Well, shucks, folks, I’m speechless.
I’d like to welcome you and thank you for being with me today. Today
I become a Jewish adult. A Bat Mitzvah is a coming of age ceremony, a celebration
of growing up. But what is growing up really? My mom talks about what she’s
going to be ‘when she grows up’ the same way me and Christyn and Laura
do. So growing up isn’t about age. When we were very little, maybe five
or six, Christyn and I decided that you became a grownup at age eighteen.
Why? Because at eighteen you could vote and go to college. So maybe being
a grownup means you can make your own decisions and leave home. But for
me at least, leaving home to go to college isn’t that terrific an idea.
I don’t feel the need to get away from my family. Of course, that may change
within the next five years, but I hope not. And I don’t need to wait until
I’m eighteen to make my own decisions, either. I make my own decisions
about my life and my education every day.
What I think being grown up means is taking responsibility. When you’re
a child, you don’t need to take responsibility. If you are very young,
your parents clean up after you, pay for anything you break, apologize
if you make a scene in a movie theater, pay your lawyer- in effect, take
responsibility for you. As you grow older, you begin to take more responsibility
for yourself. You get dressed by yourself, you clean your own messes, you
do chores around the house, and you begin to earn your own money. In this
world, money equals freedom. With enough money, you can go anywhere and
do anything. Even with small amounts of money you can gain quite a bit
of freedom. A dollar to take the bus downtown, three to buy a bag of candy.
But with freedom comes responsibility.
When I was maybe six or seven, my parents gave me the freedom to decide
when I would go to bed. With that freedom came the responsibility of getting
enough sleep. Over a period of several months—well, years—I had set my
own bedtime. Of course, if I was reading a really good book….
When I was ten and eleven I really didn’t want to grow up. I wanted
always to stay a little girl and have fun. I didn’t want to take too much
responsibility.
It’s hard to achieve a balance between freedom and responsibility.
If you give yourself lots of freedom and no responsibility someone still
has to face the consequences, and usually it’s you. It’s impossible to
avoid responsibility totally. On the other hand, if you take a lot of responsibility,
you end up with no freedom because you’re worrying about the aftereffects
all the time. Sometimes you just have to say ‘To heck with the consequences.’
In my torah portion, of which you have a copy, God sends Moses to tell
the Jews that he will take them out of the slavery of the Egyptians and
make them his people, and lead them to a wonderful land of milk and honey.
But in verse nine, and I quote, ‘Moses spoke so unto the children of Israel;
but they hearkened not unto him for impatience of spirit, and for cruel
bondage.’
This torah portion is about fearing to take responsibility. The Jewish
people feared the Egyptians more than they wanted freedom. If someone came
to me and told me, ‘I’ll take you to a land of milk and honey, where you’ll
never have to work, if you defy all you have known your whole life’ I wouldn’t
go. What if he was just a crazy bum? Then I’d be left without anything.
But just think. If the Israelites had believed Moses from the start, he
could have led them right out of Egypt without even bothering Pharaoh.
Sometimes you have to try something new, and believe.
When Moses tells God that the Jews won’t come, God tells him to go
to Pharaoh. “But I can’t!” Moses says. “If my own people didn’t listen
to me, why should Pharaoh? Besides, I stutter.”
Everyone has handicaps. The only thing that made Moses unusual is that
he went ahead and spoke to Pharaoh anyway. The first thing anyone does
when asked to do a tremendous task, one they think is too hard, the first
thing they say is ‘I can’t. I’m not very good at that. Somebody else could
do it better. I stutter.’ Growing up is conquering your fear of doing something
hard, and just doing it anyway. Growing up is taking responsibility for
yourself.
When I’m forty years old in the year 2025, the world is going to have
a tremendous amount of problems. Global warming, pollution, and overpopulation,
to name just a few.
Overpopulation presents a serious moral problem. The human race as
a group has dedicated itself to preserving life. But should we try to preserve
life when soon there will be more people than the world can hold? We could
send people off to the moon, or to Mars. But that requires more advanced
technology than we have now. Will we be able to develop a way to take enough
air, food, and equipment through space to support at least a billion people
in a little over twenty-five years?
We really don’t know whether any people will be able to stay on the
Earth if the ozone deteriorates. Then there’s all the trash billions of
people will be putting out. What are we going to do with it all?
There’s a wonderful poem by Shel Silverstein called ‘Sarah Cynthia
Sylvia Stout Would Not Take The Garbage Out.’ It starts:
‘Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out!
And so it piled up to the ceiling:
Coffee grounds, potato peelings,
Brown bananas, rotten peas,
Chunks of sour cottage cheese.’
This goes on for quite a while, until
‘At last the garbage reached so high
That finally it touched the sky.
And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said,
“Okay, I’ll take the garbage out!”
But by then, of course, it was too late…
The garbage reached across the state
From New York to the Golden Gate.’
This could happen to YOU.
Sarah didn’t want to take responsibility for the trash and look where
it got her. We need to do more than that. We need to take responsibility
for ourselves and our world.
Grandpa told me to write a prayer at the end of my speech. I’m not
sure how to write a prayer, but I’d like to ask God to give us the courage
and the patience to heal our world and help us grow.
