Showtime:
The rabbi’s proforma introductory remarks and fundraising pitch completed, I stepped forward, recited my prayers in Hebrew, and for the benefit of my parents and 99.9% of the attendees, repeated them in English. Next came my first public speech ever – proudly delivered (as were my father’s lectures) without notes, albeit unlike his, larded with clichés. [Many several hundred presentations later this propensity still needs work.] But be it known I was henceforth and for all time a fully-certified, fully-circumscribed Jewish mensch.2
Despite the element of farce that would seem to inform this portentous episode in my life, by plunging into a sincere if abbreviated study of faith and taking the time to actually read the King James Bible, and then undertake an historic “manhood ritual”, I accomplished my primary purpose – to get a sense of what it might mean to be a “person of faith” and ascertain if its prerequisites had a place somewhere deep within me. But since that Saturday, having found not the slightest inclination to set foot inside a place of worship, I intuit the answer to be a definitive no. God, if He or She or It does exist, is probably shedding few tears over my dereliction, sensing with divine omniscience that I’d be nothing but trouble.