bar mitzvah: families versus the community

[cellio]

We have a large congregation, so there is a bar or bat mitzvah almost every Saturday morning. These are held at services that are attended primarily by the families and friends, not by a consistent community. The regular Shabbat community comes Friday nights and, for some, to the other minyan on Saturday morning. Things have been this way from time immemorial, or so I'm told. This isn't the way a bar mitzvah is supposed to work in theory; it's supposed to be about the kid taking his place in the community. But our situation is pretty common, unfortunately.

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.

Comments

[cellio]

Does the rabbi have much say in these bar/bat mitzvahs?

I assume so. More specifically, we have two rabbis, the senior rabbi (the one I refer to as "my" rabbi), and the associate rabbi, who runs the school and oversees bar/bat mitzvahs. This is why I'm not sure which rabbi to address, the one I have an established relationship with (and "report to" as worship chair) or the one who can more directly fix the problem. But anyway, I assume that the associate rabbi has a fair bit of control over the details of the service, but has a general instruction from the administration to not alienate families. I think if I can persuade him that this is bad for the congregation, he has the power to make changes to make it more welcoming to the congregation. And he's already demonstrated that he can respond to congregational needs; he is actually the one who decided to move some of the younger class services (which were bad in a variety of ways) from Friday nights to their own special Saturday-morning services. So I'm hoping he'll be receptive to things like keeping all parts of the regular service, cutting out the parental greeting, massively scaling back the kid's thank-yous, and expediting some of the other bits.