![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bar mitzvah: families versus the community
But we're a large congregation, and sometimes there are more 13-year-olds than available Saturday mornings, and rather than double up on kids they'll occasionally stick a bar or bat mitzvah on a Friday night. (Ours, like most Reform congregations, reads some torah on Friday night, so this is plausible.) But the families, for the most part, don't seem to understand that they are modifying an established service with an established community, and they are not entitled to make it fully "about them" the way they can on Saturday mornings.
So we get grumpy family members who are upset because they didn't get seven aliyot to hand out to all the cousins, and we get kids who spend more time thanking their family and friends than speaking words of torah, and we get parents who go on at length with the "parental greeting" that is really only about the family, and the community gets shoved aside. (Even though they cut other stuff from the service to make room, one of these will run 20-30 minutes longer than a regular Friday service.) I know many people who just do not come on Friday nights when there is a bar or bat mitzvah. I've been tempted, but I don't really want to flee and provide that little bit of extra evidence that "the community doesn't come anyway so we can get away with this".
I want to talk to our rabbis, because I want to see this change, but I have to figure out how to approach them. I would like to see a Friday-night bar/bat mitzvah be treated as a privilege, an honor, a reward. I would like to see the future confirmands of the year on Friday nights, not the kids who've publicly said they're ditching Judaism as soon as the party is over. I would like to see the families work within the structure of the existing Friday-night service and make it less about their kids. (I think there's corrolation here; a kid who's going to stick with things and is mature enough to realize he's part of a community is more likely to want to function in that community.) It'll take years, but I would like the typical family's view of the Friday-night assignment to shift from "booby prize" to "special honor". (And just once, when families are going on about themselves, I'd like to see someone thank the congregation for their patience.)
If this could work, then maybe, in a decade or two, we'll even see the Saturday-morning bar mitzvah shift in focus from the family to the community. Wouldn't that be grand? Heck, the first time one of our kids says he wants to do his bar mitzvah at the established informal service rather than a special family service, I'll be thrilled. (We had someone recently who, in retrospect, could have done that, if anyone had thought of it in time.)
I wonder how we can get there.
no subject
Congregations know this too. If you can believe it, a recent bar mitzvah family was quite behind on their dues -- with the obvious implication being that they would bolt once the service was over -- so the finance committee decided to bolt the door on the event (except for the kid's Haftarah) until they paid up. Using a kid as a pawn in a dues dispute. Yeah, we're really going to get a great rep for ourselves that way!
Anyway, the truth is that this is never going to change, at your synagogue or mine, as long as the point I made in the first paragraph is the reality. I would avoid going to the bar mitzvahs altogether if a) I didn't have to be there running the stage management, and b) the Mrs. wasn't induced to come by all the free food...
Really, I would stay home if I could. You're noble to want to avoid doing that but this is something that I don't think will ever change.
no subject
Yes, the synagogue wants the dues from the bar-mitzvah family, and the family typically wants a big show for their kid, so the solution is a service where the congregation and the family stay out of each others' way. If it could be limited to that, well that would be kind of sad but it wouldn't be interfering with anyone else so I could ignore it. We've suggested mincha as an option, but the second thing families typically say to that is "hell no". (The first thing is "what's that?".) Monday and Thursday mornings during the summer (when there's no school) would work for kids but not the families, so that suggestion has been nixed. While it only provides one or two additional dates, we should look for Sunday rosh chodeshes and try to add those into the pool of dates.
I want to find a way to protect Friday nights from this sort of dog-and-pony show, and maybe acknowledging that it is different, but trying to spin that difference as a privilege might work. Or maybe I'm just too new to the organizational behavior of synagogues and I need to learn better. :-)
no subject
no subject
no subject
Also possible: the Sunday of chol ha-moed (it's only two days, but it's two days).
no subject