The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  An announcer rattled off names and standings to the radio, as frenzied as an auctioneer. Unfortunately, it seemed camels weren’t christened as creatively as racehorses. Because their owners didn’t tipple, I joked.

  Pulling in at dawn, owners race these camels out at the racetrack, drinking coffee in their cars from paper cups filled by Iranian men wearing traditional garb and daggers. When Abu Dhabi struck oil and tailors rushed to sew deeper pockets into every dishdash, city dwellers found more things to buy, shinier things to polish, and bigger things to invest in. But in the immutable desert, there is only desert—men whose fathers raised and raced camels continue to raise and race camels, only now with a little more land.

  We reached the end of the race, accepted CapriSun juice bags from the announcer, and settled in for another lap.

  IN ARABIC, EVERY OTHER DAY is named for its order in the week, but Friday is yom al-jumu‘a, from a root that means “gathering.” No doubt it referred to gathering at the mosque—the jaam‘a—for communal Friday prayers, but it became (or has always been) a day for many other kinds of communion.

  The more I lost track of myself, the more I gravitated toward gatherings. They all pulled: anywhere it seemed like people came together, not by accident or for money but because they knew one another and they wanted to—this was what I felt I needed.

  One day per week across the rough triangle of the UAE, on Friday, gathering day, veils of sterility lift. After the camels finish their galumphing rounds, one hundred miles away in Dubai a thousand South Asians are convening in a huge ring around a sandy lot to compete in pehlwani. They come from every emirate in the hour before sunset to watch this style of wrestling, brought to the UAE by their compatriots in the eighties. Men strip down to brightly colored briefs, a jester-like promoter bangs a drum and plays a nasal horn, and crowd favorites and newcomers take to the dirt.

  At the same moment just over the Hajar Mountains in Fujairah, families are gathering at another rough arena by the sea. This one is for bull fighting, or rather, “bull butting.” Here, men do not challenge bulls to the death; a fearless man with a switch persuades bulls to challenge each other to the point of dishonor. Bulls never die—they can only lose.

  Emirati men in all-white robes—the Arabian thobe, called dishdash here and elsewhere in the Gulf, called kandura only here—pull the animals close with ropes until they lock horns. Children plop down just behind a thin fence installed only recently, others lean out of their sunroofs or lounge in folding chairs with bags of snacks. A candy man with only sweets peddles his stock.

  The tidiness of UAE life is displaced here by a shock of chaos, a messy spectacle with glory for the taking and tradition older than the buildings. Fujairah is among the smaller and poorer of the seven emirates, with no huge oil reserves or financial havens—just morsels handed down from the national coffers that are filled in Abu Dhabi and largely tapped by the capital’s favorite relatives in Dubai.

  I couldn’t be sure what laws of the land I was learning when a one-ton Brahman bull escaped the ring and charged into the parking lot pursued by a train of men in spotless white, but we all jumped and I felt a little giddy, like I’d heard my grandmother curse.

  For that split second, I glimpsed the nation’s roots. All the while, bored Fujairans screeched by hanging off the back of their roaring ATVs, looping up and down the Corniche road, and making people frown.

  In 1922, archeologist D. G. Hogarth reported: “Social differences have always been less in Arabia than perhaps anywhere else, not only between one community and another, but between one class and another in one community.” Hogarth, mentor to T. E. Lawrence, wrote that before the oil, before the apartments were filled four parts to one with foreigners. It could hardly stand in greater contrast now, with the nation’s reputation for unearthly wealth and the squalid treatment of the labor class. And yet, on these Fridays on the dirt where everyone was welcome, you could see it: the community, the mixed crowds all looking in the same direction. And then the sun sets, and we retreat again to our separate villas.

  ONCE EVERY YEAR, right on cue, the strata dissolve nationwide for one night. “Eid sa‘id,” we wish each other—Happy holiday. Diwali has passed. It’s not Islamic New Year yet. It’s not Hanukkah (although it sometimes is). It’s not Christmas—even if the buildings all draped and merry in glittering yuletide neon suggest otherwise from every window.

  On the second of December, the UAE comes alive for National Day. My first year marked the thirty-ninth anniversary of the unification of the seven emirates, an occasion commemorated by the only tradition befitting its significance: shooting Silly String from spray cans in strangers’ faces.

  Thirty-nine. In people years, the last crossroad before a great transformation, a faintly depressing maturity. But the UAE celebrates its youth with unabashed pride, and its age as an accomplishment. Its fortieth would be just the same, just as messy. Up and over the Gulf of Aqaba they played with aerosol, too, in that country ripening past sixty-five: It’s like Israeli Independence Day! I thought quietly to myself.

  At the best moments, it’s pandemonium. Abu Dhabi car owners en masse relieve their vehicles of their mufflers, burning rubber and backfiring on the busiest street in the city. The Corniche road, which runs from the port past the beaches and the billboard for Our Father Zayed and up to the driveway of Emirates Palace, is at a standstill (as if anyone would be anywhere else). Thousands rev engines and blare music from trucks painted red, white, green, and black, arrayed with faces of the sheikhs and overflowing with garlands and streamers. Exhaust pipes howl under pressure, letting out bursts that sound like automatic gunfire from a distance, and almost feel like it up close. Friends ride in pickups or huge flatbeds, shaking them until they almost capsize. Others dance in circles in the street. Fireworks are exploding all the time. And everyone is shooting everyone in the face.

  Roaming salesmen sell cans of colored Silly String for five dirham, around a buck thirty-five, and passengers in or on top of cars fire back with a vengeance. Beware the accomplices riding shotgun and brandishing shotgun-like water guns. Some shoot string, others shoot water, many shoot a kind of bathtub foam that fills the air and sticks to clothes. It’s every national resident for himself. And tonight—if you want to be—you can be a national, too.

  With a can of string, I attacked a car through its open window and four men exploded from the doors. I was drowned in soap—a clear defeat, witnessed by the line of bystanders along the sidewalk who watched battles unfold as you would from a saloon porch at high noon.

  On December second, soap scrubs away distinctions between owner and renter, laborers and locals of leisure, leaving those who go home to wash in palaces as vulnerable as the crowds. Maserati drivers with open windows suffer sneak attacks, and clever infantry shoot soapy jets through sunroofs—the more you own, the more you have to get covered in string and spume.

  Yet in this chaos, there is a code—a wild Middle Eastern gunslinger’s rule book. I stand rattling my can streetside, armed only with the power to intimidate and get foamed in the nose. A car drives by; a Pakistani man sticks his head out of the window, holding his can. He turns his hand over and back: Empty? I’m empty. Shoot you next year.

  Dawn rises again over the Corniche. The street cleaners have already washed the roads and lifted the trash from the grassy islands, as if Rumpelstiltskin had come in the night to do the impossible job. (What will we owe in the end for this magic?) The transient unity of the UAE fades again, and communities drift further apart.

  Luckily, the day after was a Friday. Yom al-jumu‘a.

  “The best day on which the sun has risen is Friday,” Muhammad is quoted as saying in the hadith; “on it Adam was created, on it he was made to enter Paradise, on it he was expelled from it.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER, two men came to visit us bearing the unique scent of home in their scraggly beards. They both took off their baseball caps, and under them—yarmulkes.

  Dressed and bearded
to the nines of Hasidic custom, these two Chabad rabbis had come via Dubai from Brooklyn to light Hanukkah candles with relocated Jews on the fortieth floor of our brand new apartment building, where everyone I knew lived stacked on top of one another.

  I hardly thought of myself as a Jew in this place. Jewish, sure, but I felt about my Jewishness the way you might feel about being left-handed. To those who knew me, I was a white American. To those who didn’t and saw me in a suit, I lived somewhere in the spectrum of well-situated tan. But for tonight, I belonged to the Jews by dint of ancient nationality.

  I didn’t know who had invited the orthodox rabbis to Sama, but I sure as hell was going to go. Not out of Jewishness, and not for the religious community that wasn’t mine, but because—sweet Mary and Joseph!—we were going to have a real Hanukkah shindig high above the mosques, and down sweet Manischewitz above the teetotaling deserts.

  Rabbi Shuki and Rabbi Yisrael led the blessings, touching the shamas to five candles, now burning brightly with the green light from the minarets below. It was the fifth night of Hanukkah, nicknamed “the darkest night” for falling every year on the new moon. Although the lunisolar Hebrew calendar prevents it from ever falling on the Sabbath, the week’s most holy day, the fifth night is distinctly holy. The rabbis resolved the paradox: clearly, this day must need no help to get holier.

  We all reflected in the polished tile under florescent lights. All around us, we perceived Gentile expatriatism and an image of Islam in low resolution. I felt the contrast not as a mark of oppression, but one of distinction: what made us run-of-the-mill deli patrons in New York now made us bakers of homemade bagels and fasters at unpredictable seasons. We were Jews! And with shared distinction comes a kind of solidarity, a kind of fort-like refuge. I didn’t want to build a moat—however much we welcomed one another in, I feared keeping the outside out. But with blessed juices flowing, chocolate coins clinking against the tile floor, and kids screaming at their dreidels, I slipped into the comfort of familiar things. For a moment, the impulse to Do something! quieted. The wandering urge slowed, and I began to feel attached.

  It was a more Jewish gathering than I’d ever gone to in Pennsylvania, where we did lip service to the high holidays and moved quickly on to the wine. This was my great-grandfather’s territory, where Soviet identity cards considered “Jew” a nationality; for me, it was like I had come home to a home I’d never known.

  I don’t always look “white” but I check it on boxes. And within the standard boxes, Jewishness conflates concepts of ethnicity (call it race) and religion, and even nationality in the straightforward sense; to the unfamiliar, “Jewish” and “Israeli” often substitute for each other (When did your family come from Israel?)—though none of the people who made me had ever lived there. But to tangle it all more, I had family in Israel now, and I felt close to them.

  My identity, the part of it that defined me as different from the most accepted of mainstreams—male and white and connected and upwardly mobile—was a murky one. I couldn’t even tell if it was murky, if it made me different or if it just reinforced my sameness with The-Way-Things-Are.

  Jewishness was the single thing about my biography, my heritage, that I was most aware was most objectively different. And I accepted that distance most readily, I think, because it was the thing that allowed me to make some variety of joke at the expense of (us) outsiders. And in that permission to mock one minority, the “inside” gave me its blessing: to identify as “out” and to also be “in.” (Cake: had, eaten.) And yet, to the degree that my outsider status had ever been felt—it had been felt most in memory.

  In the suburbs of Philadelphia, in New York, I was not forced outside for that thing that made me different. Those memories were older: my grandfather threatened in a Pennsylvania coal mining town for being of the tribe that killed Jesus. That was what I remembered, though I’d never seen it: him running.

  My difference was not in what I had chosen to be, but in what I inherited. It meant my identity, as a thing that distinguished me from others, depended on a life older than mine. And in that way, lightly, I felt very old.

  AS WITH ANY JEWISH GATHERING—there were these bits of back of back and forth, of bargaining. Existential questions writ tiny, little requests standing in for something giant.

  “Have you ever put on tefillin before?” Rabbi Shuki asked. I waffled—I couldn’t remember what that was exactly. He explained: tefillin are boxes containing bits of scripture that very observant Jews may wear on the arm and head during morning prayers, known also as “phylacteries.” It sounded like a kind of nosy dinosaur you’d meet at the pharmacy. I wasn’t sold.

  “Uhh, I don’t think so. I was never bar mitzvahed.” Sheepish, I told him how my parents had offered me the choice when I was seven or eight to go to Hebrew School and prepare for a bar mitzvah. It wasn’t a big deal to them and, seeing my Jewish friends complaining and missing hours of playtime on Wednesdays and Sundays, it wasn’t a big deal to me either—hell, we didn’t even get an afterlife out of the whole thing. It had always just seemed like a bad investment.

  “Come join us tomorrow morning—it will be your bar mitzvah.”

  It was all so fast. These were the guys I’d always given a berth wider than earshot on the Columbia campus or on subway platforms for fear of joining a Jewish cult or missing The Office. But in Abu Dhabi, I felt I could listen.

  I had always defined my Judaism with terms of exclusion: I’m Jewish but, though, not, I don’t. . . . It was easier that way, to reject the uncertain territory I had never trod, and to have an excuse ready for my inaction or ignorance. The rabbis asked me to forfeit one of my most prime excuses.

  “I . . . I have to be at work tomorrow,” I explained.

  “We’ll do it beforehand—plus, isn’t that your boss?” The provost was sipping Manischewitz by the window.

  Could I really change my identity as an unbar-mitzvahed Jew that quickly? So efficient and convenient to my work schedule? Wasn’t religion supposed to be difficult?

  But it wasn’t really religion. For me, it was a tradition all its own, with roots in a place I recognized but didn’t know. This was some descendant of a rite that someone with my nose might have performed five millennia ago—not in words, not even in faith, but in some kindred sense of conviction.

  And Yisrael then, perhaps unknowingly, made the perfect appeal to the absurd. “Where else,” said Yisrael, “if not in Abu Dhabi?”

  Touché, rabbi.

  I might have seen the lights atop the minaret wink.

  The next morning, already late for work at 9:30, I ascended to the apartment the rabbis had been given for the night. Shuki answered the door, welcoming me in to an apartment strewn with tchotchkes no longer common on the Arabian Peninsula.

  Yisrael handed me a skullcap. He lifted the tefillin and wrapped the leather strap of the shel rosh around my forehead, the shel yad round and round my left arm, down to my palm and several times around my middle finger. Each held a box filled with unknown words—one pressed against the head, the other wedged against the heart.

  I held a page-long prayer, written in English. “God understands all languages,” said Shuki.

  I never mentioned that I wasn’t very sure there was anyone there to do the understanding. I started reading.

  Sacrilege! I imagined the whispers of the orthodox turning sour. But Yisrael and Shuki smiled at me as I read, and they were staunch defenders of the orthodoxy. Still, I feared the unknown others who would have found me an immensely unsuitable candidate for this procedure.

  By the book, though, I was already a bar mitzvah. A Jewish boy automatically becomes a “son of the commandment,” rite or no, at the moment of his thirteenth birthday. But to be bar mitzvahed is something else. To partake in the ceremony is to accept the responsibilities of adulthood, to make a sanctified promise to follow new rules.

  I wouldn’t make the promises—not by the standard rule book at least—but I could try to make good
on small resolutions. Fear would no longer excuse a lack of action or the lazy comfort of simple assumptions. Like Paul: “When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” If I’ve become a man, I said, accepting the celebratory Mekupelet chocolates Yisrael brought from Israel, I’ll try to do the same.

  Looking out at decades of Islamic architecture and a cityscape adorned with mosque domes and enormous pictures of the founding sheikhs, I performed the Jewish liturgical version of a Las Vegas wedding. Boxes properly wedged, I read words I’d forgotten from a laminated card. For those who put on tefillin every day, it is a continuous affirmation of their beliefs, of their devotion. For me, one time only, I rode this mitzvah on the express train to manhood, eight years late by traditional custom and only an hour late for work.

  THAT WEEKEND, DOWN THE Corniche road past the new skycrapers sprouting like okra stalks, I stood with my back to the plastic bristles of the diamond-draped Christmas tree, the most expensive ever known, and lifted my trumpet to play carols under the golden dome of the $3 billion Emirates Palace Hotel.

  “Happy Hanukkah!” I shouted to the pools of English children, and the unfazed Emiratis on their way across the marble.

  The principal trumpet in the United Arab Emirates Philharmonic Orchestra was half-grinning. “Shhh!”

  “No one minds,” I said. And it was probably true. There we were, in our own little Western bubble, with our tinkly music refracting off the Swarovski chandeliers. Many thousands of dollars each around a fourteen-dollar lightbulb (my estimate), they glittered high into the cupola, from whence echoes of “O Come All Ye Faithful” rebounded through jangly acoustics.

  My eyes leaped like a baby’s to all the shiny things.

  This was all a pregame, featuring the children’s brass band from the British School, before, in the waning hours of a lesser Jewish holiday, the now-bankrupt Philharmonic that bore the name of its officially Muslim host country played its annual Christmas concert. Past the portraits of the sheikhs, beyond the gold-plated vending machine for gold coins and bars, through the colonnade of petrified palm trees, the auditorium had seats permanently marked “Reserved” for His Highness and Her Excellency and other members of the Royal Family, but they weren’t coming today. Today, the theater was open to the homesick.