Elijah's choice was not completely random, as we have in keeping with a few thousand years of family tradition been raising him Jewish. We just didn't know that he'd been paying attention.

A bar mitzvah is a coming-of-age ceremony in which a thirteen-year-old boy does the weekly scripture reading and otherwise helps the Rabbi conduct a service and comes out the other side a man. The degree of difficulty is increased by the fact that he reads from the Torah in the original Hebrew, and sings the words instead of just reciting them. Since Hebrew chanting cannot be learned by watching SportsCenter or playing computer games, preparing for the bar mitzvah required an extensive extra-curricular effort on Elijah's part, during which the words "This was your idea, buddy," were spoken only rarely by his parents.

Having chosen his course, Elijah was determined to do things his own way. Contrary to much available evidence, the words "bar mitzvah" do not translate into English as "big party." A "mitzvah" is a good deed or commandment, and the "bar" is where the dad goes when he finds out the parents have to sing in temple as part of the deal. Elijah was focused from the start on the mitzvah angle, eschewing a gala and truncating the guest list and asking that donations be made to the Greensboro Urban Ministry in lieu of gifts. He explained the last part in his speech by saying that Jews believe ordinary people can be seen as angels if they do good deeds.

Oh yes, you have to make a speech, up in front of God and your grandmother's friends and your restless classmates and cousins. You tell everyone what it was that you just said in Hebrew, and then you tell them what it meant. Elijah performed a brief exegesis on the story of Jacob's Ladder from the book of Genesis, correlated the words "God" and "good" in an interesting way, and worked in something nice about his sister, all while seeming as cool as the other side of the pillow.

He also nailed the singing part, standing beneath the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments in the sunlit old Temple Emanuel on Greene Street, where generations of his family have been married and mourned and sent to the Rabbi's study for talking during services, for the last of which after 30 years I should say I am truly sorry, although I'm really not.

But the memory I will hold most closely from the whole happy experience is of Elijah sitting at the kitchen table with his mother for night after night of practice, singing those ancient prayers in a pure, sweet voice that he definitely did not inherit from his father's people. Lisa and I got through our brief prayer, too, with her carrying the tune and me lip synching like Ashlee Simpson.

When it was all done, Elijah said he couldn't believe that it was over. So much preparation, so much effort, then a fast two hours on a Saturday morning and a raucous family dinner on Saturday night, and then...nothing. But I told him that what he had accomplished was the start of something, not the finish, a road map and not the end of the road.

Telling a kid in our culture that he is a man at 13 (or telling a girl that she is a woman if she becomes a bat mitzvah) is a little confusing. You still can't drive, vote, drink, or join the army. You still have to go to school and do your chores. But there is something going on that the bar mitzvah captures, something profound, and part of the power of the ceremony is that it marks a real transition from childhood and a step toward everything that follows -- a step the young man takes on his own.

When Elijah was done, his mom stood up and told him that he is growing into that big name of his. That sounds about right to me.

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

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