Cultural Identity: Seven Paragraphs In The Torah

Cultural Identity

Eight months. Eight months is all I had. I had to learn seven paragraphs in the Torah. Some of the paragraphs were relatively long but some were quite short. In the end, after all the practice, I ended up memorizing some of it; even though I was only supposed to just read it. But the thing is in my religious school; my classmates had an entire year to learn their Torah portions. There was more than just reading from the Torah though, we also had to chant it, and chant the before and after blessings and the normal prayers we normally sang on Shabbat. I didn’t have time to learn the normal prayers; I mainly focused on the torah portion. I was going to do my Bat Mitzvah with my brother but I ended up doing it by myself which was fine with me. I was bad at Hebrew for the longest time, but when I was on a time constraint everything I

No one else except my classmates at religious school and my parents and other family members has had the experience with a B’nai Mitzvah so I’d get their advice. I didn’t really talk to the classmates who’ve already done theirs because they weren’t very loquacious to me and I wasn’t to them. I’d feel relief when I got a new paragraph to study because I knew I was getting things done. But learning the prayers and the Torah weren’t all that I had to do, I had to prepare an English translation of what I just chanted. My Torah portion was about animal cruelty for example, how to kill an animal, make it quick and painless. We do not choose our portions; it is determined on when you have your B’nai Mitzvah. I was with the Rabbi for preparing my speech called the Drash, but that only took a few times to prepare. When I started to prepare it, it was the final stretch of the time I had left. It was summer when I was finally done with my Torah portion, but I still had to learn the prayers we’d chant on Sunday mornings before religious