My little girl

I remember it like it was yesterday… twelve days from my twelfth birthday she just up and walked into my life… I’d never known that you could just fall in love instantly, impenetrably, permanently… It was March fourth nineteen ninety six and it was all over for me… life would never be the same.

Shaina came into my family’s life as a bit of a surprise, the youngest of my aunt and uncle, the product of two families becoming one, the youngest of four (six really) we all knew she was destined for greatness, I knew it right from the start.

I always used to hate it when I was little and my older cousins and relatives would tell stories about the day I was born. Get nostalgic about the silly things I had done when I was little and now I’ve become one of them. This weekend I watched my little girl become an adult in the eyes of hakadosh Baruch hu (the holy one blessed be he) that’s right we had a bat mitzvah to attend and I couldn’t be more proud.

I watched her grow up; we live (d) only five minutes apart, my mom and her sister, the whole lot of us, together. I’ve always thought of us as one big family, I guess that’s what happens when you grow up in the same town, have the same teachers in middle school and high school. Grow up having Sunday dinners together so frequently it’s more of a surprise when there not happening.

…I’ve become what I hated it was ME this weekend telling those stories I used to hate, it was me bemoaning my advanced age, acting a fool, getting overly sentimental. My little girl is growing up; I don’t know how it happened.

Except of course I’ve seen it happen with my own two eyes, maybe that’s what makes it so unbelievable, I was there the whole time… Let us start at the beginning…

I’ve always felt a deep connection with Shaina, she has always been my little girl, look for a picture with the two of us in it, it’s a mortal lock me and her are together. She was born after we got home from Japan; I was struggling at the time, dealing with issues that it took me years and years to get over. She was the light that forced its way into my soul at a time when little else did. I remember holding her in my arms when she was days old. But we all knew right then and there how special she was.

Shaina just has a light about her, a natural grace that cannot be taught. When she laughs you just know that good is real in this world, she is a unique person in that she has room in her heart for everyone who wants to be there. Maybe that’s just because she is the youngest of four, six if you include me and my sister (I do) so she just had to be adaptable, easy going and amiable. I don’t care about the reason I just know that she is and that’s good enough for me.

This weekend she was a bat mitzvah, and she did an amazing job, confident and poised at the bimah, she really lead the service. In an unusual turn of events she actually LIKED the process, worked hard learning her Hebrew, put in the time to not just do it but excel at it, I always knew we were kindred spirits.

When I first got home from Israel I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about the whole thing, my aunt has been an active member of the local reform shul for a while now. I always hated it, me and my dad used to sit in the back and crack jokes, or when the prayers were happening I’d read the commentaries (signs of things to come, but I digress) so I had trepidation, a meeting with the Rabbi did little to quell my anxieties but I resolved to get over myself and do it for her. Not a hard decision when I thought of it like that.

I’m not going to lie the service felt foreign to me; I’ve spent the last three years or so learning about our tradition and now I found myself confused at services. I have my own issues with the changes in the service that I saw, but what made it okay for me was the joy I experienced watching Shaina read the prayers and talk about her Torah portion and the experience. Due to our proximity in birthdays our Torah portions are in the same part of Leviticus, they both deal with the minutia of building the Temple and making sacrifices. They are exoteric and exotic, the things they describe have not happened in over two thousand years. So I was anxious to hear what she got out of learning about her portion after having struggled to learn mine (and I was twenty three years old, not thirteen) she did a wonderful job, explaining the relevance of these passages in the context of our experience in the world we live in.

What I say to you today Shaina is this; your name means beautiful and you are a thousand fold. It is my hope and prayer that you will hold on to these experiences and god willing have many more moments like them. I hope that you continue questioning and searching, exploring your own spirituality and self actualizing your own unique neshama as you continue to grow and blossom into the amazing woman your just beginning to become. I pray the fire in your soul continues to grow and burn brightly and that HaShem blesses you over and over again. As he does for me every time I see you.

Amen.