‘I had my barmitzvah in Abu Dhabi’

I wasn’t ready to make any choices. I practiced indecision as a religion in its own right, with its own rites: every time I came to a fork in the road, I asked, how I can I keep all the tines together?

After school in first grade, I tried to play in the Balinese gamelan at the university, and the town’s soccer team, and learn karate at the strip mall dojo up the street. I remember the panic when I had to drop one of them. (In the suburbs, it was easier to forget the value of self-defense.) That might have been the last in-or-out choice I made for a decade.

Preparing for a barmitzvah had no place in all this, I thought. I could not do it — and so I didn’t.

It wasn’t because I didn’t want to be Jewish — quite the opposite. I was proud of my dad for leading the seder, I was proud of my grandparents for being alive. But Judaism wasn’t something that had ever been a choice for me. I felt about being Jewish the way you might feel about being left-handed, mildly distinct and occasionally proud, and doubtless. I loved the Marx Brothers after all — my Jewishness was something no one could take away.

It wasn’t until I was living in Abu Dhabi, a half-season into a first-job-after-college, that the childhood choices I’d left unmade started leaking through the walls. While elementary school led to middle school led to high school, then college — after college, there was no clear path, and choices were everywhere and always.

Every single one — from what curry should I order,to why am I here in Abu Dhabi, to why am I here on Earth — I overthought.

And then, two Chabad rabbis popped over from Brooklyn on a Chanukah candle-lighting tour through Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and discovered my secret. “Let’s have your bar mitzvah tomorrow,” they said, in the fifty-story linoleum-lined high-rise we transplants lived in.

“Where else, if not Abu Dhabi?”

For the overthinker, there is nothing like absurdity to cut through all that logical cake.

Seven years later, I was asking a hip hop producer in Ramallah about using his tracks for a launch party for my book. “I didn’t get why the title has barmitzvah in it, do explain please,” he said.

It was about a coming of age, I said. “When I became a man,” said St Paul, (who was very certainly bar mitzvahed), “I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

As I child, I ran from choice. Even if I didn’t know fully why, eight years late by tradition but right on time, perhaps, in the scheme of slow-cooked American adolescence, I embraced the first choice I knew I could make.

And once I did, it was like a promise I made out loud, like an RSVP to a host’s face. The ways of childhood I’d come to the Middle East to challenge — fears built on ignorance, oversimplifications, comfort — I said I’d wrestle with them. I couldn’t not.

 

The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah: Fear and Love in the Modern Middle East by Adam Valen Levinson is published by W M Norton