16 Shvat and Parshat Yitro

[chanaleh]

(Gosh, don't I have a "jewish" userpic? I guess "shul" will have to do.)

Yesterday was Tu B'Shvat. Today is the 16th of Shvat -- my "Hebrew birthday". That is to say -- it is the anniversary date of my conversion, in February 1996.

This coming Shabbat is Parshat Yitro, my adopted bat mitzvah portion. -- Which is to say, since I never actually had a bat mitzvah (Which people do ask me occasionally, and I say, "No, I had a conversion. *That* was when I became an adult Jew. It had its own ceremony. I didn't need a bat mitzvah."), so what does that mean?

The first Shabbat after my conversion fell on Parshat Yitro, and the first time I was called to the Torah -- at Temple Beth Israel in Waltham, where I was going at the time; Rim Meirowitz was rabbi there then, and had served as my sponsoring rabbi -- was for the 6th aliyah with the Ten Commandments, a great honor.

A few months after that, I moved to Cambridge and started going to Tremont St., and the very first week I was there they announced they'd be holding a Torah reading class over the coming summer -- which was exactly what I desperately wanted to learn next, so I did that. So the first time I actually read from the Torah was on Shemini Atzeret (not far from my English birthday) of 1996; but I shall gloss over that component for the purposes of this story.

A couple of years later, presumably spring of 1998, I was dating Cantor Ken, and when I said I wanted to learn to leyn Haftarah, he offered to teach me. So we picked an upcoming date at Temple Israel (in Swampscott, the place where I'm still doing the High Holiday choir even though he's long gone from there) that the haftarah wasn't already spoken for, and I learned that one. And it was Isaiah's vision of the cherubim, which I thought was very cool. And only after I'd learned it -- it might even have been that very morning during the Torah service -- did I realize that it was the same parsha as my first aliyah, right after my anniversary date.

So Yitro has been my adopted bat mitzvah parsha ever since.

And I've even come up with one or two reasonable divrei Torah on it in the meantime -- except that I've never actually managed to give any of them in public. Which is why it's particularly too bad that I'll be out of town this coming weekend. Ah well, there's always next year.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yitro's a cool parsha, anyway. Good choice!

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Yitro was my brother's bar mitzvah reading and as a result, I still know a fair bit of it by heart. What I find strange is that I don't even remember the name of my hafatarah (with Chayei Sarah), let alone any of the actual text or melody, despite the fact that mine was five years after his. I wonder if that's because he had to practice a lot more than I did. :)

[missaligator.livejournal.com]

Parshat Yitro is my bat mitzvah portion too! Very cool. :P

[smashrgrl.livejournal.com]

I didn't read your whole post, but I ended up reading about your conversion...and that's REALLY cool. I would like to just find a religion that already holds what I feel to be true as such. I say that I'm pagan, but I'm really more like halfway between pagan and mahayana buddhist. I wish there was some clear middle ground for me to find other people in. I would really like to find myself in the company of 1000 people who feel the same way that I do. You're very lucky in that sense.