Saturday, July 27, 2019

Shabbat morning at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers: As I enter the synagogue, a bit late, I hear a voice from the pulpit, chanting, an octave higher than usual. A boy, just three weeks past his bar mitzvah, is leading the service. He moves through it smoothly and confidently. His father, sitting nearby, nods in appreciation and occasionally dozes off. When the boy reads from the Torah, he makes a few mistakes (even for a native Hebrew speaker, reading from the scroll without vowels, punctuation, or musical cues is hard) but members of the congregation call out corrections. When he stumbles over one phrase then recovers, the usual reader, standing next to him, gives him a thumbs-up. As I walk home through the park, a blue bird, practicing low-altitude maneuvers, zooms past my knees, loops under the brim of a trashcan, then flies past me again into a bush. It pauses briefly, then launches into another test run.