communities and the "bar-mitzvah show"

[cellio]

I'm on a mailing list for discussing worship issues in the Reform movement. Recently there's been a discussion of services on Shabbat morning. Someone posted about his congregation's successful early service, which draws people who wouldn't attend the bar-mitzvah service that is largely unfriendly to the community. Someone else chastised that person, accusing him of Balkanization of the synagogue and saying that those people should go to the bar mitzvah. This morning I posted the following, which I want to preserve here. (I am not the person who introduced the phrase "bar-mitzvah show", FYI.)

I'm not the original poster, but we have a similar setup and I can tell you why at least some of us like it that way. (I won't presume to speak for the whole minyan, but I've had this conversation with many people over the years.)

We didn't leave the community; we created one where none existed. A weekly bar mitzvah with revolving attendance is not a community. We have a regular congregation for Shabbat morning (torah study at 8:30, service at 9:00). Most of these people are there almost every week, though we get a steady flow of newcomers (whom we welcome). Most weeks we also have the "bar-mitzvah show" at 10:30. Our senior rabbi, who leads the early service, leaves before it's over on those weeks, and lay leaders take over (including torah reading).

We occasionally have b'nei mitzvah on Friday night, as part of the regular congregational service. Even though this is a community service, it is largely about that family on those nights; many in the congregation feel that we're more of a venue than a community for those families. We do impose restrictions that don't apply Saturday morning (fewer aliyot, pressure to keep the "parental greeting" short), and on very rare occasions we get the lucky combination of a Friday-night bar mitzvah and a family that wants to celebrate with, not in front of, the community. But it's not the way to bet.

On Saturday morning, all bets are off. There's a chicken-and-egg situation: the families assert ownership over the service, which alienates the congregation, so the congregation doesn't come, which gives the families even more reason to believe they should own it (hey, no one else comes anyway). Until we can fix this on Friday night, which is already a community service, I don't see any reason to try to change Saturday morning.

Meanwhile, we have a regular group of people who want to worship together, as a community, every Shabbat morning. Isn't that great? Why should we mess that up? This is the regular service; most people at the bar-mitzvah service won't be there next week or next month. We should support the regular community. If a child from the regular community wants to celebrate his bar mitzvah with that community instead of at the 10:30 show, I think the community would embrace that -- this is someone who has been part of the community all along and of course we'd want to celebrate together.

One difference I've seen between Reform and Orthodox congregations is in the bar mitzvah. The tighter the community (week to week, day to day), it seems, the less hoopla you have to make in order to have a celebration. I was at an Orthodox bat mitzvah (yes, really!) recently; the girl had her aliya and leining (including haftarah), and everyone there sang and threw candy and even danced a little, and you could tell the congregation was happy for the family -- but it was part of a regular service. The parents didn't talk for ten minutes extolling the virtues of their daughter. (They wouldn't need to; they're all there every week and know everyone.) The parents had an aliya but the rest of the aliyot went to members of the community. Other people led most of the service and read torah. Someone else gave a d'var torah.

In a Reform congregation, on the other hand, it appears that families feel cheated if they don't get all or most of the aliyot, a long parental speech, the child giving the only words of torah, and the child leading most of the service. That's not integration with a community, so only the people with a personal connection to the family have a reason to come. I didn't know the bat mitzvah at that Orthodox service, but I was happy to be there. I don't go to most of our b'nei mitzvah shows even when I know the families.

It is unfair to lay the blame for this separation at the feet of the regular community, the people who are willing to be there at 8:30 every week to worship. When a family wants what we offer, they join us, and we'd adjust to accommodate a community celebration. When they don't want what we do, there's no benefit to anyone in abandoning our service to attend the show. All that would do is lower the overall level of worship and community in the congregation.

Comments

[dr4b]

I think the only time I've ever been to a bat mitzvah service where the attendees was pretty much mostly the regular congregation was two of my cousins -- the two daughters of My Uncle The Rabbi, specifically. I think that's sort of a special case :) I mean, he gets up and does a ten-minute speech every week anyway!

I had a weird experience because my brother and I went to a hebrew school that wasn't actually connected with a synagogue at all. So when we had our bar/bat mitzvahs, we basically had to go find somewhere to have it, which of course leads to that feeling of "oh, um, I'm intruding on this congregation's Saturday morning to have this thing..." and vice versa. "Bar Mitzvah Show" is a pretty accurate and yet somewhat sadly amusing way to describe it, for sure.

[cellio]

the two daughters of My Uncle The Rabbi, specifically. I think that's sort of a special case :)

Yeah, I suspect so. :-) When my rabbi's twin sons were bar mitzvah a few years ago, they did it at Simchat Torah. Big crowd, as you would expect.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

When my rabbi's twin sons were bar mitzvah a few years ago, they did it at Simchat Torah.

Something I noticed when I worked at a Conservative synagogue was the way they scheduled bar/bat mitzvah celebrations: a couple of years in advance, with some parts of the year being much more popular than others, and no connection between the child's 12/13th birthday and the celebration date aside from the birthday having to be first. From your phrasing it sounds like your synagogue does something similar. In the Orthodox synagogues I've been at, most of the celebrations have been on the shabbat/yom tov soonest after the child's birthday, with the occasional one that's pushed off because of not wanting to be on a holiday (pesach often isn't convenient for catering) or done on a Monday/Thursday because the child has special needs (so smaller crowd and less fuss).

[cellio]

You're right about the scheduling. I don't know how they decide who goes when, but they're scheduled a couple years out and not tightly bound to birthdays. I suspect, but do not know, that the better students get the earliest legal slots, because they'll have had a little less classroom time when their services hit. (I'm not sure exactly what the prep is, but it's a combination of classroom work (bound by the school year) and individual work (starts N months out).)

[(Anonymous)]

At the Conservative synagogue the main factor seemed to be first come, first served: parents would ask about a date, and if it wasn't yet claimed they could have it. Granted, the better students might well have been better because they had more involved parents (and so gotten earlier dates, or at least dates chosen earlier), but the amount of classroom or other prep time they'd had never came up in any conversation that I remember. I do remember one parent being concerned about her son getting a short haftorah (she didn't want him to have a hard time), and another wanting her younger kid to get the same one as the older (so they'd be studying the same stuff).

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Oops. That was me.

[wrenb.livejournal.com]

I think it's great that you have that minyan every week! I'm always interested to see what other Reform congregations are doing.

Our own congregation formed an "Alternative Minyan" (now simply the Saturday morning minyan) to avoid the Bar Mitzvah rigmarole. We're a very small group, and we only meet monthly. If we had more people it would be great to be weekly, but we're worried about leadership burnout. We had one family with an almost bar mitzvah (they moved when he was 12), and we would have loved to have had his bar mitzvah at minyan!

I understand the clergy concern that "no one ever goes to b'nei mitzvah services" but when the families take it over, why would we? Our rabbi has been unable to answer that question.

[cellio]

I really like our Shabbat-morning group. It long predates me, but I'm told that it started as just torah study and then turned into study+service. It's always been led by our senior rabbi, and because of the scheduling problem we didn't get a torah service on weeks with a bar mitzvah (which was most of them). A few years ago we made a change: we always have torah service, done by a member of the group on the weeks the rabbi can't be there. We have half a dozen regulars and several other occasional readers, and we only read one aliya each week, so this is not burdensome. I was the instigator here, and I'm glad to see that this extra participation has helped build more cohesion. (Mind, we already had a fair bit of cohesion or this wouldn't have worked in the first place.)