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

Friday night Torah reading

[magid.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realized that most Reform congregations read Torah Friday night. I knew that *some* did, but hadn't realized how prevalent the custom is.
And I realized that it feels odd to me, partly for what will probably sound like a strange reason: it makes Simchat Torah (in the traditional calendar, the one time of the year the Torah is read at night) less special, somehow.

When in the service is Torah reading put in? Is it the whole taking-out, putting-back, with one aliyah in the middle, or is it more abbreviated than the whole Saturday morning event?
"

Bar/Bat Mitzvas

[goljerp]

I know what you're talking about. One of the nice things about the way my shul is currently structured is that the families who join just for their kid's bar/bat mitzva usually join the Sanctuary Minyan, because it's, well, in the sanctuary. Since that's not my regular minyan, it doesn't effect me so much.

RE: bar mitzvahs and Shabbat experience

[lefkowitzga.livejournal.com]

Condolences for the poor experience. This is going to continue to bug you, since as you say the bar mitzvah doesn't have its own gathering unlike the bris/baby naming, wedding, or funeral.

Once upon a time I indicated a lack of interest in attending an acquaintance's child's bat mitzvah and received a strict lecture on the responsibility of attending life cycle events in the community. I was told that participating by being a witness to these types of events is an obligation as a member of the Jewish community. Needless to say, I went - for a mediocre reading and no real Jewish feeling on the part of the celebrant.

In general, the bar mitzvah has deteriorated as a religious observance. It often seems more like an occasion for the parents to spend scads of cash and the kid to get loads of presents. It's very sad.

Bar mitzvah or not, I've never been to a service where all of the aliyot were correctly pronounced. This is also a sad commentary, but hardly surprising since the aliyah is used as a political tool - a mark of honor - rather than a religious act. Celebrant's family, member of the board, or significant donor, it would be very nice if people troubled to learn the prayers. Are you on your temple's religious committee? Maybe you could recommend that copies of the prayers with transliteration (for the hebrew-impaired) could be provided to incipient bar mitzvahs to distribute to their honorees.

Meanwhile, maybe you can find another service when a bar mitzvah is scheduled on Friday nights.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

In the synagogue where I had mine, the bar/bat mitzvah always "hijacked" the service. Sometimes they just took over Friday night or Saturday morning. Mine was just Friday night (and the first-ever summer service at our shul!). My brother's took up Friday night and Saturday morning. Dad was The Dentist (oddly enough, the other dentist in our section of town was the Cantor for the conservative synagogue), and apparently gave a lot of money to the synagogue.

Re: People not bothering to learn the prayers, most folks were good about it, but in my family, with half of us being goyim, it was tough. My mother's parents didn't participate in my bat mitzvah. Dad and Mom wanted my uncle Pete (maternal grandmother's brother; my maternal grandfather had died, and Uncle Pete was like an extra grandparent) to be in my brother's as an aliyah, but I wasn't able to get away from college early that week to teach him the prayer. As a result, Dad got permission for me to go up as an aliyah -- the first time a girl/woman had gone up alone during a bar mitzvah to do so (have you ever noticed how they don't like women coming up alone during bar mitzvahs?).

I went on after my uncle Marty (Dad's brother) and before my paternal grandfather. Uncle Marty knew the prayers in sephardic Hebrew and got by okay. Then I got up. Let's just say everything that could have gone right for my voice did. Suffice it to say Pop-Pop's knees were shaking because he had to follow me.

I also lit the sabbath candles the night before because my mother hadn't had time to learn the prayer.

Anyhow, enough digression. I grew up expecting the hijacking and learned to enjoy it.

hold on...

[goljerp]

I know I've been missing something...

I've recorded some CDs

Really? How cool... any still in "print" (or do I have to try to pirate them? :-)