Episode Report Card Deborah: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Jew Of Arcadia
By Deborah | Season 2 | Episode 10 | Aired on 11.25.2004
Cut to the synagogue. That is one gorgeous spray of flowers up there. Grace and her parents and a cantor are at the front, as the cantor leads the singing. Sarah's wearing a dressy, pale pink (or maybe beige) coat over a mid-calf-length black dress with a small black hat. Grace is still just in the sleeveless dress and is wearing a kippah. In the audience we see Luke, smiling to himself, Adam and Joan, and Friedman in one of his five tallits and one of his five kippahs (actually, I believe talaysin and kippot are the plurals). Joan's wearing a raspberry mousse-coloured top with tiny cap sleeves and a matching hat, or possibly a kippah, it's hard to tell. Where would she get one that matches such a colour perfectly? Everyone finishes and sits as Rabbi Polonski greets them: "Shabbat Shalom. Today Grace becomes a bat mitzvah. She enters a new chapter in her life where she will see the world not through my eyes or her mother's, but through her own." Dude, no disrespect, but not only did that chapter start quite some time ago, but we're well into that book. Friedman: "Who knew the lady was a lady?" Yeesh. Glynis, in some kind of Jackie O hat, nudges him. The rabbi continues: "And this ceremony is about a celebration of that new sight, the awareness of the complexity of life, awareness that she now holds the moral responsibility for her own decisions."
Cut to the cantor picking up the beautiful Torah scroll in its elaborate cover, as he sings a prayer. He hands it to Grace's father, who carries it over to Grace and hands it to her with a little speech about the tradition of handing down the Torah. It's about the same size and weight as she is, but she does an admirable job of supporting it. "This Torah is being entrusted to you, Grace, with all it contains: the tradition, the history, the beauty, the pain, the struggle, and most of all…the mystery." As Grace carefully sets it down on the bima, and the congregation sits down again, Friedman comments, "Check out the muscle definition in her calves." Glynis: "Don't you have any respect?" Friedman: "Respect? I'm in awe here." Glynis: "Shut it." Oh! Almost a shout-out. Once again, I require "Shut it, Friedman." But the writers know that. They're just playing with me.
Back to the ceremony: her father says, "Today you are a woman, Grace," as he drapes her tallit around her shoulders. Joan beams. Her father sighs and says, "Take care of my little girl." He kisses her on the side of her head. I guess in this synagogue, they only require women's shoulders to be covered if they're reading the Torah. ["I noticed too that Luke didn't seem to have a yarmulke on, which I thought was also required even of the non-Jewish in the congregation (my dad always had to wear one when we went to a bar or bat mitzvah). So maybe the rules have changed. What hasn't changed: Sars interrupting Deborah forty thousand times a recap. Sorry." -- Sars]