I recently marked the 25th anniversary of my initiation into the Bar Mitzvah Teacher’s Union.
Back then, it was a cold and stormy day and the cloud bank to the west looked just like the Red Sea parted by the breath of God. All nature seemed to rebel against my decision: Signs and wonders were everywhere. Gusts of wind attempted to blow my cheap, stripped-down model Kia (all bar mitzvah teachers are poor) off the road.
Finally, I made it to a brick building downtown — an old, old warehouse where the Brotherhood meets and administers its secret rites. Three of us new members, leaning on each other for strength, recited the oath together:
“I promise never, no matter how provoked, to squeeze the scrawny, preadolescent neck of the student.”
“I promise never to reply to a parent, ‘But he IS a monster!'”
“I promise never to shout during the bar mitzvah ceremony, ‘SLOWER, SLOWER, you FOOL.'”(If speedy Haftarah reading was an Olympic event, my students would have chests full of gold medals.)
“I promise [recited slowly and purposefully] never again to make that speech to the parents that begins: ‘You are older and wiser than him! And no, he is not Hillel, Rabbi Akivah, the Baal Shem Tov, or the Moshiach in disguise.'”
“I promise never to engage in litigation against child or parent just because they present me a weekly snack of discounted, off-brand store cookies.”
“I agree to immediately resign from the lobbying group that pickets our state legislature chambers. I’ll burn the placard that says ‘Bar Mitzvah Teacher Abuse is a Hate Crime.'” (Minimum sentence should be five-seven years plus careful reading and subsequent written review of 150 bar mitzvah speeches.)
Can you tell from the above that this battle-scarred veteran of a hundred Haftarahs and speeches (that all begin, “No thanks to my teacher, today I am a man”) is running on intellectual fumes? One hundred years ago, when parents regarded themselves intellectually and ethically superior to their offspring, bar mitzvah teaching was an honorable profession. Today, it’s a job. My rabbi says it’s a mitzvah, but so is cutting the grass so my wife gets an afternoon off.
Just the other night I called the Greenbergs.
Me, bar mitzvah teacher: “Hi, Mrs. Greenberg, I guess it’s time to begin Alan’s bar mitzvah lessons.”
Mama: “Oh, he’s enjoying the $300 video game we gave him for Chanukah. I wouldn’t want to interrupt him. He hates it when we interrupt.”
Me: “Uh, no need for that. You and I can plan —”
Mama: “Oh dear, he just gave me a thumbs-down. He doesn’t want to go through all that — not this year. Maybe when he’s 18. Or maybe 36. That’s two chais, right? Or even 54, three chais. He says that’s OK, too.”
Me: “BUT MRS. GREENBERG!!!”
Let no one tell you it’s the age of the computer, or the Nuclear Age. It’s the age of the bar mitzvah boy. He holds supreme power. His parents fear him. Best Buy and Circuit City love him. His teachers feel ambiguity because his talents are immense and make a teacher drool with dreams of intellectual nourishment that could be instilled in this young sponge of a mind — if the culture hadn’t plugged it up with nonsense.
And the old tricks just don’t work anymore. “Morris, I just hope I’m here to hear your Haftarah in July. The old ticker, you know … win one for the Gipper [gasp].”
“Hey, if you’re feeling bad, Teach, we can cancel the whole enchilada, you know!”
Whattaheart.
But in all fairness to the kids, we adults aren’t faultless, either. Not only do we tolerate the trashiness of video games, TV and movies (as corruptive to their minds as nicotine to their lungs), but we’ve distracted the child’s focus from spiritual to the materialistic.
Thoughtful Christians blame their modernist culture for “taking Jesus out of Christmas,” as they say. We’ve done much the same with enlargement of the bar mitzvah from a moral matriculation to dinner dance and cocktails.
But somewhere deep down inside, we retain the ancestral memory that it’s all about the child, so we ease our conscience with a DJ for the kids, and relatives and friends throw money and gifts at him. The Saturday night revelry, of course, shouts loudly to the honoree that this milestone is a social event, not a graduation into spiritual responsibility. No wonder our kids wander aimlessly through a desert of doubt, looking for mountain peaks with gurus not named Elijah, Amos or Jeremiah.
But it’s consoling to consider that in the old days when the yeshivas of Lithuania and Poland glowed with Yiddishkeit, the same war raged. The alluring world around the Jewish adolescent beckoned, then as now. And we’re still here, aren’t we?
So, I’ll learn patience and go back on Prozac. And I’ll maintain my membership in the Brotherhood of Bar Mitzvah Teachers.
Ted Roberts is a humorist based in Huntsville, Ala.