Shabbat

[cellio]

Network flakiness prevented me from posting this last night. Fortunately, I still have a working floppy drive. :-)

Friday night there was a bar mitzvah at services. This is pretty unusual, both overall and at our congregation. We've gotten big enough that apparently we ran out of Saturday services this year. (We don't double up.)

The Reform movement generally does Friday-night Torah readings, which nobody else does. It goes back 100 years or more and was expedient: a lot of people in this country were required to work Saturday (or be unemployed), so the Friday-night service became the main one in the Reform movement, and they figured "better they hear the Torah at the wrong time than never hear it". (What did non-Reform Jews do? Go into business for themselves, mostly, or go hungry, or depend on charity.) Today, I am told that there are only three Reform congregations in North America that don't have Friday-night Torah reading, even though the need has long passed.

A bar mitzvah is supposed to be about the transition to adult responsibilities. A boy becomes "bar mitzvah" (obligated to the commandments) at age 13 with or without any special ceremony, but it is long custom to make a big deal of it. Customarily, the kid is called up to recite the blessings for Torah reading for the first time, reads some or all of the portion himself, and -- usually -- leads other parts of the service.

A bar mitzvah, however, is not like a wedding where you have a special gathering just for the cocasion. A bar mitzvah happens in the context of a regular service (almost always Shabbat, though it doesn't have to be). The kid is supposed to participate in the service; the bar-mitzvah celebration is not supposed to hijack the service.

Friday night, I felt like I was an unwilling participant in some unknown family's celebration, at the expense of my Shabbat service. I resent it, and I will do my best to avoid attending one of these at this congregation in the future.

When we read Torah Friday night we have one aliyah -- that is, one chunk of reading with one blessing before and one after. A full Shabbat-morning Torah service has seven such (plus a special one called maftir, which I won't get into here). I would have expected a Friday-night bar mitzvah to compromise on about three aliyot, but they did seven. Near as I can tell, this was to get as many relatives as possible up on the bima for their 15 seconds of public attention. That wouldn't have been so bad if they had known the blessings or at least appeared to understand what they were doing. Sheesh, we expect the 13-year-old to spend several months preparing, but we don't expect his family members to spend half an hour learning two short Hebrew sentences? I'm not even talking memorization here; I just want them to pronounce the words approximately correctly and act like they have some clue why they're there. (We also see this almost every week in another form: when there's a Saturday-morning bar mitzvah, the parents are called up Friday night for candle-lighting. In most cases, it is painfully obvious that they have never done this before, and in many cases that they did not practice the text.)

I suspect that most family members in this situation, at least in unobservant families, think this is about them. It's not; you're being called up there to praise God before a public reading of God's words, or in the case of candle-lighting, to praise God and mark the beginning of Shabbat. You're there to do a job; if you can't do it, there are hundreds of others in the congregation who can. It's really, really not about you. But these families seem to think it is, often.

Ok, so anyway, we had seven aliyot, and maftir and haftarah. The kid actually did a good job; his Hebrew was good, and it was obvious that he had studied the portion enough to have a sense of what he was saying. I'm not dissing the kid with any of this. (And I'm only dissing the family some, because the congregation -- I suppose I mean the rabbis here -- could exert control to do things differently.)

Then after all that, the kid gave his sermon. Nothing particularly insightful, but this is a 13-year-old, so you expect that. Then after a short talk he started thanking people.

This is something I think does not belong at services unless you can keep it under a minute. Save the "I'd like to thank great-aunt Bernice, and my second-grade teacher Dr. Rosenberg, and..." routine for the party afterward, where the only people there are the guests who presumably want to hear this. Same with parents addressing the kid; they both got up there and said long, public words praising the kid. Most of it was not even religious in nature. Do we really need to hear how proud the parents are that the kid is a good tennis player or whatever? Give it a rest! The rabbi then gave a short benediction (personalized); this part I do feel is appropriate. But from "I'd like to thank" to the end of all of this was twenty-five minutes, and of that, about two minutes were appropriate.

So all of this made our service run much longer than usual and made it feel like a non-service. Shabbat was abandoned in favor of giving the kid lots of attention. And I'll bet we never see the kid again; this is not a matter of paying a small price now to encourage the next generation of leaders. Many families join congregations just for the religious school that qualifies their kids for bar-mitzvah celebrations, and then when the last kid turns 13 they drop their memberships, having done nothing in the meantime to actually contribute to the congregation.


Saturday afternoon a friend of Dani's, Jessica, visited. (She lives in Ann Arbor, but was in town this weekend visiting family.) She's a law professor, and we got to hear entertaining stories of how she beats first-year students into shape. Among things, she calls on students by name to answer questions, and she has a non-obvious sorting algorithm so she will call on everyone but they won't be able to guess when their turn is likely to come up. After the first few embarrassments she finds that her students are prepared for class. (Apparently, the tendency is to skim or skip readings and not always do the homework.) She seems like a neat person; I'd never met her before. Dani met her on the net ten years ago or so; I'm not sure what newsgroup.

Jessica's specialty is copyright, which apparently is a social hazard. "Everyone" knows about copyright anf fair use and stuff and is happy to pontificate, but "almost everyone" is wrong. A lot of things just plain aren't known, Jessica said. Especially in the areas related to electronic rights (Napster et al), there is not nearly enough case law yet to know. A lot of these suits never get resolved because one party or the other runs out of money before the hearing. And in at least some cases, she said, the record companies don't own the rights they're suing other people over, because their contracts with the artists didn't provide for that possibility lo these many years ago. So the field is just a mess, and will be for a while. I'm glad that it mostly doesn't touch me at all. (Yeah, ok, I've recorded some CDs, but nobody wants to pirate my stuff and I'm not doing anything that violates the permissions I've gotten from other people.)

Comments

Re: bar mitzvahs and Shabbat experience

[cellio]

That's a good idea. Apparently "havdalah bar mitzvahs" have been discussed in the past (before my time); I assume that would have to mean mincha first, else where's the Torah reading? The rabbi hates that idea because when he's seen it done, people show up in eveningwear for the party to follow, and he isn't comfortable with that. (I think, if I have this right.) But a stand-alone mincha service held at the earlier time needn't have that problem.

Party: You know, I don't really know what is usually done in my congregation for this. I know that often there's a private gathering in the social hall after the service, with served food and such. I don't know if they permit bands, or permit the shul's kitchen to be used to cook food on Shabbat. The only one of these I've been to involved cold foods and no band, but it's only one data point.