Daniel's Bar Mitzvah

Yesterday was Daniel's bar mitzvah. He was so super. I really felt proud.

I met Daniel last spring when he decided he wanted to have a bar mitzvah. I worked with him intensely over the summer to get him up to speed to have his bar mitzvah in October. (Not a lot of months of preparation...). It was challenging to do as much as we could in this short time, but it was also challenging, because Daniel has some pretty serious learning disabilities, and I am not trained and have no experience in working with these.

Daniel learned to read only four years ago. He struggled with transliteration (reading the Hebrew was clearly not an option), and we sang over and over and over again. I made a cd for him that he listened to as much as he could.

Daniel was so interested in everything Jewish. His torah portion was about sukkot, so we talked about that holiday in depth, the other pilgrimage holidays, the other holidays in Tishrei (the current Jewish month). We talked about the Jewish history timeline and the Temple. He was so interested, and I loved discussing it all with him.

He LOVED the Tanach. Each time he came over, he would go directly to the tanach and try to find his parsha. And he would ask me over and over again if I had read the entire book. He asked if it's like a novel, and we talked a lot about what's in there - including the book of Daniel (he got super pumped about that one - but we had a hard time understanding it together!).

Saturday morning, Daniel stood in front of his parents, sister, grandparents and community, and he said the Shema. He said the first paragraph of the amidah, he said the brachot before and after reading the torah and haftorah, and he delivered a great d'var torah (sermon). I know he was proud of himself. I was also so proud of him. He worked so hard to get there. And he so got there.

Mazal tov!!