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Authors: Elizabeth Benedict

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Never Too Late

ABIGAIL POGREBIN

When I was growing up, my mother, Letty, always sewed elaborate Halloween costumes for me, cheered my every softball game and musical revue, and even helped me win first prize in the “Original Hat” contest at Fire Island's day camp when she sent me with a colander cap filled with sea grass sticking out of every hole. Every Hanukkah, she bought a present for each of us three kids for each of the eight nights, and her holiday tables were something to anticipate and ogle—festooned with candles, crystal, honey, and challah.

But her most memorable gift to me was the flowers.
Th
e flowers for my bat mitzvah at age forty.
Th
e fact that she suggested them, insisted she pay for them, and found a florist who transformed what would otherwise have been a grim space into a fantasyland, is the gift I'll remember most about her. My mother gave me the flowers that in turn gave me one of the rare flawless days of my life.

ONCE I DECIDED
I was going to become a bat mitzvah, I had to find a synagogue. I didn't belong to one and you can't just schedule a bat mitzvah in any synagogue if you don't pay dues. Neither can you plop your makeshift service in any JCC or YMCA because your space needs a Torah and a Torah is expensive to rent and unlikely to find. Do you know anyone who happens to have a Torah scroll in his closet?

Th
e young rabbi, Jennifer Krause, who had been teaching me Judaism 101 for three years (and who gave me the idea to do this belated bat mitzvah thing in the first place), didn't have a pulpit, so there was no natural shul or hall to land in. I did occasionally attend the Upper West Side hub of Conservative Judaism—B'nai Jeshurun—on the High Holy Days, but I didn't consider myself a real congregant.

So, after much hand-wringing, and with my husband's nudge and blessing, I finally decided to plunk down more money than I'd anticipated to rent an old synagogue that now functions as an event space: Angel Orensanz, located on Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (Sarah Jessica got married there.) I liked that it was dusty, dimly lit, and historical. I liked that it was a raw space to make our own. And of course, they had the essential prop: a Torah in the ark.

Th
e date was set, the space was booked, the Hebrew was (almost) memorized, but I wasn't sure how the day would actually come to life. I hadn't planned on any set pieces or lighting that would guarantee “the magic” and didn't know where it would come from on its own.

And then Mom said, out of the blue: “I want to contribute the flowers.”

At first I wasn't sure what she meant.

“You mean a bouquet or two?”

“I always regretted that I didn't give you a bat mitzvah,” she confessed. “For all the reasons that I was wrestling with Judaism personally during your childhood, I decided to take your bat mitzvah off the table. And so you didn't learn anything. And that milestone passed without a service or celebration.
Th
ere is no getting that day back. So I want to get you the flowers for your bat mitzvah.
Th
at's the least I can do now.”

I can't say I was entirely sure why I'd decided to go through with this ritual. A bar or bat mitzvah is supposed to be the day a child becomes a Jewish adult and, God knows, I'd passed the adult demarcation decades ago. I was also somewhat embarrassed about all the Jewish education I'd never had, let alone mastered, so I wasn't in a hurry to trumpet my ignorance with a ceremony.

But when Jennifer suggested the idea, something tugged at me. I didn't like what I didn't know. I regretted what I'd never learned.
Th
is was a chance to catch up, to connect to something enduring—to choose a tradition I don't remember ever being given the chance to embrace or reject.
Th
e three years I'd spent unpacking lines of Bible verse with Jennifer and my good friend Jamie Lynton had been galvanizing somehow. Without any expectation of being moved or feeling spiritual, simply the exercise of studying a few lines or chapters with a smart rabbi had deepened the world for me, made me read fiction differently, see movies differently, hear lyrics differently, look anew at beautiful views.
Th
ere was an electricity in study, which no one had forecast, an ineffable power in the weekly conversation itself.
Th
e more I learned, the more I wanted to know, the more I felt.

And then Jennifer said, “You should go further. You should take the next step.” And before I knew it, we were starting to plan and prepare. She gave me recordings of her voice to help me memorize the complete Shema and my Torah portion. I started writing (and rewriting) my d'var Torah—my minisermon—on the section of Torah that fell on my birthday, editing drafts upon drafts with Jennifer, and rehearsing out loud.

I began to consider the appropriate “afterparty”—a lunch for my family and friends (was I really inviting family and friends?)—that would happen somewhere near Angel Orensanz and hopefully not add too much to the price of the day. I kept feeling apologetic about this enterprise, like it was indulgent or silly somehow to plan a thirteen-year-old's party twenty-seven years later.

But my husband said, “We should host a nice lunch.”

And then my mother said, “I'll do the flowers.”

My mother, who was raised in an observant home in Queens and who became one of the rare bat mitzvahs of her day.

My mother, whose mother died of cancer when my mother was just fifteen, and who rejected her faith when she was excluded from the mourners' minyan solely because she was female.

My mother, who celebrated all the major Jewish holidays, but didn't return to true observance until she found a way to reconcile her Judaism with her feminism.

My mother, who constantly made us aware of her guilt and self-flagellation that she didn't give us a proper Jewish education like she had.

I asked her if she would chant Torah during my adult bat mitzvah and she said yes, and then panicked once she started practicing. “I'm too rusty,” she said, sounding sad and stunned. “I wanted to do this for you but it's just too hard for me.”

I said it was absolutely unimportant—it was—but I was aware she felt empty-handed, and I wasn't sure what to tell her I needed when I didn't know myself.

“I'll do the flowers,” she announced, and I heard her spirits lift.

She hired her friend, Bella Meyer, a floral designer who has a soft face with twinkling eyes and Bohemian style. Meyer happens to be the granddaughter of Marc Chagall, which seemed no accident in the way she approached flowers: as artistic elements, colors on a palate. A graduate of the Sorbonne with a PhD in Medieval Art History, Bella came to meet us at Angel Orensanz and as she walked around the shadowed, cavernous hall, she asked what we envisioned and told us what she imagined.

But I couldn't imagine. I couldn't see how the space could be brightened, how she was going to create arrangements that would make much difference, frankly, let alone supply the warmth I knew in my gut was still missing.

I SLEPT AT
my mother's house the night before the ceremony because supportive in-laws had lovingly descended upon our apartment with my husband and children for this event, and I knew I would be a stress-case.

When I arrived with my packed overnight bag at my childhood apartment, I went upstairs to my old room and found a card and a box. Mom had written a beautiful message about her astonishment and pride that I chose to do this myself.
Th
e green velvet box contained an engraved perfect silver Kiddush cup:
ABBY
5-14-05.

I slept in my childhood room—the one that used to be decorated in the hunter green theme she'd let me select when I was fourteen: Laura Ashley flowered wallpaper, cushioned headboard, quilt, orange telephone, butcher block desk. I remembered the stereo my parents received for free when they made a deposit at the local bank—it had built-in disco lights that flashed to the beat of my eight-track tapes. I recalled the sound of the traffic down below in winter—which I'm still convinced has a different sound than traffic in summer.

My mother kissed her forty-year-old daughter good night and I tried to sleep.

Th
e next morning, a stunning May Saturday, we rode the subway together in heels down to Essex Street. I carried the wine and bread for the Kiddush blessings, plus the customized prayer books, yarmulkes, candlesticks, and matches. My father had given me the tallis he was married in. I don't think he'd worn it since.

When we walked up the dilapidated stairs of Angel Orensanz and entered the sanctuary, I gasped. Bella had created the equivalent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
Th
ere were purples and whites and reds and pinks, cascading and exploding everywhere.
Th
e room was a forest and an oasis. It felt like jewels had been strung and music was playing.

I hugged my mother and kept saying thank you. For the first time, I exhaled and knew what I was there to do. To hold something close and keep something safe. To honor what my mother had inherited and, for her own reasons, couldn't pass on before today. Now she was ready to give it to me (and so relieved I had arrived here in time for her to see it). Her atonement and reinforcement was visible—even fragrant—in the peonies, daffodils, and lilacs.

TH
E CEREMONY IS
a blur and also utterly crystalline. I recall my father placing his tallis around my shoulders. I recall my parents' aliyah and my husband's. I won't forget reading the Torah in front of me—the magnitude of the words I was looking at, that the letters were each hand-calligraphed, that so many had died to keep reading them, to protect them, that this code no longer appeared foreign to me.

I remember delivering my d'var Torah in a steady voice, looking out at the faces I knew so well, and smelling the flowers as if their scent alone was there to hold me up and guide me to the finish line.

Most powerful of all, I recall my children's blessings over the candles, bread, and wine. Ben was eight and Molly six.
Th
ey looked like freshly scrubbed angels, and their little voices made me feel blessed.

We all exited the murky hall into spring sunlight. My friends walked, chatting, down the street to the corner of Norfolk and Delancey—finding seats in the breezy little Italian café that was waiting for us, its doors opened to the sidewalk.
Th
e tables were long banquet-style, twinkling with plates and glasses, and Bella's flowers dancing down the center. Mom had asked her to make the lunch beautiful, and that's the only word for how it all looked: beautiful. I hadn't known I could feel high from the sight of hydrangeas and lilies arranged in artful boxes.

My family and friends' speeches put me on a cloud.
Th
e food was delicious.
Th
e kids ran around with their cousins or spun around on the bar stools. My husband actually got choked up (a first) when he toasted me.

And in the midst of the joy were the flowers Mom bought me.
Th
ey'd made the service feel transcendent.
Th
ey'd made the lunch exuberant and elegant at the same time. She gave me more
in those gusts of color and vegetation than I could even have imagined.

My mother didn't give me Judaism when maybe she should have, but she made up for it.

Th
ank you for the roses, Mommy.

Th
e Broken Vase

REVEREND LILLIAN DANIEL

In her first international trip ever, my twenty-five-year-old mother moved from a small town in South Carolina to Tokyo, when I was just six months old.
Th
ere we met my father, a foreign correspondent who had taken one day to pick out a house for us in a traditional Japanese neighborhood. A stylish Southerner with a taste for adventure, bouffant hairdos, and high-heeled shoes, my mother soon learned how to speak the language, to bathe standing up, and to collect Asian pottery. As our family went on to move from one country to another, my parents grew their collection of pottery. Since the pieces were arranged around the house just out of reach of running children and frisky dogs, it was not until I was a teenager that I noticed a vase that did not fit with the rest of the collection.

With a cream glaze and a blue Japanese design, it looked like it had once been a fine antique, but now it was badly damaged and glued together. It stood amid the finer pieces, a mass of cracks crudely bound with what was obviously the wrong type of adhesive—everywhere the twenty or so pieces met, glue had bubbled out yellow as it dried, creating the effect of scabrous scars, or a dried-up runny nose.

“Why don't you get rid of that one?” I asked my mother. “It looks just awful next to the others.”

“Never,” she replied. “It's the most valuable piece of pottery we have in this house.”

Th
en she told me the story.

WHEN I WAS
a toddler, my journalist father covered the Vietnam War, moving in and out of the war zone for weeks at a time. Whenever he returned home, he brought a piece of Asian pottery to add to my mother's collection.
Th
e vase was one of the finest he'd found, and he wrapped it in brown paper and string and carried it carefully on several airplanes and buses before finally walking up the driveway with it in his hands.

Th
at was the moment I, at two years old, saw him and rushed forward. Surprised and elated, my father opened his arms. As I fell into them, the vase fell out and smashed into pieces. My father gasped, but my mother had no concern for the broken vase; she was just delighted to see me in my daddy's arms. Later that night, my mother pulled out the glue, clumsily repaired the vase, and pronounced it “precious.”

It remains a symbol to me of why so many people loved her, and mourned her passing.
Th
ere was no situation she didn't think could be repaired and redeemed, including her own illness. It surprised her by taking her from this world at the age of sixty.

She could always see the beauty in broken things, including in me. When I went through a brief stage at Yale Divinity School, attempting to adopt what I thought was the look of a serious student, in baggy linen dresses and stern glasses, she had to intervene. “Darling, it is wonderful that you want to be a minister,” she said, “but I'll be damned if I will tolerate you dressing like a missionary.” Most people who had known me as a teenager were shocked, perhaps appalled, to hear that I intended to go into the ministry. My mother claims that she had seen it coming. It seems she could often see things that other people couldn't; she did “makeovers” long before there was a word for it. Her friends were always showing up at our house with three suits on hangers, to ask my mother which one to wear to the job interview.

She saw the beautiful possibilities in everyone. So much so that whenever she'd tell me news about friends, she gave everyone a promotion.
Th
e medical resident became a chief surgeon, the teacher's assistant an assistant principle, and all were fascinating and successful. When her cultured-spiritual-but-not-religious friends were disdainful of my strange turn in career path, she defended my choice to lead a dying church where the small choir outnumbered the tinier congregation by telling her friends, “It's really very much like being a college president.”

But when the reality of life hit hard, and failure crossed, my mother was somehow able to sweep away all those promotions and listen to people who doubted themselves with absolute attention. As a person who had failed herself in more than one arena—from some of her workplaces to her marriage—she was the kind of person you felt you could tell your failure story to and have it blessed. You could trust that she would see the beauty in broken things.

AS A SPIRITUAL
leader, I see my own calling very similarly. Until God gets around to the major repair work, as a person of faith, I try to repair the brokenness of the world in small ways. But ultimately, I have to learn to see the beauty, the image of God, in broken things, and to call them precious.
Th
ese days, I strive to do all that as the senior minister at a large church in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago, where broken things are seldom displayed, but shunted out of sight, far back and behind the children's sports trophies and the smiling family portraits.

In Henry James's novel
Th
e Golden Bowl,
the central metaphor that predicts the suffering of all the characters is a lovely bowl. But running through the bowl is a nearly invisible flaw that renders the treasure less valuable than it appears to be.
Th
e beautiful but flawed bowl mirrors the false contentment of the characters as they move about in desperation, in a society that has no room for flaws.

I've always hoped that the churches I serve can offer a different understanding of brokenness. When we gather around the communion table, the vessels, whether pewter plates or delicate chalices, are not the issue. It is in the breaking of the bread, tearing it out of the perfection of a formed loaf, and leaving the edges jagged, that we remember what Jesus said: “
Th
is is my body, broken for you.”
Th
ose words render absurd our human preoccupation with perfection. True beauty comes, not from the flawless piece, nor from the piece that pretends to have no crack.

On the Sunday mornings when I preside at the communion table, I tell the congregation that our salvation lies in God's broken body. But in real life, as I lead a complex organization, I am not so different from any other leader. I fall prey to the same pressures, and the same ambitions. I want my church to be perfect. So in the frenetic pace of children's classes, choir rehearsals, efforts to create more programs and attract more people, a congregation and its minister can forget the beauty of being broken, and appear to be a congregation without flaw or fault. In my suburban village, where our idolatry is not so much the golden calf but that other graven image, “the perfect family,” perfection in the church can have heartbreaking and isolating results. When happily married, a family attends church, but once divorced, they wonder if they still belong. At his wife's funeral, the grieving widower finds peace in the sanctuary, but on Sunday morning, the church seems to be a place with too much cheerful veneer to make room for his scars.

My mother's great gift of seeing the beauty in broken things pushes me to push my church to resist the culture of the golden bowl. When we can acknowledge the beauty of the broken vase, remarkable things can happen.
Th
e hungry are fed, the homeless sheltered in the midst of affluence, and personal testimony moves from victory dance to truth telling.

Yet order and flawlessness are seductive in a chaotic world. One evening, years after my mother had died, my father sat at my long clean kitchen counter, littering it with an explosion of newspapers, magazines, coffee cups—all teetering on the edge of chaos. When he gestured to call my attention to an article he was reading, the coffee cup went flying, spilling onto the papers in a sticky mess and breaking when it hit the floor.

“I'll get it,” he said, using a magazine as a mop.

“No, Dad, it's OK,” I said, in a tone that indicated it might be time for him to leave. “I'll clean it up after you're gone.”

AFTER HE LEFT
I picked up the pieces of the broken coffee cup, mopped up the papers, and pulled out the spray-on cleaner. As the fumes of disinfectant hit my nose and the counter shone once again, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Th
at was the last time he drank coffee at our counter. I could not have known that I should have paid more attention that night, worried less about the mess, and perhaps had him stay awhile longer. Today my counter sparkles, but I want the mess back. I want to see the sticky rim of a coffee cup, mop up newspapers read and discussed and stamped with a date of a happier day.

Now that my father is gone, I preside at another unfinished meal. I stand at the communion table where my brokenness finds its place in the open arms of Jesus, and my eyes are opened in the breaking of the bread. Clean counters, golden bowls, and perfect people are no match for the broken vase that now sits on a grown orphan's mantel. Its beauty lies in the scars themselves, reminders that over the generations, God has picked us up, put us back together, placed us back on the best shelf and called us precious.

MY MOTHER WAS
a magnificent entertainer.
Th
ere was something about a meal at her house that topped everything, though it was not necessarily the cooking. Sometimes that was delicious, but other times, the gravy might have burned on the stove, or the chicken was frighteningly undercooked, or the whole meal came out an hour late, blackened and crunchy—
including the green beans. But there was something about
being at that table that pointed you toward abundance. You knew you were special, that someone had set the table for you, put on festive music, and killed the fatted calf, even if the food was strange.
Th
ere were always flowers and candles. My mother had a keen sense of both her strengths and her limitations as a hostess. Her entertaining motto was, “Well, it may not be good, but it'll certainly be fancy.”

One night, she came out of the kitchen more than an hour late, dressed to the nines in a sparkly outfit a couple of sizes too small, red high-heeled shoes clicking across the floor, and she was holding—on another giant Japanese pottery tray—a magnificent roasted duck. It was a brand new recipe for her. We had waited a long time for the meal, but it was hard to see the duck on the plate, for in her enthusiasm for her project, she had gone heavy on the garnish. It was like a parsley explosion of culinary enthusiasm, a product of a long day's work, cheerfully given. But then, the combination of all the greenery, the grease of the duck, and a fold in the carpet just underneath her high-heeled shoes all came together in the perfect storm. As she tripped, the duck she had spent the whole day preparing went flying across the room.
Th
e bird landed where once it had had its tail feathers and skidded across the floors, only to stop on the muddy doormat in the front hall, a brown trail of grease, gravy, and parsley garnish in its sad wake.

Th
e hostess had a moment where tears welled up, and there was a collective gasp among the guests. You could see that my mother was thinking about how she would be judged. She knew from experience how easily people mock a woman of enthusiasm when her big plans go wrong. But then, as if a new spirit came upon her, she pulled her little shoulders back and marched over to the defeated duck on the doormat. As she stooped down and picked it up, she announced to the group, “Let me just throw this duck away in the kitchen, and I'll be back in just a minute with the other duck.”

A few minutes later, she made another grand entrance, this time avoiding the crease in the carpet, and this time with a duck even more heavily disguised in garnish, to cover the bruises, for of course, as we all knew, there was no other duck. But the holy spirit of hospitality was such that without a word, it was as if the guests collectively decided to replace the world's petty practices of judgment and critique with a spirit of generosity. And we sinners all ate well at the table that night, feasting less on the damaged duck than on the grace that was served to both an embarrassed hostess and to her hungry guests.

Th
is remains my vision of the heavenly banquet, my hope for the life that is to come. I imagine my mother greeting me with a plate of burnt hors d'oeuvres. I imagine my father relaxing at the table, with the cup of coffee he never got to finish at my counter. And there with my parents is the original artist who made us all, the one who delights in broken things and calls them precious.

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