The Bat Mitzvah Invitation

This week I received an invitation to a bat Mitzvah addressed to Rabbi Rachel Bregman and Guest.

RABBI:
People have been referring to me as Rabbi for a while and so I thought I was over the sticker shock. I thought I had passed that moment when I thought "Oh right, they mean ME" and all the feelings that go with that about becoming a Rabbi-look who am I that I get to be THAT for someone else. I am me and this is what I feel called to do. But this week, I found, to my pleasant and slightly uncomfortable surprise that I am not there yet. Pleasant because it is lovely to forever remember that this is a privilege to have the title Rabbi which I have not completely, or rather, officially earned yet. Also uncomfortable because I felt so young and immature in my giddiness. As I have seen my classmates have this moment I have, embarassingly now looking back on it, turned my nose up to them in this moment thinking-how cute is that they still don't own it when I already do. How condescending of me! Well, the truth is, I too am in the boat of, oh my goodness, they mean ME! And what a fun place to be.

Rachel Bregman:
I am Rachael with an "A." rachAel. The family fiction is my mom's mom liked vowels and so named her Adeane (although I suspect my maternal grandmother somehow knew the Hebrew word, Adin, meaning dear, precious or beloved and named her for that) and thus made up a name that was cjhock full of them. I like to joke that a love for vowels is hereditary and thus-Rachael with more a's than Hallmark store name key chains and pencils could accommodate. People spell my first name wrong all the time and it always irks me. At first it is a minor nuisance but when it is repeated, it bugs me. It is my name! Names are so important. We identify through titles. Rachael is a title just like Rabbi. It is a statement-this is who I am. I would be someone else if I were a Melinda or a Sally or a Chen (with a chet meaning grace in Hebrew not with a hard ch sound like in child) so my elation around being called Rabbi was slightly deflated by seeing my first name misspelled.

(As an aside, I read this piece today by Buber about names: Moses page 61. "The 'true'name of a person is the essence of the person, distilled from his real being, so that he is present in it once again. What is more, he is present in it in such form that anybody who knows the true name and knows how to pronounce it in the correct way can gain control of him. The person himself is unapproachable, he offers resistance; but through the name he becomes approachable, the speaker has power over him" I love this idea of someway being able to say your name just right-communicating that they really know you, really see you. This reminds me of the scene in Indiana Jones when Jones finds the grail and his father says, "Junior, let it go" Or when the angel calls to Abraham from the heavens saying, "Abraham, Abraham." In those moments, it was saying the name just right that made the person go form being closed to open.)

And Guest:
What on earth will I do with this one? And Guest will be two words which haunt me for a long time, I imagine. I do not have an established partner in this life. The words and guest, meant as an expression of inclusion, raise issues of my connections to other people and how I bring those people to my professional life-a professional life that is so interwoven into my personal one. If I have an and guest, when do I bring them along? What does it mean for the Rabbi's significant other to show up at a bat mitzvah with her? Can I bring a friend who is just a friend (of course I cannot but it is sad that this is the case). And if I bring an and guest once and then not again, to what questions and critiques and judgments does this open me? And how much do I invest in that and how much SHOULD I invest in that…

Questions questions questions….

I love to ask them and I am not sure where to go with them. Maybe us young Rabbis need a support group :)