My bat mitzvah was a glorified birthday party with little religious significance. It was an opportunity for me to show that my gown could be as pretty as my friends’ gowns. The closest I got to the bimah was on the needlepoint of a girl reading from the Torah, which my grandmother stitched for me, not realizing its religious significance. Even if my parents had accepted the idea of a girl leyning at her bat mitzvah, I would not have accepted the offer. To my eleven-year-old mind, learning to leyn my bat mitzvah parsha would have robbed me of valuable time otherwise spent with my friends. It was far easier to learn Pirkei Avot and call it a day. Why would I want to take on an unnecessary burden?
During high school, Tanakh (Bible) became one of my favorite subjects. I sought the ideal way to connect to this ancient book. I studied parshanim (commentators) on Tanakh. I spent hours on Shabbat analyzing the parsha with my friend. Robert Alter’s translation and commentary gave me a greater appreciation of the dialogue between different stories and an understanding of the linguistic origins of certain words. I examined archaeological artifacts from the biblical time period. In Israel, I was amazed to see the seal of Gemaryahu, an officer from the end of the First Temple period, about whom I had been learning in Tanakh class. Yet the words of the Tanakh, no matter how much I learned about them, were still just words.
A few months ago, my Tanakh teacher asked me to read a pasuk (sentence) out loud during class. I stumbled through it, pronouncing the nekudot properly (I had practiced diligently in second grade), but emphasizing the wrong syllables and not pausing at all for the etnachta. (Back then, I didn’t even know what an etnachta, the cantillation sign that marks the end of the first half of the sentence, was.) My teacher corrected me for not articulating the pasuk properly; if only I knew trope, she told me, I would not have made so many mistakes. She asked the class who did not know how to leyn, and I was the only one to raise my hand. It was no longer a question of whether I wanted to leyn: I had to leyn to redeem my dignity.
My friend Ricki Heicklen agreed to teach me. (Luckily, she owed me a favor after stealing my Gemara notes.) We sat down with a tikkun one night, and she showed me the chart of ta’amim (cantillation signs). “Kadma,” she sang, and I followed, using the same notes that have been used for thousands of years. The dark side (a term that still invariably reminds me of Star Wars) of the pages awed me. With the elaborate crowns above the letters, I could hardly make out what the words were, but at the same time, I felt more connected to them than I ever had before. When I leyned, I was participating in a Jewish tradition that had existed long before me and that will continue to exist long after me. By serving as an active link in that chain, I felt that Tanakh became more than a historical account or interesting literary work. I no longer had to rely on someone else’s interpretations to feel connected to the text. Leyning the words took them out of the page and brought them to life.
After weeks of preparation, I leyned for the first time in a women’s tefillah at Shabbat mincha during the Drisha High School Winter Seminar. It was the first aliyah of the book of Shemot; to me, the new book represented a new beginning. For the first time, I gazed into a sefer Torah. In the handwritten words, I could feel the painstaking effort of a sofer (scribe) meticulously writing the words into the Torah scroll. As I peered into the Torah, my friends surrounding me disappeared from my thoughts, and I was alone with the Torah in my hands. If I hadn’t made a concerted effort to contain my emotions, I would have been unable to make my lips and vocal chords work in synchrony to recite the necessary words of leyning.
Despite my newfound passion for leyning, I am grateful that I did not read from the Torah at my bat mitzvah when I was twelve. I would have been unable to appreciate the skill had I learned it back then, and similarly, I would not cherish the skill as much now if it had existed with me for many years. I never would have been able to experience the rush I felt as I leyned for the first time. I am proud that I accepted the “burden” of leyning at a time that was right for me, as my own developmental journey led me to the decision on my own.
Maybe some day I’ll have a make-up bat mitzvah in which I do leyn. At that time, though, it will not be about showing off (my singing voice is far from spectacular), but about cultivating my personal relationship with Tanakh and with Judaism. And I will approach the bimah, rising off my grandmother’s needlepoint, ready to pronounce the words of the precious Torah.