(October 8 marked the 54th Anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah)
The Bar Mitzvah talk starts after my tenth birthday. My parents join the Reform congregation of Temple Emanu-El in Lynbrook, and I am inserted into the Bar Mitzvah track: Hebrew School twice a week and Sunday School. I call it going to “reformed school.”
I am good in real school but terrible in Hebrew School. Twice a week I have to tear myself away from playing ball with the gentiles or hanging out in pre-teen café society: Gino’s Pizzeria and Zanneti’s Luncheonette (we over-pronounce the final e in luncheonette). I bring my attitude to class, where memorization and pronunciation obscure language and poetry.
Sunday School is a little better, with girls as classmates and discussions of Bible stories. Still, it is school and it is Sunday. One October morning I show up and the building is locked. I think maybe it is a miracle, but it turns out to be Daylight Savings Time.
Toward the end of my second year of Hebrew School, the teacher takes me aside and says that if I don’t start doing better I will be his first boy to get left back. I ask if this would put off my Bar Mitzvah until I am 14. He replies tersely that there is nothing in Jewish law to delay entering manhood.
I see an angle. If I hunker up and barely get promoted, I’ll be in over my head for another year; if I ease up even more, I can repeat the class and let osmosis see me through.
When the teacher gives me the “bad” news a couple of months later, he does so with his hand on my shoulder and a mournful look in his eyes. “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” He has no idea how much of an understatement that is.
Six months before my departure from boyhood, I am placed in the Bar Mitzvah class to learn my portion of the Torah reading and write my speech. This group works directly with the Rabbi and his assistant, a Rabbi-in-training. With my public moment approaching, I turn on the brain power.
I like Rabbi Sapperstein—whom we call, amongst ourselves—Rabbi Rabbistein. He is a slight man with a moustache, my first teacher with facial hair. Without his rabbinical robe he looks like a shoe salesman, but with his flowing black robe, presiding over the Friday night service, chanting Hebrew words I don’t understand because I have been left back, he is a spiritual man and I believe in him (if not in everything he says).
One day Rabbi Rabbistein asks us to sit around in a circle. “I want to talk to you about something serious: sex,” he says, and a couple of kids giggle. “What does he know about it?” a fellow pre-man whispers in my ear, and I reply, “He has two sons. He did it at least twice more than we have.”
Surprisingly, Rabbi Rabbistein starts by telling us how good sex is, how we’ll be getting more and more of an urge for it, and some of us might have a chance in the next few years. Then he drops the other rhetorical shoe: But you won’t be ready emotionally, nor will the girl. Sure, it might seem good, but it could mess up both of you.
He closes with a rabbinical flourish: So, I am suggesting that you put off something good now, so that you may have something great later.
“Nice try,” I say after class, “but I want something good now and something great later.” Privately, though, I feel somewhat less of a need to beat the other kids in the who-got-it-first competition. And, when a few years later I hear Dylan sing “The slow one now will later be fast” I think of Rabbi Rabbistein.
My Bar Mitzvah is set for October 8, which I will share with two others. That is fine with me—I’ll have less to do, and surely one of the others will be selected to sing the Kaddish. I can’t sing a lick, was one of only four kids turned down for the school chorus. So, I am shocked when Rabbi Rabbistein takes me aside during a break and hands me a copy of the Kaddish. I tell him about the chorus and he explains that the other two boys can’t sing either but he has faith in my resourcefulness. He pats me on the shoulder and leaves the room. I wonder if by “resourceful” he realizes that I got left back on purpose, and this is my punishment.
I have gone to enough Bar Mitzvahs to know how the congregation picks apart the performances and rates the boys against each other. I walk around in circles till I realize I am about to cry and there isn’t anything I can do about it. I sneak to the back of the room, bow my head, and try to muffle my sobs. Maybe they will think I am davening.
The Rabbi-in-training crouches next to me and asks if I am hurt.
“No,” I finally get out. “I can’t sing the Kaddish.”
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I told the Rabbi I thought you could do it best. Let me speak to him.”
“No, you don’t understand. He picked me to sing the Kaddish. But I can’t.”
They work with me, but it turns out that I really can’t sing the Kaddish. Finally, the Rabbi suggests that I talk it, chant-like. I try to emulate Rabbi Rabbistein’s cadence, but I learn that must be earned.
My performance is greeted by murmurs, though I redeem myself by coming right back out with an impassioned delivery of my speech comparing life to football: some lead and some lead the way for those who lead, and you have to pick yourself off the ground and try again. Part of me does become a man that morning.
A few years later I see My Fair Lady. When Rex Harrison starts his first number, I imagine him crying when he found out he got the part.
Postscript:
On May 4, 1970, I am walking on campus, dazed, having just heard the news. “What’s wrong?” a classmate says.
“They just killed four of us at Kent State,” I reply.
A few days later, we huddle around a fuzzy television screen and listen to Walter Cronkite narrate the memorial service. In the background, amidst the static, I can make out the mellifluous intoning of, “All they were saying was give….peace….a ….chance.”
It is the cadence I tried so hard to emulate nine years earlier.
“I know him,” I say with pride.
“You know Cronkite?”
“No, the Rabbi.”
(from the working draft of Based on a True Life: A Memoir in Pieces)
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