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By HELEN GARNER
The vestibule of the Temple Emmanuel in Ocean Streeet, Woollahra, five minutes before the bar mitzvah was due to start, was milling with people, Jewish and otherwise.
The bar mitzvah boy was the son of an old Melbourne Jewish friend of mine and his wife, a grand beauty born in Birmingham of a Jamaican immigrant family, who has recently converted to Judaism. They sat, glowing in pale clothes, in the front row of the raked synagogue, backed by their families and friends -or, as the New Testament says, "compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses..."
The boy himself, a famous mimic with bouncing dreadlocks and a slow, wicked smile, was strolling about in a large necktie emblazoned with South Park icons. What a complex spectacle! It was almost scary. Who on earth would be able to draw its many parts together and point it in the right direction, ground its hilarity, and drive it fonward for a whole two hours?
Though I think of myself as a Christian. , though I like to take Communion, to pray and to hear the bible read, this is one of those periods in my life when I feel a revulsion against going to church. I can't hack the strained, dusty theatricality of Melbourne high-church Anglicanism. At Catholic mass I am a stranger. But on Saturday in the shul I was swept away by the graceful ease and sweetness that the young rabbi brought to the ritual.
They had a brilliant little choir - five good voices, two men two women, plus the bloke who conducted them - which sang demurely, bringing gravity and beauty to the prayers. When the cantor got up to sing, his tremendous riffs were as fruity as opera. The whole celebration went forward with abounding energy, full of poetry and chant, switching from Hebrew to English and back again in short grabs, always something new happening, constantly changing its mood and refreshing itself. Every minute of it was exhilarating.
What moved me most was the vivid physicality of it, the freedom, the lack of pomposity.Even when the Torah was brought out of its hiding-place, and carefully unwrapped from its velvet before our eyes, when children, concentrating hard, seized and bore aside its tingling little filigree silver decorations, when the parchment scroll emerged, radiating mystery - even these moments of intense reverence were warmed by something almost affectionate: a mixture of awe and tenderness.
When the boy's grandfather, with the boy close on his heels, carried the Torah up and down the aisles, a wave of energy followed it. People surged forward to touch it with their shawl-tips or the spines of their prayerbooks, which then they kissed. It seemed so ancient, and yet so fresh and joyful.
The boy stood up in a creamy white tallit with a broad blue stripe, and chanted his way through his portion. This was no shrinking violet. He opened his mouth and his chest and he belted it out. We hung on his every note. People delighted in his triumph, even those of us who had only the vaguest clue what he was singing about. Some old grand force was sweeping him along, and taking us along with it.
"Isn't this fabulous," I whispered to the ex - Communist Party member beside me.
It is amazing how many nonJewish men are totally transformed by a yarmulka: a bloke I'd known years before in Melbourne came over with his wife and little girl to say hello and for a moment I couldn't place him, rummaging in the wrong mental file. Then the bar mitzvah boy's auntie rocked up to him and said, "Hi Remember me? We met years ago, in the party".
Mishearing, he looked perplexed:
"At a party?"
"The CPA?" she said patiently. "The party we used to be in...that we're all so embarrassed about now?"
A slip of a lass with a great mass of red-brown curls flopping down her back, hair that she tossed out of the way whenever she rearranged the corners of her shawl over her slender shoulders. She turned to us a bright face, arched her brows, and set the whole thing rolling.
He replied behind his hand, "I might convert."
We laughed. I glanced at him in profile. He was smiling. His hair under the skullcap was grey. I looked down at my hands. The backs of them were speckled and veined. I thought, with a strange happiness, we are not old yet, but our youth has been over for a long, long time.
Helen Garner was writing for the Melbourne Age's This Life section, November 15th, 2000.
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