life wax and wane, the entire axis shifts. We get married later. We begin driving earlier. The age of criminal accountability keeps changing. Sexual maturity begins sooner. Financial maturity is achieved later. But one thing never changes: Bar mitzvah.
Thirteen years – that is the age at which a boy becomes a man responsible for his own spiritual world. My eldest has now taken on this responsibility. On his 13th birthday, we went to the Western Wall early in the morning. Mother and son.
The efforts to build a Reform, mixed-gender prayer plaza at the holy site has dominated the headlines lately. Until recently, the Western Wall was a gender-specific setting with a men's section and a women's section. The Reform movement has now established the "Israel section," where men and women can pray together. I prefer to call it the family section. Try to call it that and see how your blood pressure drops back down. I don't care what the Reform Jews do there. (I do care about what they do at the general, segregated prayer plaza, because there, attacking the gender divide would compromise the right of other Jews to pray.) What I care about is that in the "family section," I can breathe in the holiness standing next to my son.
The controversial prayer plaza, which has stirred a lot of dissent, is close to the Western Wall Plaza, but isn't actually at the main part of the wall. Praying at the mixed-gender plaza, one can touch the stones of the Temple Mount – stones that are technically part of the Western Wall, only not the part of the wall that has been sanctified by centuries of tears and notes. The mixed-gender plaza is situated further south of where the Holy of Holies was when the Temple existed, and thus, worshippers there need to pray at a more acute angle to face it.
There were prayer books, Torah scrolls and tables around the plaza. A number of small groups that looked like families stood in circles, draped in tallitot. The group closest to us was singing songs of praise with an American accent.
We approached the massive wall with exhilaration. It was peppered with a few notes stuffed into its cracks. Its stones are lighter than the stones of the traditional Kotel. I prayed with my son for himself, the family and the people of Israel. We read together from Igeret Haramban - the letter that Nachmanides wrote to his eldest son with the instruction to read it every week. We read Maimonides' 13 principles of Jewish faith. I recited the blessing parents customarily give their children on Yom Kippur evening, adding my own text.
It was a very maternal bar mitzvah ceremony that would not have been easy to pull off at any other holy site. I was very grateful for this opportunity. But it wasn't THE Kotel. It will never be.
* * * *
We met his father for the tefillin-laying ceremony at the traditional Kotel. The sight of my son bound and entangled in the tefillin straps was simultaneously rapturous and alarming. A second birth. My son said the blessing for his tallit and I immediately recalled the receiving blanket that the midwife wrapped him in when he was born.
After that, like a maturation in fast forward, I watched him through the cracks in the partition dividing the men's and women's sections. He appeared to physically grow as he read from the Torah. I had to stand on a stool to see him better, sending him a blessing from afar.
He raised his eyes and saw me peeking over the copper-colored partition. We shared a private gazing tunnel above everyone else's head. Again I was reminded of his birth, how I lifted him up for the first time and he looked at me inquisitively, as if he was testing me. Occasionally he cried, as 3-minute-old souls tend to do, but then, to my surprise, he became silent every time he heard my voice speaking to him. For nine months we were literally inseparable, with only a thin membrane between us. It felt as though we had been speaking by phone for nine months and finally, we were meeting face to face.
At the bar mitzvah, I gave my son a kiddush cup and told him that from now on, he would lead the kiddush on Shabbat and I would bless the bread. To say kiddush is to make a division – demarcating specific areas of holiness and creating mountains inside reality that rise up above the horizon of the mundane.
On Shabbat, after he read from the Torah, I read two beautiful Hebrew songs that mothers sing to their sons: "My Life" (which includes the lyric "there is no love in the world like the love of a mother") and "When You Are a King," which was translated and performed by Shlomo Artzi. I put my own spin on them.
In the song "My Life," there is no separation – the child doesn't emerge from his mother's womb. "I breathe your skin, want to keep you close to me, protected from any hint of pain. What wouldn't I do for you, my life, so that you'll never leave me." But for the sake of any child's individuation, there has to be a separation (according to psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler). Growing pains include distance, rebellion, partitions.
In the Hebrew translation of the other song, "When You Are a King," we see the son as a king of beasts or king of the mountains, in a distant and foreign place. "There, in a bed, before a big, blue, cold and cheap wall," his mother accompanies him from afar. Unlike the mother in "My Life," this mother is not convinced that her son is perfect. In fact, she knows he isn't, and that only she sees him in that perfect light. The song features humility and understanding of the maternal role: For me, you can be the king of the world, but in the real world, you'll have to work hard. That is precisely what I told my son, who has now grown taller than me.
