Over the course of 12 days in November 2016, United Maryland Muslim Council director Mubariz Razvi and his wife were camped at the University of Maryland Medical Center’s shock trauma ward. Their adopted 23-year-old son, Ali Shah, was suffering from sepsis, on life support, and unfortunately, didn’t have much time left to live.

Around a week into agonizing over Shah’s health, a woman saw that the ward doorway was clear, walked into the room, and rudely confronted Razvi.

“She blatantly stood a foot away from my face and said, ‘You don’t belong here,’ and ‘Get out of here,’” Razvi recounts. “The shocking thing was that, if she was in that area, that means that she had a family member in the same ward.”

The situation escalated to a point where the woman threatened to call hospital security on Razvi, who had simply been tending to his family. Razvi turned the tables, enlisting security himself. The woman fled before she could be questioned.

“That is an example of what security systems can do for you when they’re in place,” Razvi says. “It deterred her from going any further.”

Since that event almost three years ago, similar incidents and others much worse have become more commonplace. There has been a stark rise in hate crimes across the country, according to reporting by the FBI. It’s for this reason that religious institutions and community businesses have become more proactive in ensuring the safety of their congregants and patrons. More than $3 million in aid from the same grant program has been provided to these institutions in the past year. But as lawmakers see it, as the danger grows, so too does the need to increase funding to support these efforts.

Earlier this month, Maryland congressmen John Sarbanes, Ben Cardin, and Chris Van Hollen introduced a proposal to quadruple federal funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program from $90 million to $360 million in the 2021 fiscal year. The program, established in response to 9/11, is designed to provide security assistance to religious and community nonprofits at high risk of terrorist attacks across the country. Its promotion has been co-signed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Our overriding goal has to be to reduce the number of hate crimes that are being committed,” says Van Hollen, who served as a representative for Maryland’s 8th District from 2003-2017 before being elected to the U.S. Senate. “That’s the most important thing we can do to help reduce people’s fears. But, to the extent that you can provide a more secure environment, people can feel more safe in practicing their religion or going about their daily lives.”

Given the increasing prevalence of hate crimes across the country, government leaders say they need to both institute stronger measures to try to prevent such crimes, while also providing appropriate assistance to respond to attacks.

“It would be irresponsible not to take steps to protect places that we know have been targets of hate crimes,” Van Hollen says. “We need to be confronting [the increase] in two ways. One is to bring the different faith communities together in solidarity to speak out against hate crimes. The second thing we need to do is to provide protection for places of worship and other places that are targeted.”

One of the many reasons there is a sense of urgency surrounding this problem is that it’s not just affecting one community. Elissa Sachs-Kohen, the rabbi at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation for the last 16 years, says anti-Semitic crimes remain an increasing concern in the Jewish community. Baltimore Hebrew Congregation was one of many Maryland institutions that received part of the more than $3 million funds from the grant program in the past year.

“The Jewish community feels more at-risk than it has in many years,” Sachs-Kohen says. “In my Rabbinic tenure, there’s always been a very low-level hum. There are people who hate Jewish people and who might choose to do something about that hatred. It’s no longer a low-level hum.”

Among the suggestions for how to use the funds include increasing physical security presence and surveillance, as well as fencing around places of worship. Leaders also hope that talking about these issues will help members of their communities, and the community at-large, to understand why these attacks are happening and what they can do to combat them.

“I think that what [calls to increase funding] also point to is this has been a neglected area in the past,” Sachs-Kohen says. “Whenever you’re looking at something quadrupling, it suggests maybe that there wasn’t as much as a need before, but it also suggests that we were not doing our due diligence before.”

Van Hollen serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Maryland 2nd District Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, who has also been a part of this initiative, serves on the House Appropriations Committee. The two plan to collaborate with their colleagues to put together a workable funding resolution for the 2021 fiscal year, hoping for approval in both the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate later this year.

Even so, for Razvi, these ideas are short-term solutions to a larger problem, one that he hopes one day will be left in the past.

“With additional funding, I definitely believe it will help us keep houses of worship secure,” he says. “But at the same time, there has to be a change of opinion in the public’s mind that, we might speak a different language, we might look different, but we’re all one humanity and one human race.”

“I wander around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars…” —Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009

As the great Wyeth did with his easel in the Pennsylvania town of Chadds Ford, local landscape artist Lissa Abrams does in her hometown of Baltimore.

Abrams is one of those people—there’s at least one in every family—who drives through the old and often greatly changed neighborhoods where her ancestors once broke bread, helped a friend with a problem, raised kids, and told stories.

Sometimes it’s a sad stroll—the houses boarded up or gone completely—but other journeys bring a smile through the mist of years gone by.

“My parents used to drive around, too,” says Abrams, whose mother Rosalie Silber Abrams (1916-2009), grew up in a successful Baltimore bakery family and became the first female majority leader of the Maryland State Senate.

Abrams’ late father, William, grew up on a block of Linden Avenue (now torn down) near Druid Hill Park before the family moved to Dorchester Road in Forest Park. His parents belonged to the Bais Hamedrash Hagodol Congregation at Baltimore and Chester Streets in East Baltimore, a synagogue which is now also gone.

These memories were going through Abrams’ mind last year when she attended a funeral at Wayland Baptist church on Garrison Boulevard in Forest Park. Noticing the Stars of David on the building, she remembered it as the original Beth Tfiloh synagogue, which was built in 1927.

She decided that such places—of which there are many in Baltimore, where the Jewish community goes back to the early-and-mid-19th century—needed to be preserved in oil even if the brick and mortar had fallen.

And now, they are. Some 55 paintings of eight synagogues by about a dozen-and-a-half artists, both Jewish and Gentile, are now on view in an exhibit at the Hoffberger Gallery of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation on Park Heights Avenue. A reception for the exhibit—in which synagogues both defunct and still in operation are depicted—will be held on Sunday, September 15th at Baltimore Hebrew, and the paintings will be on display through October 28.

“I like painting moments in time,” says Abrams, treasurer of the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association, several members of which are in the exhibit. “I love painting things that are old, that might be gone in a couple of years.”

Abrams has learned that, in Baltimore—where history long precedes the founding of the nation—”now you see it, now you don’t” can happen to just about anything at any time.

“A lot of these are big, beautiful buildings that take a lot of maintenance,” she says. “I’m sure they’ll be around for a while, but eventually…you never know.”

“Oheb Shalom, Study of Form and Faith” —Stewart White

“Gone” Ahavas Achim—Lissa Abrams

The synagogues—or shuls—portrayed in the exhibit include B’nai Israel on Lloyd Street near Corned Beef Row, still vibrant in the one-time epicenter of Jewish Baltimore; Shaarei Tfiloh, also in operation, in Druid Hill Park (where the Jewish community migrated after first settling in East Baltimore); and the former Eutaw Place Temple of the Oheb Shalom congregation in Bolton Hill, designed by Joseph Evans Sperry, best known as the architect of the Bromo Seltzer Tower.

Another painting of note is a sad and beautiful corner building (boarded up and scarred) of pale orange brick—once home to Congregation Ahava Achim at 427 Pulaski Street—in southwest Baltimore, an area known during the Great Depression as “Little Jerusalem.”

“I’m honest [in depicting] all the work I do, but when you’re painting a religious building there’s an extra feeling of, ‘I better get this right,’” says Crystal Moll, perhaps Baltimore’s best known plein air artist who contributed a canvas of the old Eutaw Place Temple, modeled after the Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy and now a Masonic Lodge.

“I’ve always wanted to paint that building,” says Moll, who did a 16 inch-by-16 inch detail of the grand building’s domes and also has a painting of Shaarei Tfiloh in the show. Each visit to Eutaw Place, she said, took a few hours and she set up her easel there about six times before completing the work.

“You always have great conversations when you’re sitting on the sidewalk painting,” Moll says. “People come up and say that they’re an artist too, pull out their phone and show you pictures of their work.”

Which is all well and good. You can’t really haul around framed canvases all the time to share your art with friends and strangers. But long after digital images have been deleted or lost in some cyber crash, oil on canvas—like the faith represented in the “Baltimore’s Bygone Synagogues” show will endure.

“It’s about making sure all the colors work together,” says Abrams. “I’m not too mystical—with me, what you see is pretty much what you get. It’s all about capturing the light…”

Along with a couple of centuries of faith, migration, and history in the Queen City of the Patapsco River.

You’ll be performing at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation’s fifth annual Night of the Stars on May 7. What can people expect?
I’ll do like 10 or 12 characters. It’s like my version of standup. I talk to the audience. I talk about the human condition. I use video sort of to satirize myself. But I don’t want to give too much away.

You’ve got a new Netflix show, Grace and Frankie. What is it about?
It’s going to debut May 8. Jane Fonda and I are in it. Sam Waterston plays my husband and Martin Sheen plays her husband. And its about women of our age who’ve been married to the same two men for 40 years—they’re law partners—and we don’t like each other much because we’re so different. She’s very Republican, and I’m sort of bohemian. And our husbands are going to retire, and we’re hoping we’ll have our husbands to ourselves, and we’ll go traveling and all that stuff. They take us out to dinner and they announce to us that, the last 20 years, they’ve been having an affair together, and they’re going to get married and divorce us. So we kind of only have each other.

Is it fun to see you’re old friend Jane Fonda?
Oh yeah, it’s great to work with Jane—and Sam and Martin, too. She’s with Sam from Newsroom and I’m with Martin from The West Wing. What we have in common is Aaron Sorkin. He’s sort of our offspring. He didn’t write this show, but he wrote the other two shows.

You’ve always identified as a feminist. Is this show a way of talking about that?
Yeah. Women’s friendship and everything that goes along with being a woman of our age.

What does it mean to you to be a woman of a certain age, particularly in the entertainment industry?
Well, the entertainment industry is a whole other ball of wax. I don’t relate to my age too specifically. I have a hard time getting that I’m as old as I am. I’m very active. I just keep on working. I think it’s good for people to see someone my age performing—just like seeing Joanie [Rivers], before Joanie died, damn it to hell. In Hollywood, you’re supposed to go somewhere and lie down permanently [after a certain age]. Well not someone like me. My friend Jane Fonda belies all that, too. Progress has been made, but it’s never enough. Just like it’s never enough with anything. It’s two steps forward, one step back.

So then, in that vein, what else are you working on?
I have a movie coming out in August. It’s called Grandma. It was kind of a hit at Sundance and it’s going to be at Tribeca, and Sony Classics bought it. I play grandma and my daughter is Marcia Gay Harden and my ex-husband is Sam Elliot, and my girlfriend is Judy Greer, and my granddaughter is Julia Gardner. It’s really a terrific cast, and its written and directed by Paul Wietz who I did Admission with, where I played Tina Fey’s mother.

Oh, I saw that! I loved that. You know what I saw you in recently was Eastbound and Down.
Oh yes Eastbound and Down! God I loved those. I did three of those.

How’d you get involved?
They just called me, out of the blue. I was sort of dumbfounded. And I didn’t even know the show existed, so I watched the first two seasons, and I just fell in love with Danny McBride. And that whole sensibility is just outrageous. So I went down there to wherever that is on the East Coast.

North Carolina, I think.
Yeah, somewhere in there. It was really great. Something happened—either the weather [was a problem] or they had to go on a trip somewhere—and my hair and makeup people and me ended up staying there about three weeks—and a good time was had by all. [Laughs]

You grew up in Detroit, can you talk a little bit about that.
I grew up in a very mixed neighborhood in an old apartment house. My mother and dad were Southerners whose came up from Kentucky. So there was just a range of human beings that lived in this old apartment house. I went to every apartment. I hung out in every place. I would play the room so that I could just stay there with them. I would do whatever they were doing. If I got my foot in the door, then I would stay. And they would say, ‘Isn’t it time for you to head home?’ and I would say, ‘Oh, I told my mother I was staying out late tonight.’ And I’d be, like, 10 years old. And my mother would be outside, trying to get me to come in for supper, yelling my name. She had the older kids tagging along, out looking for me. Suddenly I’d remember how late it was, and she’d see me coming around the corner, and I’d see her reach up in that tree and get a switch. I’ve heard so many people say that their mothers would make them go get the switch, but she got the switch herself. [Laughs] She could skin those leaves off with one swoop. She was very studied with it.

Sounds like the writing was on the wall in terms of you becoming a performer.
Well I guess it was, but I didn’t know it. I put on shows all the time, and I would imitate the neighbors, and I would dance ballet, and do magic. I pitched on the police athletic league baseball team. I mean, I just did everything, plus hanging out at everyone’s apartment.

It sounds like it was a fun childhood that gave you a lot, but it wasn’t showbiz at all. How’d you get the confidence to try showbiz? It must have seemed so far away.
Yeah, it did. When I went to college, I went into pre-med. I never graduated, and I never would have become a doctor but it was, like, another role I was playing. I wanted to make my own way, have my own career. And I was sort of good in biological sciences. But then I got in a college show in my sophomore year, and I was just a huge hit—huge! They were doing all these parodistic things, like a take off on Gunsmoke. And I had gotten into a play—The Madwoman of Chaillot—and I’d made kind of a hit in that, so when I went over to the variety show, they were ready to give me all the leading women’s parts. And I didn’t know what to do with them. They were just corny. So they took all the roles away from me. I’d come back the next day and somebody else would have the part. So I was ground down to a nub, but the producer kept saying, ‘If we only had one more piece of material,’ and I said, ‘Well, I think I might have something.’ And I told a kid I was friendly with, ‘Just interview me like I’m a distinguished guest, and I’ll be a Gross Pointe matron.’ Grosse Point was a very rich suburb of Detroit, and I talked about my charity works and my social activities. I just adlibbed a bit, and people would just crack up. So I went on all the local shows and did that and people just went nuts. I was also satirizing Grosse Point to expose that it was a covertly segregated community. So that led me to New York. I said, ‘I’m going to try to be in show business,’ because I was so comfortable on the stage.

So when was it you actually went to New York?
I went in ’62 and then I went again in ’65 and then I stayed.

There weren’t many female comediennes at the time.
No! No there weren’t, and I didn’t like any of them anyway. And I didn’t like many of the male comedians. I wasn’t really a stand-up comic anyway, but I did do character stuff. I’d go to the Improv late at night and do 10 minutes and people would say to me, ‘How can you do stand-up? You’re going to lose your femininity?’ It never crossed my mind. Such a strange idea, that you would lose your femininity. I said, ‘Well, I don’t like the way men perform stand-up either. They’re just gauche and sexist.’ It didn’t apply to me. I just didn’t even think of it. I don’t even know if it was confidence. I was single-minded. In fact, I try not to say anything to young people. If I think they have any kind of gift at all, I don’t want to interfere with what they’re doing because I think, ‘Who am I to tell them how to do what they’re doing?’ They’re on to something. They’re going to develop and evolve themselves, and I don’t want to derail them. And I used to just be adamant with people who tried to give me advice. I was cheeky as hell. I would say, ‘Who asked you?’

So your big break was Laugh-In, right?
Yeah, I went on Laugh-In and, literally, overnight, Ernestine was a huge success. To the extent that people didn’t realize it was me. Even after I was well-known, I was doing a Vegas special one year, and I did a male singer, Tommy Velour, and so many people who knew me as Lily and knew all those characters. . . . I went to the cleaners the next night and they said, ‘Your special was really good last night.’ And then, with great trepidation they said, ‘But who was that guy? He wasn’t very talented. He wasn’t a very good singer.’ [Laughs] And I was like, ‘That was me.’ [Laughs]

And I did Tommy Velour for Elizabeth Taylor’s 65th birthday, a television special that someone did. And she was sitting with Michael Jackson as her date—they were good friends—and he didn’t know who I was. I came on and moonwalked and did a bunch of stuff like he does. I did a bunch of screams, and I don’t know if he ever knew who I was. And she [Taylor] got such a kick out of it. And I got up real close to him, too. I was kneeling down at her knee and did a little bit. In the show’s contract they had to refer to Michael Jackson as the King of Pop three times, and so I was chosen to do one of the references. So I said something like, ‘Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it rare? Me on the ground here, the King of Pop there up in my chair.’ He’s kind of smiling, but kind of befuddled. Maybe he thought, ‘What in the hell is she going to pull now?’ I don’t know what he thought, but he didn’t know who I was.

You got the Kennedy Center Honors in 2014. That’s sort of the official stamp saying that you have influenced American culture.
I did get the Kennedy Center Honors . . . and I got the Mark Twain Prize [for American Humor, also awarded by the Kennedy Center] 12 years ago.

Well, that’s true, too.
I thought, ‘Oh I’ll never get the Kennedy Center Honors because they probably want to keep the comedian Mark Twain thing.’ In fact, when I got the letter, I didn’t even respond to it for over a week. I’m on a committee that nominates for the Kennedy Center Honors, and nobody I’ve ever nominated ever got picked. So I got a letter from [Kennedy Center Honors producer] George Stevens telling me that the season was coming up, and I thought he was inviting me to come [as a guest]. I was shooting Grace and Frankie, and I put the letter aside. And [my partner] Jane [Wagner] called me a week later—she was down here looking around on my desk—and she said, ‘Did you see that letter from George Stevens?’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, he’s just inviting us.’ And she says, ‘They want to honor you.’ And I said, ‘No they don’t!’ [Laughs] I was in the makeup chair at work and she said, ‘Yes they do! You better answer George right away.’ And I said, ‘No they don’t. Go back and read the letter again.’ I just fought with her about it. Then I was like, ‘Oh boy, hey!’ I was all turned out.

What if I open my mouth and no words come out? What if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve studied for the past two years? What if I sneeze on the sacred scroll?

These were my thoughts as I stood in front of my family and friends for this milestone event. After two years of preparation, my big day, March 29, 2008—22 Adar II 5768 according to the Jewish calendar—had finally arrived. I was becoming a bat mitzvah, a rite of passage that involves reading from the Torah and symbolizes a commitment to the laws and customs of Judaism. Did it really matter that this blessed event traditionally occurs at the age of 13, and, at 45, I was 32 years past puberty? To put it another way: Was it too late for me to experience a coming of age in middle age?

On this sunny March Saturday with 200 congregants—plus my sons, Zachary and Alex; my daughter, Sophia; my husband, Michael; and my mother, Millie—to bear witness, I sat in the front row of Pikesville’s Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, waiting my turn to chant Torah. Two years ago, this spiritual hegira would have been unfathomable. With my inability to follow even the most basic synagogue services, skepticism of organized religion, doubt of the existence of God, and poor aptitude for learning languages, I was far from an ideal student of theology.

For most of my life, my Judaism had been a deep source of embarrassment for me, not because I wasn’t proud of my heritage, but because I knew so little about it. While my maternal grandmother, Beile Kotler, came to Ellis Island from the Russian village of Kopojgorod, on April 13, 1913, with little more than a pair of silver Shabbat candlesticks and a love for her Judaism, she did not provide a more formal religious education for her daughter—my mother—and, as a result, those traditions and testaments were not passed down to me or my three sisters. We were Jews, but my parents were not like other Jewish parents I knew. Growing up, it’s safe to say, I had the only Jewish father on the block who (fledgling painter that he was) in his spare time once painted a near life-sized oil portrait of Titian’s Madonna and Baby Jesus and the only Jewish mother who, thinking it a masterpiece, hung it front and center in our family room. I mean, most Jews like Chagall.

I grew up eating the special Eastern European noodle kugels from my grandmother’s Philadelphia kitchen and loved listening to the Yiddish that rolled off my grandmother’s tongue. (“Bubele, take off that schmata,” she would say whenever I wore frayed jeans.) I grew up unable to identify the symbols on a Passover plate, broke fasts we never kept, and spun dreidels with Hebrew letters I couldn’t discern, but we came together as a family, and this was our version of Judaism. For many years, that was enough for me.

And then, it wasn’t.

The first seeds of my discontent were sown on a trip to Israel two decades ago. I was called shiksa (Yiddish slang for gentile) by native Israelis, who laughed at my ignorance of the most basic customs and rituals. The irony was not lost on me. Fellow Jews were “accusing” me of not being Jewish.

Still, on other occasions, I was seen only as a Jew. In casual conversation with the mother of one of my son’s former classmates, I used the word “minutiae.” “Is that a Yiddish word?” she asked looking perplexed. “No,” I replied curtly. “It’s a Webster’s word.” I remember feeling a rush of mixed emotions: a surge of anger at what seemed a subtle form of anti-Semitism, a sense of shame that my Judaism was so on the surface for her, and a sense of guilt that it bothered me to be “outed” as Jewish. I found it ironic, too: With my red hair, green eyes, and flagrant visits to Starbucks on Yom Kippur (the Jewish high holiday of fasting), no one had ever mistaken me as a poster child of Judaism.

For years, I had contemplated the idea of becoming an adult bat mitzvah, but every time I attended a bar or bat mitzvah of an extended family member or one of my children’s friends, there were parties with mechanical bull rides, caricature artists, and a commercialization of what was supposed to be a deeply sacred experience. Two recent extreme cases that I read about: American Idol’s Sanjaya performed at a Huntington, N.Y., bat mitzvah and a Bronx “bark mitzvah,” complete with chopped liver and wishes of “muzzle tov.” This was not something I wanted to be a part of.

Then came middle age, which coincided with an interest in yoga, a thorough reading of Elizabeth Gilbert’s juggernaut Eat, Pray, Love, and the realization that quiet contemplation was essential to my well-being. I had a sudden desire to “grow” into my own body as a spiritual being infused with equal parts wisdom, compassion, and decency. And maybe Judaism, I reasoned, could help me follow that path.

That and the fact that my son, Alex, also convinced me during his bar mitzvah process that if he had to do this, so did I, and no one likes a hypocrite.

My midlife crisis took the form of an inexplicable urge to demystify my own religion. I wanted to be able to sit comfortably in synagogue and follow a Friday night Shabbat service, to be able to explain the symbolism behind the tallit or prayer shawl, to read the Hebrew prayers in the siddur and, possibly, to contemplate the existence of a God I last seriously considered in fourth grade during my Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret Judy Blume phase.

Attending Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, where Zachary and Alex were bar mitzvahed (and where Sophia would be bat mitzvahed in 2010), was particularly meaningful to me. I studied with the same clergy, stood on the same bema, and read from the same Torah as my children. And while I felt silly initially, I felt better on the first day of class, realizing I was not the only one on a Jewish journey. There were nine other participants in my adult b’nai mitzvah class. Among us: 81-year-old Sylvia Besser, whose husband Jacob was the radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay at Hiroshima and was never bat mitzvahed because, in her day, that milestone was usually reserved for boys; Lee Smothers, an African-American Baltimore City parole officer and recent convert to Judaism; and Michelle Short, who converted, in part, for her life partner, Betsy, and because, as she once joked to me and my fellow classmates, “No other world religion would have me.”

We couldn’t have been a more diverse bunch. Our ages spanned the decades—we were mothers, fathers, grandmothers, spouses, and significant others. We were quiet, smart, comedic, and, as a group, delusional that decoding the Hebrew alphabet, with its befuddling vowels, would be as easy as learning to read in first grade. Over two years, in addition to learning to read Hebrew, we chanted from the Torah, and covered a few thousand years of Jewish history and liturgy.

We learned our Torah portions by chanting to our dogs (classmate Claudia’s dog, Boola, even crooned back) and taping copies of our portions to the strangest of places including my favorite spot: the sun visor of my Volvo. (Red lights were no longer the enemy, but a useful learning tool.) Alex supported me as well, downloading his silver iPod with a recording of the cantor singing my Torah portion and, 14-year-old wiseacre that he is, creating some Semitic music of his own by a make-believe group he dubbed “Moses and the Circumcisions.”

Who knew that Sunday mornings between 9:30 and noon would become holy? In those two-and-half hours, in a windowless, cinder block room, time seemed to stand still. And what began as nothing more than an adult education course transformed us not only as individuals but also as a group. Through our shared study and sitting together in synagogue services, we were pulled closer to each other and our identity as Jews.

What if I open my mouth and no words come out? What if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve studied for the past two years? What if the fire alarm goes off?

As Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen and cantor Judy Rowland called me to the Torah, I stood tall and prayed that my new Manolo Blahniks would bring me to the bema. (Finally, I was grasping the usefulness of prayer!) As is traditional before the reading from the Torah, an aliyah, or blessing, is read by a family member, who also comes to the bema. Smiling, Alex blessed me. The ner tamid (eternal light) burned overhead, and a sudden surge of warmth came over me that I am willing to believe (drumroll, please) was the presence of God. (How else to explain what a nice, middle-aged, reluctantly Jewish girl like me was doing in a place like this?)

I took a deep breath, leaned into the microphone, and, using a yad (pointer) because the hand-scribed scroll cannot be touched, I started to chant, acutely aware that for thousands of years Jews in synagogues all over the world have been reading the same portion on the same day and will do so until the end of time. Standing on the bema, I felt myself become a part of something much bigger than myself. For the first time, I felt a sense of community and belonging that overwhelmed me, and years of humiliation were replaced by pride. “That was awesome,” whispered the cantor when I was done. (Hey, it’s a reform temple.)

Becoming a bat mitzvah has not made me any more Jewish than I was at the start. What I learned is that my spirituality did not come from this single moment in a poof of smoke—it has been here day by day throughout my lifetime, and I can see that now. All of my values and belief systems about myself and the world—my questioning, my curiosity, my idealism, my quest for knowledge, even my angst—are all inherently Jewish traits. Who I am fundamentally is a byproduct of my Judaism, and that hasn’t changed, but having taken that journey, I am now part of a continuum that will go on forever. Like the millions of Jews who came before me, I am now a torchbearer.

Today, I wear my Judaism more openly and more comfortably. I am more willing and able to expound and elucidate. Years ago, while in Boston one summer, a Catholic friend discovered I was Jewish. “I have so many questions,” he said. “And I have absolutely no answers,” I fired back. My formal study has helped me with some of those answers, not all of which have been revealed. If my long-lost friend were to ask that question today, I would have to say, “Let’s talk. I have some answers.” Me, the shiksa of all people.