"What's My Child Doing Up There?" ( an introduction to bar/bat mitzvah)

There’s a lot of mystery around becoming bar or bat mitzvah, and there shouldn’t be.  In essence, it’s very simple.  When a Jewish boy or girl reaches age thirteen, he or she is eligible to lead parts of the service at his or her family’s synagogue.  So, he or she celebrates the occasion by…actually leading some parts of the service. 

Sounds pretty straightforward, right?  Yet, I have been tutoring Jewish children for bar and bat mitzvah off and on since 1982.  I have seen the parents of my students approach the bar or bat mitzvah feeling confused, and sometimes even overwhelmed.  These parents are no dummies.  They are not being neurotic for no reason whatever.  In the U.S., the way we live now, there are good reasons why you might not immediately understand what your child is doing for his bar mitzvah, or her bat mitzvah.

 Why the mystery?

Let’s start with language.  Very few Americans are fluent in Hebrew.  Depending on your synagogue or temple, what your child does for bar or bat mitzvah might be partly, mostly, or nearly all in Hebrew.  So, let alone understanding what your child is saying: how do you track your child’s progress as he or she studies for bar or bat mitzvah?  You want to be a good parent.  You want to be supportive.  But how?

 Even the terms the rabbi or tutor uses for the tasks your child will take on are usually in Hebrew.  “What’s an aliyah?  Is a parshah the same thing as a haftarah, or is it something different my child has to learn?  How come one set of relatives calls the skullcap worn in synagogue a yarmulke while the other set calls it a kipah?”  Whether you grew up Jewish, became Jewish later in life, or raised a Jewish child without any Jewish background of your own, chances are you need a guide to understand the vocabulary that surrounds bar or bat mitzvah studies.

Then, there’s the fact that preparing for bar or bat mitzvah is usually a multi-step process.  Again, depending on your Jewish community and its local customs, your child may be reading or singing some things from the prayer book, and chanting other things from the printed Bible or the Torah scroll.  Most likely, he or she will also be giving a short talk about the passage of the Bible read that day.   

To prepare for these tasks, you may be driving your child to meet with one tutor throughout the process--or a tutor and a rabbi--or a tutor, a cantor, a Hebrew school principal, and a rabbi.  You’ll need to find ways to talk with each of them, and make sure that they are all talking to one another.

 

The Saturday morning service itself, the usual time for celebrating bar or bat mitzvah, can be a challenge.  It’s going to be at least an hour long, maybe as much as three hours: again, partly, mostly, or nearly all in Hebrew, depending on local custom.  It will involve a set of rituals and protocols that are certainly not obvious.  “Should I invite my non-Jewish friends or relatives to the service?  How are they going to feel at home there?  How will I?”

Finally, there’s one huge distraction that makes it difficult for parents to look forward to the bar or bat mitzvah ceremony: planning the party.  Everybody likes a good party.  For some children, it’s the reason they started studying for bar or bat mitzvah in the first place!  But for unwary parents—especially parents going through it for the first time, with their eldest child—planning the party can take up all the time and attention you have. 

You might not be planning something as lavish as the party Peter Finch attends in the movie Sunday Bloody Sunday, or as obscenely ostentatious as the one Jeremy Piven plans in Keeping Up with the Steins.  In fact, I hope not!  Still, in the midst of scheduling a space, a caterer, and entertainment, designing and sending out invitations, and helping your child keep track of gifts, it might be hard for you, yourself, to keep tabs on the bar or bat mitzvah studies—and all too easy to arrive at shul that Saturday morning without a clue about what’s going on.  

“What’s my child doing up there?”  Wonder no more.  I am writing a book to give you the answers you need as you begin to think about your child’s bar or bat mitzvah.  There are other, excellent books that will help you think about the deeper meaning of this rite of passage.  I will mention some of them in the Appendices.  

 Writing this book, I have a different mission. You will soon hold in your hands a practical guide to bar and bat mitzvah for the perplexed parent.  With this book as your road map, you will be able to navigate the process from the first day of lessons to the last blessing of the Saturday morning service, with confidence.  It shouldn’t be a mystery—just a mitzvah!

Yes, I'm Privileged

Many of you may have seen it.  A young white Jewish student, Tal, wrote a piece for Time about why he's tired of being told he's privileged. Here's something you might not have seen yet: A black graduate student who goes by @dexdigi beautifully pointed out the tired old fallacies that Tal was spouting as if he'd come up with them for the first time. 

Now, here's my take.

Like Tal, I am a white Jewish man from a working-class background who went to an elite university (in my case, decades ago). Like Tal, I give a lot of credit to my parents for their struggle to make sure I got the opportunities I deserved, and to my grandparents, who struggled with a new language and culture.

But unlike Tal, apparently (and definitely unlike some of the commenters on this thread), I realize that while I was disadvantaged by class and antisemitism, I never had anyone think I was a janitor instead of a professor simply because of the color of my skin. 

I never had to worry that someone I thought of as a friend would rape me simply because of my sex, or attack me violently because I said I was one gender and my birth certificate said I was another. 

I didn't have to be concerned that doors would literally be shut to me because there were no wheelchair ramps leading up to them, or that people would see signs of a disease like MD or CP and assume I was stupid or insane.
 
I have 99 problems but lack of privilege isn't one of them.

How to Make Your Meetings Happy and Productive

This post originally appeared in my professional blog, Communicate!, but I think we can ask these three questions in our church and synagogue groups, community meetings, and anywhere people want to get to know each other.

We love talking with friends.  We hate going to meetings.  Why?

Too often at meetings and conferences, we’re listening to people we don’t know, talking about an agenda that doesn’t matter to us.

With friends, we can share not only thoughts and plans, but hopes and dreams–the things that make us get out of bed in the morning–the things that make us human.

If only we could invite people to bring their whole humanity to the conference room. But how?  Ask these three questions.

1. How You Got Here
“What is the winding path of your life, that has brought you to the work you do?” Hildy Gottlieb of Creating the Future asks this question at the beginning of every event.

Every time I begin a training or facilitation or even sometimes a keynote address, I ask people to turn to their neighbor and spend a few moments asking and answering those two questions. Every time, the room comes alive with chatter and laughter and gesticulating hands.

Try asking this question at the start of your next Board meeting.  See how happy and productive the rest of the meeting becomes!

2. The Awesome Thing that Happened
Marc Pitman, The Fundraising Coach LLC, begins training sessions with the question “What is something amazing that happened to you this week?”  Hildy Gottlieb asks the same question at the beginning of every Board meeting.  Why?  She quotes Hank Green:

There are two ways to make the world a better place. You can decrease the suck, and you can increase the awesome… And I do not want to live in a world where we only focus on suck and never think about awesome.

If your meetings feel like a great big time suck, start them with awesome.

3. What You Will Remember
You’ve come to the end of your panel, or conference, or meeting, and it was grand.  Really.  But you have phone and email messages and a long to-do list awaiting you.  How do you remember what you learned, and carry the experience into your daily work?

Hildy Gottlieb suggests giving yourself the rare pleasure of reflection.  At Creating the Future:

We ask folks to look over the notes they may have jotted down during the meeting, and to share what in particular stood out for them about the meeting.   It is again very grounding to learn about each other in this way. And it is also a great segue to ongoing email conversations that can carry us through to the next board meeting.

Talking about what matters to you will help you remember.  Listening to what other people care about will help you pull together as a group.  Knowing that you will make time to do both will make your meetings happier and more productive.

Creating Judaism: a review

Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice by Michael L. Satlow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I have always told my friends that in important ways, Judaism is not a religion: it's a lot more than that.  Satlow helps me explain why.  Jewish communities have lived in nearly every country in the world, for thousands of years, and they lived in ways that bear only a family resemblance to each other.  Even today (as the first chapter shows), American Judaism and Israeli Judaism look starkly different. What is "Judaism"?

Historically, Satlow says, what has held these diverse communities together is a lively and heated conversation about three things: Jewish identity (what it means to be a Jew, who is and who's not); relationship to sacred texts (the list of which has changed over time); and practice.  Jews don't have to believe the same things, which has shocked many members of other religions.  Satlow tells the story of the Calvinist Dutch government in the 17th century tolerated Jews but tried to enforce their own idea of what all Jews believe!  Within the Jewish fold,in the Middle Ages, Maimonides listed 13 principles of faith.  Today we sing them but we don't study them. 

It was only in the 19th century that Jews began to define their differences along ideological lines, and that has led to the different "movements" and in fact to "Judaism" as we know it today.  Even then, Satlow makes the point that the founders of the Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox movements all kept kosher and wouldn't have any trouble sitting down for dinner at one another's tables.  That has changed--but still, you cannot tell much about the everyday life of a Jewish "lay" person by asking him or her what "kind of Jew" he or she is.  You would have to watch them from day to day.

I found this book fascinating because it showed me how Jews have always been influenced by the trends in the larger culture in which their communities were situated.  Because we live in the early 21st century, the book is particularly interesting when it shows the ways that Jewish and Muslim currents of thought flowed in and out of each other.  In the Muslim world in the 8th century, people were arguing about whether only the Qur'an was holy or whether the hadith, a set of traditions about Muhammad and his circle, should also be studied like sacred texts.  Muslims considered the Torah sacred, although some thought the Jews had a corrupted text, and many believed the rabbinic interpretations of the Torah (in the midrash and Talmud) had distorted the truth given to Moses at Sinai.  Look at the Jews in the same time and the same place, and you find many of the same arguments.  The Karaites wanted to get rid of the rabbinic commentary and go straight back to the Torah.  Meanwhile, the rabbis were working to recognize the Talmud (the work of earlier teachers, from the 2nd through 6th centuries) as equally worthy of study as the five books of Moses--and for a time, they succeeded as the Muslim scholars did with the hadith.  This is a very different conversation than went on in Christian lands at the same time, or ever.

Creating Judaism is not a perfect book.  It starts out strong and straightforward, but in later chapters it tries to cover too much ground too quickly and falls into the academic habit of referring to history instead of explaining it.  Still, it is a perfect book for right now.  It shows how we can recognize that our most cherished beliefs are historically and culturally relative and still continue to cherish them, which is the only honest way to be part of a religious community in the 21st century.



View all my reviews

Star Trek Economics

 

Today, while shoveling, I heard Paul Ryan condemn Obamacare because it would give people more freedom to choose whether or not to work, and how many hours.

When I came in from shoveling, my sister Yael Fischman had shared this article with me about an economy where no one actually has to work.

I want to live in the Federation!

https://medium.com/editors-picks/29bab88d50