Yesterday morning, we attended Shabbat services not at the synagogue we belong to, but at a different Conservative synagogue several miles from our house. We went to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of cousins and ran into a number of people we knew.

I told one of them that every time I am in their sanctuary, I am reminded of the most frightening experience I ever had in a synagogue, and that it happened in that very room, about 45 years ago.

The occasion was the bar mitzvah of the son of a first cousin of Edie. We went to the service, but the service was unlike anyone I had ever been to.

How could that be, you ask. Well, it was a Conservative service, and for the first almost 40 years of my life, I had only been to Reform Jewish services. St. Louis, where I grew up, had a greater percentage of Reform Jews and a lesser percentage of Conservative Jews than any other major American city. While there were a few Conservative Jews in my high school (I would bet were are talking about no more than 10 at most out of the 80 or so Jews in my class), none were close friends and I never was at their synagogues. When I was in college and high school, my Jewish life was pretty much limited to high holiday services, and I always chose Reform services. And when I moved to Washington and for the first several years after we married, we belonged to a Reform synagogue.

I remember, by the way, being very surprised, in college and law school, at the large number of my classmates who identified as Conservative or even Orthodox. The same was true of the people I met when I moved to Washington.

Edie’s father, born in Europe, went to an Orthodox synagogue, and her other relatives all seemed to belong to Conservative congregations. In those days, much more so than now, Reform and Conservative services were quite different, and you could be comfortable in one and lost in the other.

I was lost at Edie’s cousin’s bar mitzvah. The entire service was pretty foreign to me and the fact that everyone else at the service knew what was going on and seemingly could fully participate made me feel quite inadequate.

At some point, as I was trying to pay attention and get my bearings, someone (maybe Edie’s cousin, I don’t remember) came up to me and said something like “Go up to the bima. We have an honor for you.”

WHAT???? What could they possibly want me to do that I could possibly do? Read something in Hebrew? Chant a prayer? That seemed to be what others were doing. I was going to make a fool of myself.

But I gamely went up front. It was time to take the Torah, which had been read a bit earlier in the service, and carry it around the congregation and then bring it back up in the bima and place it in the ark. That is what they wanted me to do. No vocalizing required.

Well, that may sound easy, but I had never seen a Torah carried around a sanctuary in this manner. And I certainly didn’t know where, in this room which I had never been in before, I was to carry it. Right, left, back, front? No idea. And no GPS. I also didn’t know the cantor and the congregation would be chanting a prayer while I carried, that I would be leading a small parade, that people wanted to touch the Torah as I walked and I was to let them, or that the prayer would end while I still had a fairly long way to go and this didn’t mean I should have walked faster.

Somehow it all worked out, although I remember that I certainly did not feel a sense of accomplishment.

Well, that was then and this is now. What do I mean that it worked out? Not too long after that, we joined a Conservative synagogue, I became more than comfortable with the service, and I became an active congregant, a member of the board of directors and an officer. The synagogue we joined was not the one where I had been so petrified, but one closer to our home. And the bar mitzvah boy? He did all right, too. He is now the president of Hamilton College.