‘God provided a choir of birds’ in Northern Territory
The ceremony took place at an aboriginal sacred site in the dried-up bed of the Todd River just outside Alice Springs.
What may be the first ever bar mitzvah in the Northern Territory took place on August 19 just outside Alice Springs.
The family’s Mum, Elliat Rich, is a designer and Dad James, who is not Jewish, is a professional designer with a First Nations group as well as a cameleer, and every year they load up a wagon and head off on a trek on camel back.
They joked that the bar mitzvah boy, Ace, would have to practice his leining walking barefoot in the desert.
TBI’s Beit Sefer Chayim Principal and Bnei Mitzvah coordinator, Caroline Paz who helped prepare Ace via Zoom, said the ceremony took place at an aboriginal sacred site in the dried-up bed of the Todd River.
“On the Friday, we went there and had a welcome to country and smoking ceremony, which in their culture purified the area and I got to say the shehecheyanu. And then the following day, we all trek down to this place, and we had the bar mitzvah under a tree and God provided a choir of birds for us!” said Paz.
She said Ace asked if he could do the ceremony in bare feet, and she told him there was a biblical precedent for that because when Moses saw the burning bush and realised he was standing on sacred ground he took his shoes off.
“And I said, we’re standing on sacred ground. At the beginning, before we started, I invited I invited everybody to take their shoes off if they if they felt comfortable to do so quite a few did, and I did [and] it was a barefoot Bar Mitzvah” she said.
Rich says her son Ace was given the choice of flying to Melbourne for the ceremony, but he chose to have it at home where the desert setting under a tree proved to be very special.
“The tree itself is hundreds of years old, so we were in the dappled shade. There was a beautiful cool breeze there were galahs and golden ring parots joining us for the ceremony – there were rock wallabies kind of rocking past, it was very pretty” she said.
Rich said it was remarkable to celebrate and ground her son in his Jewish family lineage and tell him where he came from, especially in central Australia where there is an ancient, continuous cultural backbone as well.
Paz says she is now looking forward to helping the family’s daughter with her Bat Mitzvah in three and a half years’ time.
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