Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“I guess a bar mitzvah speech is like a plane in a storm: once you’re in it, there’s no way out but through. Great-Grandpa taught me that expression, even though he hadn’t been in a plane for like thirty years. He loved expressions. I think they made him feel American.

“This isn’t really a speech. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be here, so I didn’t prepare anything, other than my original bar mitzvah speech, which wouldn’t make any sense now, given that everything has completely changed. But I did work on it a lot, so if anyone wants it, I suppose I could e-mail it to them later. Anyway, I brought up that thing about actors who say they didn’t prepare a speech, because maybe demonstrating my awareness of the untrustworthiness of saying you are unprepared might give you a reason to believe me. The real question is why I care if you believe me.

“Anyway, Grandpa Irv used to do this thing where he’d give Max and me five bucks if we made a speech that convinced him of something. Anytime, anything. So we were constantly making little speeches: why people shouldn’t have dogs as pets, why escalators encourage obesity and should be illegal, why robots will defeat humans in our lifetime, why Bryce Harper should be traded, why it’s OK to swat flies. There was nothing we wouldn’t argue, because even though we didn’t need the money, we wanted it. We liked how it accumulated. Or we wanted to win. Or to be loved. I don’t know. I’m mentioning it because I guess it made us pretty good at speaking off the cuff, which is what I am now about to do. Thanks, Grandpa?

“I never wanted to have a bar mitzvah in the first place. My objection wasn’t moral or intellectual, I just thought it would be a colossal waste of time. Maybe that’s moral? I don’t know. I assume I would have continued to object even if my parents had genuinely listened to me, or proposed other ways of thinking about a bar mitzvah. We’ll never know, because I was simply told that it’s what we do, because it’s what we do. In the same way that not eating cheeseburgers is what we don’t do, because it’s what we don’t do. Even though we do sometimes eat real-crab California rolls, even though it’s what we don’t do. And we often don’t observe Shabbat, even though it’s what we do. I don’t have any problem with hypocrisy when it’s self-serving, but applying the logic of what we do to having a bar mitzvah didn’t serve me.

“So I made efforts to sabotage it. I tried not to learn my haftorah, but Mom would put on the recording whenever we were in the car, and it’s actually unbelievably catchy — everyone in the family can recite it, and Argus starts beating his tail with the first verse.

“I was incredibly obnoxious to my tutor, but he was happy enough eating my crap if it meant cashing my parents’ checks.

“As some of you might know, I was accused of writing some inappropriate words in Hebrew school. As terrible as it felt not to be believed, I was happy to get in trouble if it would get me out of this. Which it clearly didn’t.

“I’ve never thought about it until right now, but it occurs to me that I don’t know if I’ve ever actually tried to stop anything from happening in my life. I mean, obviously I’ve tried to get out of the way of inside pitches, and I make a lot of efforts not to use urinals without vertical privacy shields, but an event . I never tried to stop a birthday or, I don’t know, Hanukkah. Maybe my inexperience made me think it would be easier. But for all of my efforts, Jewish manhood only got nearer.

“Then the earthquake happened, and that changed everything, and my great-grandfather died, and that also changed everything, and Israel got attacked by everyone, and a whole lot of other things happened that this is not the right time or place to get into, and suddenly everything was different. And as everything kept changing, my reasons for not wanting to have a bar mitzvah changed and became stronger. It wasn’t just that it was a colossal waste of time — that time was already wasted, if you think about it. And it wasn’t even that I knew that lots of bad things were going to happen after my bar mitzvah, so the effort to stop my bar mitzvah from happening was actually an effort to stop all kinds of bad things from happening.

“You can’t stop things from happening. You can only choose not to be there, like Great-Grandpa Isaac did, or give yourself completely over, like my dad, who made his big decision to go to Israel to fight. Or maybe it’s Dad who is choosing not to be there, which is here , and Great-Grandpa who gave himself over completely.

“We read Hamlet in school this year, and everybody knows the whole ‘To be or not to be’ business, and we talked about it for like three consecutive classes — the choice between life and death, action and reflection, whatever and whatever. It was kind of going nowhere until my friend Billie said something incredibly smart. She said, ‘Isn’t there another option besides those two? Like, to mostly be or mostly not be, that is the question.’ And that got me thinking that also maybe one doesn’t have to exactly choose. ‘To be or not to be. That is the question.’ To be and not to be. That is the answer.

“My Israeli cousin Noam — that’s his dad, Tamir, over there — told me that a bar mitzvah isn’t something you have, but something you become. He was right, and he was wrong. A bar mitzvah is both something you have and something you become. I am obviously having a bar mitzvah today. I chanted my Torah portion and haftorah, and no one was holding a gun to my head. But I want to take this opportunity to make clear to everyone that I am not becoming one. I did not ask to be a man, and I do not want to be a man, and I refuse to be a man.

“Dad once told me a story about when he was a kid and there was a dead squirrel on the lawn. He watched Grandpa take care of it. After, he said to Grandpa, ‘I couldn’t have done that.’ And Grandpa said, ‘Sure you could.’ And Dad said, ‘I couldn’t.’ And Grandpa said, ‘When you’re a dad, there’s no one after you.’ And Dad said, ‘I still couldn’t do it.’ And Grandpa said, ‘The more you won’t want to do it, the more of a dad you’ll be.’ I don’t want to be like that, so I won’t.

“Now let me explain why I wrote all those words.”

“O Muslims, the hour is here! The war of God against the enemies of God will end in triumph! Victory in the Holy Land of Palestine is within the reach of the righteous. We will have our revenge for Lydda, we will have our revenge for Haifa and Acre and Deir Yassin, we will have our revenge for the generations of martyrs, we will have our revenge, praise Allah, for al-Quds! Oh, al-Quds, raped by the Jews, treated like a whore by the sons of pigs and apes, we will restore to you your crown and your glory!

“They burned Qubbat Al-Sakhra to the ground. But it is they who will be burned. I say to you today the words that filled the hearts of a thousand martyrs: ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad Saouf Ya’ud!’ As the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him, defeated the perfidious Jews at Khaybar, so too will the armies of Muhammad inflict the final humiliation on the Jews today!

“O Jews, your time has come! Your fire will be met by fire! We will burn your cities and your towns, your schools and your hospitals, your every home! No Jew will be safe! I remind you, O Muslims, of what the Prophet, peace be upon Him, teaches us: that on Judgment Day even the stones and the trees will speak, with or without words, and say, ‘O servant of Allah, O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”