Page 132 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
your mom, your dad, your sisters, and your aunt Sadie; and I know that you will follow in your father’s footsteps and be a real mensch and a credit to the Jewish community,” etc., etc. Well, Rabbi Halpern, who might have been two inches shorter than I was, was not your typical rabbi. He glared at the bar mitzvah boys that day, wagged his finger at us in Mandelbaumesque fashion, but more forcefully, and then said that today’s youth all too often care only for the party that follows the ser- vice and the gifts that will come with it. He went on to predict that it was unlikely that any of us would ever again be in a synagogue, except to attend a bar mitzvah, and said that he was tired of officiating at bar mitz- vahs when he knew that the boys did not truly have their hearts in it. And that was it! Worse, he had it nailed, at least in my case. I believed, and was relieved, that my bar mitzvah was the absolute end of my formal experience as a practicing Jew. (Little did I know that, about a dozen years later, there would be a veritable renascence in my commitment to the practices of my ancestors. We shall discuss my conversion in detail in Chapters Twenty and Twenty-Three.)
And, verily, it came to pass that—clad in a tuxedo, sporting a crew cut, having successfully completed cha-cha lessons and posed for doz- ens of photos, holding a Torah and wearing a tallis and a yarmulke that had my name inscribed in it and was the color of the matches, match holders, place cards, flowers, other yarmulkes (similarly inscribed), and napkins that had been chosen for the sixteen tables at which would be seated over one hundred and fifty people, most of whom I didn’t know, who were my parents’ friends and those of my parents’ relatives with whom they were still on speaking terms (but not Rabbi Halpern), who would shower me with checks ranging from ten to fifty dollars, United States Savings Bonds with face values ranging from twenty-five dollars (many) to seventy-five dollars (one) but purchased at a discount and maturing in ten years, and one Polaroid camera, as a consequence of which I would have to write far too many thank-you notes under far too much pressure, and sitting at the double dais that would hold my friends and the offspring of those of my mother’s friends whom she couldn’t possibly offend, all gathered to concelebrate the occasion of my
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