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Recently, I've been competing with a bunch of 13-year-olds and coming up short. This is because, as of last month, I've been studying for my Bat Mitzvah, the same event that at one point was originally, if tentatively, scheduled for June 1972. But when I was 12 and my father, who in our house was the boss on all things Jewish, asked me if I wanted to have a Bat Mitzvah, I adamantly refused. Indeed, I would have preferred to eat sawdust for the rest of my life than learn a bunch of indecipherable and stupid Hebrew prayers that no one understood anyway, and even if they did, the whole thing was ridiculous.
What does it mean to be your brother's keeper? Lessons from the Cleveland kidnappings