welcome sign at Camp Barney
Daniel, Fisseha, Helen, Jesse
         On the weekend of May 16-18, we celebrated the collective b’nai mitzvah of four of our children: Helen, Jesse, Fisseha (“Sol”), and Daniel. The Friday-afternoon-to-Sunday event was held at Camp Barney Medintz, the Jewish sleepaway camp in North Georgia beloved by our children for many years.  Out-of-town guests and religiously observant friends spent two nights in the bunks and cabins and little plywood apartments with us; on Saturday morning, more friends drove up from Atlanta, bringing the number seated on wood benches and folding chairs in Zaban Chapel in the North Georgia woods to more than 200.  
Zaban Chapel, Camp Barney Medintz, Cleveland GA
          The weekly Torah portion [Parashat B’har, Leviticus 25:1 – 26:2] describes the Jubilee Year, a year of freedom and redistribution of wealth to be proclaimed in the land after seven cycles of seven years. That morning, in the rustic sun-lit chapel, surrounded by favorite friends and relatives, with our handsome dressed-up children leading the service, felt as rare and sweet as a Jubilee Year.           We had caravanned up to Barney, outside Cleveland, Georgia, on Friday afternoon in a dozen cars and vans, some from our house, some leaving from the airport. The Friday night service was led by guitar-strumming Rabbi Hillel Norry of our Atlanta congregation, Shearith Israel, in the chapel that overlooked a sparkling lake until about a week ago Wednesday, at which time, during a heavy storm, a sink-hole opened up at the foot of the dam and the entire lake emptied out downstream, leaving a vast empty crater.  A few off-season camp staffers had scrambled across the lake floor with buckets and nets, rescuing fish and turtles and transferring them to a second, surviving lake.            So, on a cold mountain spring Friday night, in a chapel overlooking a bizarre, streaked, vast crater of mud, we welcomed Shabbat, then walked on the foot-path across the (defunct) dam to the dining hall for Shabos dinner on the deck.  All nine of our children were there; and all three of our brothers and their wives; and Grammy, the children’s sole grandparent; and three of Donny’s first cousins; and three of the children’s second cousins; and two of the children’s second-cousins-once removed, who filled up the vacuum left by the many first cousins unable to be there. The family members who made the trip shared our joyful sense of a once-in-a-lifetime event and deep family connection.
Don, Lee & Melissa
         On Saturday morning, the bus arrived and disgorged 50-some children, wearing synagogue clothes, with towels and swimsuits under their arms, and they charged towards the chapel, as I reached an advanced stage of panic because we couldn’t find the 150 siddurim, the prayerbooks, which had been stacked in boxes in our diningroom. No one remembered driving them up to camp. I was ordering people left and right to run to distantly-parked cars to open trunks. Rabbi Norry started the service from memory, as I missed the beginning of this so-long-awaited moment.  I spotted Azeb, our Ethiopian babysitter, arriving with her family.  “Azeb, were there boxes of prayerbooks in the diningroom?” I cried.              Yes, there were. End of search. “We found them: they’re in our diningroom in Atlanta,” I told the rabbi; so he and his wife (we’re Conservative Jews) and other prayer-leaders and friends carried on by heart.  “You could now turn to page 122 in prayerbook,” the rabbi announced, “if you had prayerbooks!”  Memory and habit stood us well: the entire morning service was chanted by heart by everyone, while led by our children whose prayerbooks I had NOT left behind. 
Helen, Daniel, Jesse, Sol & Rabbi Norry
              Each of the four children davened (prayed) so beautifully and tenderly; Helen’s high pure voice stilled us all. One heard only her clear sweet voice, and the birds in the woods besides the chapel. She looked beautiful, her intelligence and hard preparation shining through the shyness, even though she was too scared to look up.  “I thought about looking up,” she would tell me later, “but I decided not to.”  Helen chanted both her Torah portion and the Haftorah portion and led much of the service. My close friend Ursula Spitzer, a choral singer, later would email:  “Helen's beautiful soprano voice just soared in the air! “  And our old friend Dr. Melvin Konner, Emory University Professor of Anthropology, Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology, and Jewish Studies, would later write a blog about the day, including these words about Helen:              “As the boys would freely tell you, diminutive, lovely, brilliant Helen, just shy of twelve,                carried the largest liturgical burden. In impeccable Hebrew she read from 	               the Torah about the Jubilee year---”Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the 	               inhabitants thereof!” which is carved on our Liberty Bell, is in this portion--the 	               Haftorah (a linked long excerpt from Jeremiah chanted in a different mode), and the 	               entire service following the Torah reading. 		“When we first came to Atlanta we rejected this congregation because our 	daughters would not be treated equally. Now, under a new, liberal, young rabbi, not 	only a girl but a former African orphan whose mother died of AIDS was standing on 	the bima leading two hundred people in Jewish prayer, doing more at her Bat 	Mitzvah than most boys born Jewish in America ever do. So the Jewish Liberty Bell 	might have rung for Helen.”  http://www.jewsandothers.com/Jews_and_Others/Blog/Entries/2008/5/22_Children_of_the_Commandment.html 	Remarkable as she was, Helen was no surprise.  Of all this and more, we knew she’d be capable.                     Bigger surprises were the boys, like Jesse, who studied long and hard and chanted his Torah portion in a clear baritone, carried the Torah, chanted part of the Torah service, and shared the bimah with Helen in a back-and-forth discussion of the morning’s portion, which included these words:“HELEN:The Torah says, “If your brother becomes impoverished, and his means falter in your proximity, you shall strengthen him so that he can live with you.”JESSE “If your brother becomes impoverished” means if your brother runs out of money.  “If his means falter”  refers to him losing his job. “In your proximity” means he’s near enough for you to help.…Wait a minute – is Moses saying that if I lose my job…HELEN:You?JESSE:And it happens in your neighborhood, you have to let me move into your house? HELEN:  Wait, let me look at this again. JESSE:  OK, this is great.  So this applies to ME, right?HELEN: What do you mean?JESSE:It says “If your BROTHER becomes impoverished.”  And I’M your brother. This is great stuff!   And there’s more!  (reading):  “Do not give him your money for interest, and do not give your food for increase.”  What does that mean? HELEN:Moses is saying that if you loan your brother money, you should not charge interest on it. And you must share your food with him without making a profit.JESSE: I love this!  All right, so if I lose my job… HELEN:Everything isn’t about YOU.JESSE:Oh, you’re right…  I’m not your only brother. So if I lose my job, and if Seth loses his job, and Lee and Sol lose their jobs and Daniel and Yosef lose their jobs, we can ALL move in with you.  …..  I hope you’re going to have a really big house.HELEN:Molly?  Lily?  A little help here? JESSE:Good idea! We can put two impoverished brothers with each successful and rich sister. This is going to be GREAT!”
Helen & Jesse on the bimah
HELEN:Oh no, there’s more. (Reading:) “If your brother becomes impoverished and is sold to you, you shall not work him with slave labor.  Like a laborer or a resident shall he be with you; until the Jubilee Year shall he work with you.  Then he shall leave you -- he and his children with him -- he shall return to his family, and to his ancestral heritage shall he return.”JESSE:So if I move into your house, you can’t use me like slave labor.  I get to relax and enjoy until the Jubilee Year.  … When is that again?HELEN:  The Jubilee Year is the special year of freedom that comes after seven cycles of seven years.JESSE:Seven cycles?  Of seven years?  After 49 years?  And no slave labor all that time?  This just gets better and better.  HELEN (looking around):Who gave us this Torah portion? JESSE: Will you have a flat-screen TV, do you think?  Can I have my own room? Lee, you’ll want cable so you can watch ESPN, right?  Seth, you will need a piano.  Sol, Daniel and Yosef will need a soccer field. Can you put in a basketball court?  Can we have a trampoline?  HELEN: I do NOT think that God was telling Moses to tell Jesse Samuel in the 21st century that if he loses his job, he can move in with ME for 49 years. JESSE:And not do slave labor. HELEN:And not do slave labor.JESSE:Like cooking or laundry or mowing the lawn. HELEN:So I’m looking at 49 years of you occasionally emptying the dishwasher. JESSE:This is too good to be true!...  “	And on it went, towards an understanding of tzedekah, the commandment, the mitzvah, to be charitable. Though Helen was admittedly too shy to look up, handsome Jesse played the crowd for laughs, thrilled as always to be on-stage.  Everyone later praised his remarkable poise. 	Sol, from the first mention of “bar mitzvah” a year or more ago, had said, “I’m not reading in English.” He hates reading aloud in English in any class, ashamed of still stumbling over words.  (He was illiterate until he came to the US at age ten; he BEGAN learning to read in English, a language he didn’t speak, at TEN.  But he refuses to take shelter in this explanation and feels bad about his reading-aloud skills.)  He, too, devoted himself to the Hebrew studies, sitting over his notebook with a tape recorder and cassette tape, learning the ancient words and the ancient melodies.  But no speech!I composed a few words for him.  “This is not a speech,” I told him.  “You’re just going to introduce Daniel.”	“I’m not doing a speech.”	“I know!  This is just an introduction.”	On Jesse’s and Helen’s notebooks, I wrote SPEECH, to help us not lose the precious notebooks.  On Sol’s I wrote: INTRODUCTION.  	He stood tall and proud for his Hebrew reading; he too carried the Torah through the congregation, chanted part of the Torah service.  Then it was time to introduce Daniel.  He came up, draped in the woven black tallit he had chosen, under a halo of his tremendous curly Afro, stopped short of the podium, and leaned far into the microphone.  His bass voice was thick and shy, but we could hear him.  He talked about the Haftorah portion and introduced Daniel:  “Good Shabos.My brothers Daniel and Yosef were converted to Judaism last month by Rabbi Norry. For our bar mitzvah, Daniel will read today’s Haftorah portion in Amharic. Amharic is a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew.  Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia, but there are 89 languages in Ethiopia. I was born in the Oromo region and I grew up speaking Oromo and Amharic.  Helen grew up in Addis Ababa speaking Amharic.Daniel and Yosef grew up in the Guragge region and spoke Guragge until they moved to Addis Ababa, where they learned Amharic.  Today’s Haftorah portion is a story from 15 hundred years ago in Jerusalem. It was the year 587 and the prophet Jeremiah was in prison.  The city was under attack by the Babylonians.  Jeremiah told the people that they had brought this evil on themselves by not following God’s laws.Then he heard the voice of God while he was in prison. God was telling him to 	buy a field that belonged to his uncle  Jeremiah thought this was a strange thing to worry about at such a terrible moment, when he was in prison and the city was about to fall.  But God was telling him that there was always reason to hope.”	He did it!  And sat back down with a huge smile of relief.  Sunday night, when we were home and finished and most guests had departed, I was in my bed, completely immobilized by fatigue and a horrific cold that roared up out of nowhere.  Sol, in an unprecedented move, came to sit on my bed for a visit.  Lily and Helen do this nearly every night; Lee & Seth often pay a call when they’re in town; and Jesse sometimes throws himself onto our bed, asking to sleep there.  But this was the first time Sol had arrived for an evening chat.  “You were amazing yesterday,” I said.  “We are so, so proud of you.  I hope you’re proud of yourself.  Are you?” He was.  He was overflowing with smiles.  He visited our bedroom several more times that week, and he rode in the car with me one day on a pointless errand, and I believe it was because he wanted to hear again the fact that he had done it, he had beautifully read aloud in Hebrew and in English to more than 200 people, and he had handsomely become a Bar Mitzvah, a son of the commandment. Though Helen and Jesse and Daniel attracted the most attention that day, I know what it cost Sol to be up there, and that HIS poise was a far greater personal stretch than Jesse’s.	And Daniel.  A year ago this exceedingly tall and thin and quiet young man was still living in Haregewoin’s orphanage.  He didn’t know kosher from sushi. The day at the foster home when when I told Daniel, with Selamneh Techane translating, that we wanted to adopt him and Yosef, I also told him that our family was Jewish, “Beta Israel.”  He nodded yes, that this was acceptable. We were sitting in Selamneh’s taxi outside the gates. I explained that, like the Ethiopian Orthodox, we read the Bible, we believe in God, and this was enough for him. He wanted a family very much. He ran inside to tell Yosef. Since he’s nearly 13 and in seventh grade with Sol, we decided, at the eleventh-hour, to add him to the roster of bar and bat mitzvah children.  	But he wasn’t even Jewish yet.	So a few weeks ago, Donny and I took Daniel and 10-year-old Yosef to be converted to Judaism.  We’d only partly told them what to expect.  As Ethiopian Orthodox boys, they were already circumcised, but Jewish conversion requires a symbolic re-circumcision, with the drawing of a pin-prick of blood from the side of a certain portion of the male anatomy.  I’d told the boys about the mikveh—the hot-tub-like ritual bath in which they would completely submerge themselves three times, in the nude, emerging to recite Hebrew blessings.  This news alone had sent them running.  Daniel ran downstairs and got on a sofa under a bed-spread and refused to come out.  I sent Azeb after him to discuss in Amharic.  It was the idea of this semi-public (only Dad and the rabbi) nudity that had terribly alarmed him and Yosef; it seemed not an opportune moment to mention the pin-prick drawing of blood.  Donny, jokingly, said, “Let Rabbi Norry tell them,” and that is what happened,IN the doctor’s office, when it was too late to turn back and there was no bedspread to get under. The boys and Donny and Hillel Norry followed the urologist/moyel into the examination room while I frantically turned the pages of an out-dated Sports Illustrated in the waiting room.	They came out, laughing amongst themselves, with many pats on the back and words of praise, and we headed for the synagogue with the mikveh to complete the conversion. 	Later, driving them home, I praised their courage and composure.  “Was it OK?  Did you do OK?” I asked, as I hadn’t been permitted to witness anything.  “Mom, the doctor, oh my God,” said Daniel in his Ethiopian accent and deep voice.  “Oh my God, very dangerous, Mom, very dangerous.” 	Now it was Daniel’s turn to face the congregation of 200-plus worshippers. In a low quiet voice and deep accent, he began in English, offering a glossary of the Amharic words he was about to read in today’s Haftorah portion: “Good Shabos,” he said, “these are some of the Amharic words you will hear. God is IGZEE’ABIHIE; King is NEGUS.  Jeremiah is ERMIAS. Love is FIKIR…” and so on. I’d told Rabbi Norry that it was important for people to understand, so that they could enjoy hearing the Amharic. When Daniel finished, the Rabbi asked, “Did you all get that?” and the congregation chuckled appreciatively. Later I learned that they laughed because most people thought he was already reading in Amharic.  Then he read the Haftorah in Amharic—his low fluent voice, the sing-song of it, the strange syllables, had the congregation transfixed. Some people wept.  Unlike Sol, who came from non-literate people, Daniel came from literate people; he remembers his late father reading the Bible in Amharic, though Guragge was their own language.  Draped in his new tallit, prayershawl, he looked and sounded distinguished.  When the rabbi later faced all four children, and said, “You all have followed very different journeys to get to this moment,” it was Daniel’s low voice, and the thick rich syllables of Hebrew’s ancient cousin Amharic, that brought home the truth of those words.  What great distances each of the children had traveled! How sweet and beautiful they were on this great morning.