I was fourteen, and I was having my Bar Mitzvah. A bar mitzvah is supposed to happen on your thirteenth birthday, but perhaps betraying an unconscious ambivalence, I was late.

Thirteen is when the Old Testament folks decided childhood was over and we were eligible to be tried as adults for our crimes. Back in their day most people didn’t live much past 30, so I guess it made more sense to get a head start on holding folks accountable. But in 1982, thirteen (or even fourteen) was still pretty young.

I didn’t know anything about Bar Mitzvahs until my friends started having these elaborate parties and getting showered with gifts. (Northern New Jersey was full of successful Jewish families eager to show off their wealth and magnanimity, so the celebrations were competitively garish.) But best of all, a bar mitzvah was an excuse to invite all the girls from school to a party where I would be the center of attention. I wanted in.

Me and my older sister lived with my mom, who held Judaism at arm’s length. Her grandfather had been an itinerant rabbi in Wyoming, and, what with the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, her mother (my grandmother) wanted nothing to do with any of it.

As a toddler during the Holocaust, my mom remained blissfully unaware of the horrors being committed—least of all her own family’s connection to it. At thirteen herself, she came upon her father crying after a meeting with a doctor who “knew people from the old country.” Only then was she forced to absorb the reality of why she had no relatives on her father’s side.

And so, like many American Jews, she assimilated. Not hiding her Jewish identity exactly, but not embracing it either. In New York, people like us were called deli Jews: Proud of the bagel, but a bit more ambivalent about those guys in the big fur hats and long curly sideburns who walked to temple on the sabbath.

Growing up, Judaism was a part of my identity that I understood to be a bit unfortunate—like a cleft palette or being really short. Something that made me different, but that I was confident I could compensate for with humor or wit like the many great Jewish entertainers and writers of my childhood; Woody Allen, Rob Reiner, Fran Leibowitz, Philip Roth… there were plenty of examples.

My father, whom I saw only on weekends, held organized religion in high contempt, but then he held most things in high contempt—at least anything accepted by society.

When I told him I wanted to have a bar mitzvah, he scoffed, incredulous: “Why would you want to do something like that?”

But I wanted savings bonds, and I wanted to hire the junior high principal’s jazz band, and most of all, I wanted to have an excuse to invite out blond haired, freckly-nosed Mary Ann O’Malley (the least Jewish person in the school). So, I feigned a deep curiosity about this important religious coming of age ritual, and with a shrug, my mom hired a tutor to teach me how to fake my way through reading a Torah portion in Hebrew. Four months later, I had my very own bar mitzvah. So what if I was a year late? God would have to understand.

I don’t know what my rush was. Adulthood could wait. Should have waited. I had a lifetime of growing up to do, but all at once there I was, waiting backstage at the local reform synagogue nervously practicing my baruch ata’s, picking at the rubber bands in my braces and feeling choked by the navy blue, square-bottomed, knit necktie my mother had tied too tight.

I listened through the thick curtain to the rabbi giving a sermon about going back to school and how each year gave us a new opportunity to live more honestly, and more in accordance with the laws of the Torah. The high holidays were days away, and the small area where I waited was crowded with props that I guessed were for some kind of kid’s play about Yom Kippur, the day when Jews fast for 24 hours as penance for whatever sins they committed over the past year. Among the props was a huge, four-foot tall papier-mâché book painted with the words Book of Life on the cover, and a corresponding five-foot fountain pen. And inexplicably there was also a pink, heart-shaped pillow with arms and legs sticking out of it and the words Kiss me I’m Jewish embroidered on it. I absently picked up the pillow and held it to my chest.

I wondered if one ramification of this decision, this ceremony I was about to endure, was that from now on, I was going to be expected to perform that barbaric ritual of starving myself. I pondered the math: one day of stomach grumbling in exchange for a year’s worth of shitty behavior. Muslims have to fast for a whole month, but then again, they get to have dinner every night, so you’re only skipping one or two meals. Catholics just have to say ‘Hail Mary’ a few times, but that’s once a week, or every time they went to confession. Maybe if you only went to confession a couple times a year, you might be getting a better deal… Then I thought, How Jewish of me to be trying to squeeze a nickel out of a negotiation with God.

But then I remembered that Yom Kippur was going to be on a Sunday this year, which would be a hard day to skip eating. Mom liked to get bagels and lox and watch the Giants play football. Maybe instead I could do it on Wednesday when I’d be busy with band practice and—

“Don’t let the sanctimonious horseshit hypocricize your ass on the way out.”I heard my Dad’s voice. He sidled up beside me, startling me. I dropped the pink pillow.

It was unsettling to see him in a suit, complete with a (poorly knotted) tie. His beard was unusually kempt and trimmed, his long Jew-fro surprisingly tame with a white silk yarmulke bobby pinned a little off-center. He smiled a big dopey grin, his yellow smoker’s teeth beaming.

“Look at you.” I whispered. “All dressed up.”

He nodded. Gave an amused shrug. “How you feeling?”

“I’m okay.” I confessed. “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Relax. Have fun. It’s all bullshit anyway. And from here on in you get to make your own rules.”

I smiled back at him, and nodded, not really following.

He continued, “That’s at least a little consolation. For you know, being a man now.” He winked. Then, looking around to ensure we were alone, he slipped a small, fat envelope into my hand. “And of course, this’ll help too.”

I looked down and spread the top of the envelope open with my thumb and finger. Inside were three expertly-rolled, chubby marijuana joints. They smelled wonderful.

“Happy Birthday, Buddy.”

I grinned, covering for the guilt of holding the contraband right here in the synagogue. He turned to leave.

“Don’t uh… you know, just keep it from your sister.”

“Of course.” I said, playing it cool, tickled to share a secret with him, already trying on the posture of what I thought adulthood required. He nodded and headed back out, disappearing just as the cantor arrived waving at me to step onto the stage.

“Come on. It’s time!” The cantor urged.

I stuffed the envelope into my inside suit pocket, took a breath, and tried to steady myself but the grin kept fighting its way back to my face.

The cantor led me through the curtain and I stepped up to the bema where an ornate Torah was splayed out. We had rehearsed all of this, but still, I started to sweat. I thrust my hand into my pocket and made a fist.

The rabbi laid his heavy hand on my shoulder. “…Bar mitzvah is both blessing and obligation. I was overjoyed when young Tobias here came to us, determined to find his own way, to mark his passage into adulthood with me and with all of you…”

I looked out at the audience, at my friends, all sitting politely and patiently; at my 18-year old sister Anais with her over-earnest, over-encouraging smile, and at my mom beside her in the front row, gritting her teeth with anxiety on my behalf and probably focused most on how her rich, successful brother and his perfect family were judging our ungapatchke attempt to pretend we were normal.

My dad stepped into the auditorium through a side door and managed to trip over and knock down a stack of collapsed folding chairs lined up along the side aisle, creating a cascading eruption of noise and garnering the attention of everyone in the room. Making no effort to clean up the mess, he flashed a smile and a quick wave to the congregation as he scanned the seats for a place to sit.

The rabbi continued, trying to overcome the distraction. “…and so it’s quite fortuitous that today’s passage is one about self-determination above all things. And about duty to oneself, to one’s family, and to God.”

He nodded grandly at me, a cue for me to begin, but I just stood there frozen. He moved his hand from my shoulder to the small of my back and forcibly pulled me forward a step.

“Begin whenever you’re ready.” He grunted.

I watched my dad make his way to a seat in the third row, forcing a few of my classmates to get up to let him pass. He was smugly oblivious to my struggle to muster the courage to speak, to proceed with this thing, this commitment I had made—perhaps to spite him, though my teenage emotions were hardly coherent enough for me to consciously recognize that.

He finally sat down, of all places, right next to Mary Ann.

I cleared my throat and began my memorized Hebrew. The rabbi stuffed the yad into my hand and then, with his hand on top of mine, roughly dragged the pointer along the hand-drawn glyphs on the scroll. As I spoke, he unconsciously mouthed the reading along with me, occasionally vocalizing that plosive “kh” sound that is so common in Hebrew.

When I next looked up, my eyes went straight to that third pew, four seats in, and I watched as my dad leaned over to my crush and whispered something to her, making her blush. She covered her face with her hand as she tried to stifle a laugh. I darted my eyes back down to the scroll, then closed them as I struggled through the last few stanzas.

God, please make him die. I thought.