From Stranger to Sage: A Bat Mitzvah Story

The image I will keep from my daughter’s bat mitzvah is not the singing of Hallel on that Yom Ha’atzmaut afternoon, nor the speeches I worked on for hours, nor the kiddush in shul a few days later on Shabbat. It is the look on her face while she absorbed the d’var Torah from a woman she had met for the first time that morning.

Her teacher’s name is Sarah-Beth Neville, a rabbinic student at Yeshivat Maharat, learning also at Hadar, and whichever congregation eventually lands her will be in very safe and very wise hands. Sarah-Beth had flown in from New York to stand by my daughter’s side on the most important day of her life so far. She stood, and she shared a d’var Torah without notes, without flashcards, without a script. In that moment, the makeshift sanctuary we had built in a courtyard (a mixed crowd of family, friends, neighbors, and a few people who weren’t sure what to expect from a women-led ceremony) went quiet in the way spaces only go quiet when something real is happening.

But it was my daughter’s face that did it for me, because Sarah-Beth was not just teaching Torah in that moment. She was showing my daughter, in a way no lecture or essay ever could, what it looks like for a woman to stand up and teach Torah unapologetically and beautifully.

Sarah-Beth did not just give Torah that morning. She was Torah that morning.

How we got to this point is, truly, a testament to the rising generation of female Jewish leaders who had a hand, both direct and indirect, in bringing it all together.

Let’s rewind.

My path through Judaism has been defined by many different roles. I was born in the 1980s into a traditional family that regularly attended shul. After my parents separated, both independently embraced Orthodoxy. I was raised by my mother as she immersed herself in the charedi communities of the United Kingdom, and later, in the early 2000s, she joined me in Israel after I was drawn there by the ideals of Religious Zionism.

In hindsight, the community around me in Manchester took so much pride in doing things “right” that the pedestal it built for itself became too high to climb down from. Many, not all, did not interact with anyone whose tradition looked different. It mistook isolation for holiness. And the holiness it produced was, in the end, alienating, to outsiders, and eventually to many of us inside it.

I have spent the better part of two decades trying to reclaim Judaism for myself, and for my children. To find the version of it that is generous, intellectually serious, observant, and rooted in the conviction that inclusivity works both ways. In this home, there is always a seat at the table, Jew and non-Jew, charedi to reform, straight or queer, male or female, black or white. The version of Judaism a great many of us are quietly hoping is still out there.

It is, and here is how I know.

The story starts at a Friday night dinner in London, where I knew no one but the host. I was a guest at my friend’s flat, doing what we do best: breaking bread, drinking scotch, laughing at the size of the humongous potato kugel that adorned the table.

After Shalom Aleichem and kiddush, somewhere mid-meal, I was sharing with the person to my right how hard it had been to find someone willing to teach my youngest for her bat mitzvah. The vision was a women-led ceremony in a neutral venue rather than a synagogue, so that the various levels of religious observance across our family could be honored in the same room. That kind of ceremony does not always fit neatly into the modern Orthodox world I live in.

Then still a stranger to me, Sarah-Beth said, almost flippantly, “You know what? I’ll help you with that.”

In the very British way of these things, I assumed we’d both walk away, smile politely if we saw each other again, and never speak of it. That is how those moments usually go.

The following Shabbat, I walked into Kehillat Nashira, a partnership minyan in Borehamwood, to find at least four people from the previous Friday’s dinner already there. A week earlier we had been strangers to one another. Now we were embracing in hugs and greetings of Shabbat shalom, amused that we had all chosen the same shacharit out of the dozen or so minyanim within walking distance of each other.

There is a hand of G-d in a coincidence like that.

And there she was again. Sarah-Beth Neville. We picked the bat mitzvah conversation back up. Sarah-Beth reiterated her offer to teach my kid. And just like that, we had a plan.

The geography is part of the miracle.

I grew up in Brighton and Manchester before moving to Jerusalem. I now live in Kansas. Sarah-Beth grew up in Edinburgh, has mutual friends with me in New York, and that is where she lives now. Both of us simply happened to be visiting London, sitting at the same table one week, walking into the same shul the next. (As an aside: the last time I saw this many city names in one sentence, I was sitting a geography test.)

The hashgacha pratit that pulled us into the same room twice in a week, on a different continent from either of our current homes, would carry across an ocean to become a year of Sunday mornings and land, eventually, on a Yom Ha’atzmaut afternoon in the American Midwest, in a courtyard, with my daughter at the center of it and Sarah-Beth standing at her side. Am echad b’lev echad, working out exactly as it is supposed to.

That Yom Ha’atzmaut afternoon was the result of a year of Sunday mornings.

Whether there had been a sleepover the night before. Whether it was Shabbaton weekend, or a chag that pushed the schedule, or one of those weeks where everything is too much. My daughter showed up. And Sarah-Beth showed up. Whether from her apartment in New York or across an ocean for a weekend, no matter the time zone, no matter the place, across the entire texture of two very different lives, they built something together.

The commitment Sarah-Beth showed my daughter was a shining example of how to have it all: faith, fun, friendship. From ski cabins to airport lounges, these two held their zman kavua with sacred honor.

I will say something honest here, because parents of multiple children will recognize it.

This is my third child to become a bar or bat mitzvah. What Sarah-Beth did with my youngest was a different category of thing. She paid attention. She got to know who this particular child is, her temperament, the way she learns, the way she connects to ritual and text. She met my daughter where she actually was, not where a curriculum said she should be. That kind of attention is a gift. It is also a skill. It is one of the rarest things in Jewish education, and it cannot be faked.

She was not the only teacher or rabbi to work with my daughter to make this moment happen. But she was the only female leader, and she was the one who poured the asset so many of us have the least of, time, into a kid she had never met.

Maybe if I had had teachers who saw me the way Sarah-Beth saw my daughter, I would not have spent the last twenty years redefining my own Judaism to make it fit.

And while Sarah-Beth was the answer to the question, Kehillat Nashira is the room where it happened.

Nashira is not the first partnership minyan I have walked into, but it was the first time in the UK I had walked into an institutional one. Not an Israeli partnership minyan, the kind that is widely accepted in its native context. Not a minyan in someone’s home that felt nice to neighbors who wanted to embrace a halachic framework for gender equality. Nashira is an institution: a community that knows what it stands for, knows who its rabbi should be, and has put the sweat equity into making it flourish.

Everyone in that room wanted to be there. Not out of obligation. Not out of a British sense of supposed to. Not out of any generational guilt a matriarch or patriarch held over them. They had come, unhurried, not just to observe Shabbat, but to celebrate and elevate Shabbat as a community, and to welcome everyone into it.

You could feel that before a single word of davening. It is the work of Rabbi Miriam Lorie and the board of trustees who have built and tended to the space. I have only met Rabbi Lorie a handful of times. But I watch her divrei Torah on Instagram, and I have read her published writing, and I will say this plainly: if I lived in that part of the world, I would be a regular at Nashira.

Without Kehillat Nashira, the offer at dinner would likely have stayed an offer.

There is a verse in Bereishit, said by Rivka’s family as she leaves home to become a matriarch:

אֲחֹתֵנוּ אַתְּ הֲיִי לְאַלְפֵי רְבָבָה Achotenu, at hayi l’alfei revava, “Our sister, may you become thousands of myriads.”

The midrash reads revava not as a number but as a vocation: leaders, teachers, the ones who go on to shape thousands of others. It is the verse Yeshivat Maharat says over every one of its graduates at semikha. Their sisters, sent out to become multitudes.

It is one of the oldest moves in our tradition. A community blessing one of its own as she steps into something larger than herself. It is what every parent hopes for their daughter. It is what every good teacher does for a student.

And it is what Sarah-Beth did for mine.

Achotenu, at hayi l’alfei revava.

And my daughter was blessed to be the first.