cellio | weekend

Friday night there was a bat mitzvah at services. I would be really, really happy if the congregation would institute two rules for Friday-night b'nei mitzvah: (1) no "parental greeting", and (2) the kid's d'var torah must be longer than the thank-you section.

When we have Saturday-morning b'nei mitzvah, which is practically every week, it's mostly a family affair. (There is another Shabbat morning service, and it's where the regulars go. These facts are related.) But the Friday-night service really belongs to the entire community, and it is not fair to make it so much about one person. I mean, the student already has a significant role in the service, and we even read haftarah on Friday for a bar/bat mitzvah (we usually don't), so losing some other elements will not minimize the simcha. What removing these elements would do is take away the family-specific stuff -- the stuff they could well do at the party instead -- so the congregation isn't held hostage. I mean, is it really appropriate to make us sit there for eight minutes of the parents going on about how proud they are? Sheesh! (No exaggeration; I timed it.)

Saturday morning one of our occasional attendees (a young man) told me that he's moving to Arizona in a couple weeks. It sounds like he's connected with the community there, which is good. I would be intimidated by moving, alone, across the country. I wish him well, and I told him to send email when he gets there.

Saturday night after dinner we went to

lefkowitzga's to hang out and play games, including the longest hand of Uno I have ever played. I was getting droopy around midnight (and knew we'd be meeting my parents in the morning), so we left around 12:30 or so.

Today was my father's 65th birthday. Our anniversary was a couple weeks ago. So we all went out to brunch and each of us thought we were treating the other. It was pretty funny. They gave us a nifty cheese knife and a very good vegetable peeler (Cutco). Good tools in a kitchen make a big difference! We took the cheese knife (along with some cheese) to Ralph and Lori's this afternoon; the knife was excessive for the soft cheese we were bringing, but the geek factor of playing with sharp objects prevailed. :-)

This afternoon was the annual bunny melt (and high tea). It was much fun, and we had vast quantities of food. The cats mostly behaved, though one of them (I assume Louie, but I didn't see it) attempted a close encounter with the remains of the fondue and was tossed across the room for his sins. Or so I gather; I wasn't in the room at the time.

I discovered this afternoon that I am still having hardware problems. My CD burner won't burn, and reading from a CD in the drive for more than about 30 seconds (I was attempting a software install) causes the machine to reboot. More side effects of the meltdown, I presume. It's all under warranty, but I don't want to be without my machine for several days again. Given that it's followup from the last repair, I'd really like it if I could make an appointment for a specific time to get it looked at. In other words, I want to wait in line at home. I'll bet I can't, but tomorrow I will call and ask.

Tonight Dani and I watched two more episodes of B5 (first season), "Signs and Portents" (important episode) and "TKO". I didn't care for "TKO" the first couple times I saw it, but this time it worked pretty well for me. (I never disliked the shiva plot; it was the martial-arts plot that didn't do anything for me.)

I had a geeky moment with the former plot. There is a point where someone says she's going to recite the "mourner's prayer" in English instead of in Hebrew. Last time I asw this episode I remember thinking, on hearing the English, "hey, that's not the mourners' kaddish". This time I recognized it for what it was (El molei rachamim). Cool; I'm getting literate. :-)

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On Saturday night Joy and I saw TKO. I think it was the third (possibly 4th) time for me; I'm still not thrilled with the martial-arts plot. The character development of Ivonova, however, is very important.

The character development of Ivonova, however, is very important.

Yes. Which might be why I liked it better on second viewing than on first; by then I knew this. :-)

The parents spoke for eight minutes? Yeesh. It's supposed to be the kid's affair, not theirs. The parents are only supposed to do the candle lighting, 2nd-to-last aliyot for the torah, and the passing down of the torah part.

Our synagogue only allowed one bar or bat mizvah candidate per service, and you had to get your reservation in. One classmate of mine had to wait two months because all the other days near her birthday were booked up. Also, in our synagogue they usually had the bar or bat mitzvah on Friday night unless a) they were heavily booked or b) you had the youngest son of a major contributor to the synagogue (my brother's -- ugh -- which was held on both Friday night and Saturday morning!).

Re: Babylon 5, JMS often screws up on his Judaism. For example, he had her lighting a chanukiyat on New Year's Eve of a year where Chanukah would have been long over by then.

The parents spoke for eight minutes?

Yup. I timed it, because this part has sometimes been a problem in the past. This was the longest I've seen, and I think it's an unnecessary and (to the congregation) abusive part of the ceremony anyway. The parents already do candles, the torah-passing, and an aliya. (The student makes kiddush in our congregation.) In addition, the rabbi always says a few words specifically to the student -- and you can count on the rabbi to be (a) on-point, (b) interesting to the congregation, and (c) concise. So for the parents to get up there and say how proud they are of the student, and on and on, is really out of line in my opinion. It's not just a quirk of our congregation (I've seen it elsewhere), but I don't know where it came from or how to get rid of it.

Other timing data, because I'm anal-retentive that way: the girl's d'var torah was 2.5 minutes, which included a summary of the portion. Her thank-yous ran 3.25 minutes.

Our synagogue only allowed one bar or bat mizvah candidate per service, and you had to get your reservation in.

We only have one per service (except for really unusual circumstances). That service is almost always Shabbat morning. The Friday service has become the main congregational service, and the Saturday morning service has become basically for the bar/bat mitzvah family, though of course anyone may attend. (The morning service I go to is a different one, and it has a regular community.) Sometimes we have more 13-year-olds than Shabbat mornings in a year, so a couple also end up on Friday nights because they'd rather do that than double up. (Our congregation has 850 families, in case you're wondering.)

I know that we have some administrative process for allocating the dates, but I don't know what it is. Most of the time you can't count on getting a date close to your birthday, just because there are so many. I think it's a combination of general requests from the families and some form of lottery. Dates are assigned a year or two in advance.

It's funny -- almost everyone I know dislikes TKO, but there is no unanimity of why. Half of them dislike the shiva plot (one close friend particularly dislikes it, as oversimplifying a fairly complex emotional experience); the other half dislike the boxing plot. (Which I personally find incredibly trite.)

Oh, well; I've seen B5 through enough times to forgive the occasional weak episode...

That's funny. Most of the people I've talked to dislike the boxing plot (which I also find trite). I haven't run into as many who dislike the shiva plot, though I've run into people who don't specify and just say "ehh" to the whole show. But, like you, I can forgive the weak episodes, because the strong episodes are very very strong and overall the story is very good.

I went through an amusing progression with the shiva plot. The first time I saw the episode, I thought "oh, so that's what mourners' kaddish is". The second (or third?) time, I said "hey, that's not the text of mourners' kaddish; whatzup?". The third (or fourth?) time was this recent viewing, where I actually identified the text.

I don't think the episode trivialized the mourning per se; I think it's just that it's hard to really convey what they needed to convey in 42 minutes, and it would seem more realistic if there are echos of this in later episodes. But hey, whatever.

Wow; how times have changed.

My d'var torah was much longer than my stupid speech (I had written an age-appropriate one; my father instead felt he should write my speech and forced me to deliver a horrible one that ended with the line "Thank God for air-conditioning," which turned out to be massively inappropriate because the AC was up way too high).

In our synagogue you could always see the "candidate kids" sitting together. The synagogue would insist your family went to services for at least six weeks prior to the bar or bat mitzvah, and whenever possible, the kids would try to get away from their folks and sit with their much-more-fun classmates. When it was my generation we'd be doing a running commentary on how our friend was doing; when it was my brother's generation, they had a female cantor up to right before his bar mitzvah (he was not happy about that), so there was a pack of prepubescent boys seated front row, center. (I don't know where the girls sat.)

I almost had to wait till September (my birthday is July 4th) because, at the time, the synagogue didn't do services in the summer. My father paid massive amounts of money to keep the synagogue going an extra weekend, and my name remained on the synagogue marquee into the fall, which amused my family to no end (they even took photos of it a few times!).

Wow; how times have changed.

Sad, isn't it?

At least in my congregation, the b'nei mitzvah d'var torah follows this formula: "my portion" (rarely the actual name, for some reason), summary, brief commentary. It's almost always around 3 minutes, total. Now granted, I don't think they would particularly want a kid to go for 10-15 minutes even if he was good, especially on Friday night when the b'nei mitzvah has already lengthened the service quite a bit, but I could hope for more than (on average) 1 - 1.5 minutes of original thought. Then, as I said, you get a couple minutes of the student thanking people. Sometimes that can run to another 3 minutes or more, as it did Friday. Sigh.

I realize that herding 13-year-olds can be hard and it's easy to fall into formulas, but I think they could go much more quickly to the commentary, allowing it to be deeper. What is so wrong with, e.g. "The story of the 12 spies teaches a lesson..." or "kashrut shows us that..." or whatever? You just read the portion, and it was translated; do you really need to spend 1-2 minutes retelling the story in your own words? Get to the original content!

(This isn't the kids' fault; I'm pretty sure it's what they've been taught to do, because they all do it.)

Perhaps I have unreasonably-high expectations of insight and scholarship. I hope I don't, though.

Hmmm...I just did the aliyah prayer, read my torah portion (in Hebrew), then the translation, then the closing aliyah prayer.

weekend

B5 coincidence...

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TKO

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b'nei-mitzvah talks

Re: b'nei-mitzvah talks