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]

Normally, on Friday night we have one aliyah. (We usually give it to two people -- one says the blessing before and one after.) For a Friday-night bar/bat mitzvah we have three plus maftir, and the families complain because we don't give them seven like on Saturday morning. We also do not normally read haftarah on Friday night but (of course) do for a bar mitzvah. At the Friday bar mitzvah that prompted this post, they also inserted two extra readings that we do not normally do; these readings were done by family members.

We have an oneg every Friday night with standard food. Sometimes a family sponsors it and sometimes not, but there's no visible difference (other than an acknowledgement of sponsorship).

Saturday mornings, by the way, the family will often have a reception immediately following, in the shul, and they don't invite the congregation. Though since the Saturday bar-mitzvah service is, functionally, a private affair anyway, there won't be many congregants there anyway.

We have Friday services year-round, and a regular congregation of people who come almost every week. That's why the Friday-night bar mitzvah feels sort of like an invasion; they are taking our established service, turning it into a family-centric affair at the expense of the congregation, and not even saying thank-you. It's not about who has the aliyot; I don't care about that. It's about adding so much to the service, removing other stuff that we are used to having every week (to make room), and adding gratuitous stuff that really should be done at the private party. So the regular congregation doesn't get a service; we get treated like outsiders at someone else's private party. It's ok to do that at a service that doesn't have a regular congregation, I guess, but when adding a bar mitzvah to an established service they need to be more sensitive to the congregation as a whole.