Shabbat Shalom, a Good Sabbath to you all, and thank you for being with us on this special day.

You may be wondering why this Bat Mitzvah isn't being held in a synagogue, but instead at this wonderful non-sectarian school.

Rebecca and I felt the setting of HER Bat Mitzvah should be different - because for us, this day is different - from all other days - as this Bat Mitzvah is also different from all others.

It's not that the ceremony itself will be very different. Actually, there really is no such thing as a Bat Mitzvah ceremony.

What we'll have this morning is a regular Jewish Sabbath service, the same service held every Saturday in synagogues all over the world.  A Bar or Bat Mitzvah plays an important role in that service, but it's not a ceremony like a graduation or wedding.

That's because the idea of Bar or Bat Mitzvah, of the coming of age ritual of a Jewish boy and girl, isn't found in the Torah, the five Books of Moses, or anywhere else in the Bible. It's not an ancient practice.

BAR Mitzvah - celebrating the rite of passage of a 13 year-old boy - began just a few centuries ago in Germany.  But that was for boys only. 

When my mother was born in Russia early in the 20th century, Bat Mitzvah - for girls - was unheard of.

It wasn't until 1923, the same year my mother immigrated to America and passed through Ellis Island, that the first Bat Mitzvah took place not far away in Manhattan, when the daughter of a famous Rabbi decided that anything that boys could do - she could do better.  It didn't catch on quickly.  When I was Bar Mitzvah in the late 1950s, Bat Mitzvah was just coming into its own.  Since then, hundreds of thousands of Jewish girls have been Bat Mitzvah.

Of those hundreds of thousands of Bat Mitzvah girls, probably no more than a hundred in all the world have also been Chinese. That isn't because, as some people assume, these two venerable ancient civilizations, of the people of Israel and the people of China, never met.

In the time of Marco Polo, Jewish merchants first made their way  to China from India and Persia; some of them stayed, married Chinese women, built a synagogue and formed a vibrant Jewish community in the city of Kai-feng. As the centuries passed, Kai-feng Jews became imperial Governors and Generals and famous artists and musicians.  But they were isolated, cut off from Jews in the rest of the world, and by the 1800s, the Jewish community of Kai-feng was slowly dying.

By the time some of my other Russian relatives came to China in the 1920s, Chinese Judaism was extinct.

Which bring us to this day - to this Bat Mitzvah - and how it came about.

Just 14 years ago, on November 3, 1993, the Beijing Government enacted a law providing for the foreign adoption of children in the Peoples Republic of China. That was the day that, as adoption professionals put it, that "China Opened" - opened its doors just a crack so that a few of the half million or so children - almost all of them girls - in Chinese orphanages, could find loving families in America and Europe.

Almost exactly nine months later - we don't know the exact day or time or place, though the official papers say August 4, 1994 - a baby girl was born somewhere near the Yangtse River in Anwhei Province.

You might say that baby girl was conceived on the very day that China "opened" - just in time to find her destiny elsewhere.

"Conceived", of course, means the start of pregnancy and the formation of an embryo.  But, more abstractly, it also means the birth of an idea in thought and imagination.

I believe that on the day of that baby's physical conception, there was also conceived the metaphysical idea of this day, this moment in time, when that baby,  passing through China's open door, would grow up to be the answer to two prayers.

One was my lifelong prayer, that I would some day have a daughter. The other was a much older prayer, one that seemed almost forgotten.

In 1850, a British diplomat in China received a letter from Chao Nien-Tsu, leader of the thousand year-old Jewish community of Kai-feng. This is some of what he wrote:

"During the past fifty years, our religion has been imperfectly transmitted, and although its canonical writings" - meaning the Torah - "still exist, there is none among us who understands so much as one word of them. It happens only that there yet survives an aged female of more than 70 years, who retains in her recollection the principal tenets of our faith.

"Morning and night, with tears in our eyes...do we implore that our religion may again flourish. We have everywhere sought about, but could find none who understood the letters of of the Great Country" - he means the Hebrew of the Torah - "and this has occasioned us great sorrow...Our synagogue...has long been without ministers; the four walls...are greatly dilapidated...in ruins. Through the whole day have tears been in our eyes, and grief at our hearts, at the sight of such things...Daily with tears have we called on the Holy Name...[that] our religion...and its sacred documents...would have a...future..."

Chao Nien-Tsu died with his prayers unanswered. But if he were sitting here today, I think he would again have tears in his eyes, but not tears of sadness. Because today, he would see a young lady, born on Chinese soil, come to this table, open a sacred scroll identical to the one treasured, but unread, in the dilapidated Ark of the Revered Scriptures at Kai-Feng - and she will do something which no one at Kai-feng, no one in all of China, with its hundreds of millions, could do in 1850. She will chant from that scroll, in the ancient language in which it was written thousands of years ago - what Chao Nien-Tsu called "the letters of the Great Country", the Hebrew language of the Holy Land. 

And so that prayer of 150 years ago will finally be answered - and what passed away in sorrow will be reborn in joy as a Chinese girl becomes a Bat Mitzvah, a daughter of God's Covenant with the children of Israel.

This will be one of the first - but not the very first - such Bat Mitzvah in the world, nor will it be the last.

Three weeks ago, I posted a message about Rebecca's Bat Mitzvah website to an e-mail group for the adoptive parents of Chinese children which reaches 50,000 people in 40 countries. A few of those people who are Jewish responded by sending Rebecca messages of congratulations.

Some of the messages were from other Jewish girls, adopted from China, who were already preparing for their Bat Mitzvah in the near future. One was from a Jewish mother in New York, who wrote, 

"Dear Rebecca- I followed your link this Shabbat morning and was so touched by your website. We have 2 girls from China. One will have her Bat Mitzvah in 2010. You are blazing the way for all of us...Mazel Tov!"

So - not the very first, and certainly not the last, Chinese Bat Mitzvah.

But there is something else about this day, this Bat Mitzvah, that does make it different from all others. What makes it different - is YOU - all of you in this congregation who are here to witness this spiritual event.

If you've been to other Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations, you know that they're mostly attended by "mispochah", the Yiddish and Hebrew word for - "family".  Blood relatives, who may not like each other very much, if at all, dutifully come together, sometimes after years of estrangement,  to celebrate a young relation's coming of age.

But not today.  Today, not one person in this room is a blood relative of either Rebecca or myself.

And if you look around you, you'll see that most of you - not just the rare book dealers, the politicians, and even a few ex-spies, who are linked to past events in my peculiar life - most of you are even strangers from one other.

And finally, most of you aren't - even - Jewish.

So why have you taken time out from your busy lives to sit among strangers and spend two hours listening to prayers chanted in a language you can't read or understand?

Because all of you are, in some way, part of Rebecca's family - our family - a very extended family, just not one built around the Double Helix.

And you do, I believe, all have one thing in common:

You've come here today to honor a young lady who, 13 years ago, began life 7,000 miles away, all alone, a new-born baby, crying, in a basket, on a dark street corner. A baby without a mother. She was taken to an orphanage where she spent two years in a crowded crib - with her wonderful honorary sister, Hannah - a crib that became her familiar world, until one day, suddenly, she was torn away from everything and everyone she had ever known and handed to a strange man, the first white dude she had ever seen, old enough to be her grandfather, who dashed her away to another country and took her to his home, where he lived alone, a bit of a hermit. And so that baby grew up, still never having known a mother.

But, miraculously, in spite of all this, thank God - and I mean that literally - she has grown up - to become a lovely and loving human being - who deserves, I think, the gift you've all brought her on this day that, in the Jewish tradition, she becomes a woman.

Not a gift she can put in the bank, or one she can even see, but a gift she can certainly feel.

Your gift is a simple, poignant message - one she's heard many times in the past 11 years, but has never taken for granted.  The message is this:

"Dearest Rebecca - you are loved by many people. And many of them have come here today just to remind you - that you're not alone - any more."

Shabbat Shalom.  May this be a Sabbath of Peace and Joy and Love for all of us.