His advisers have been suggesting such a peroration to a Jewish audience ever since his May speech calling for negotiating on the basis of the 1967 borders and the subsequent fallout. He couldn’t have asked for a better audience. This is the Reform crowd: the pre-game show was all about the history of the Religious Action Center and the crucial support Jewish activists lent to the civil rights movement—without which, Obama said, he probably wouldn’t be president. There was a warmup act of camp songs, which, as the delay wore on, extended to “Maoz Tzur” and “Great Balls of Fire.”

He discussed domestic issues like fair pay and he discussed Israel. But the overwhelming thrust was the journey—“journey” would dominate a word cloud of the speech—he has been on with this group since he first began to run for the White House.

In other words, this was the equivalent of a hometown speech. He gave a shout-out to AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, but also to NFTY, the organization for Reform teens. When I walked out, I heard one young man remark, “How about that shout-out to NFTY!” To which another young man replied, “I can’t wait to use that video clip.” Shabbat Shalom, bro.

Related: Disunion [Tablet Magazine]

In addition to a small mountain of jewelry, many of the gifts I received were books. They were the kind of books you give a bat mitzvah girl regardless of whether she loves to read: hefty ones about big subjects, books of history and tradition conveying weighty life lessons. They were about Israel and Strong Jewish Women, mostly. Had it been published in time for my bat mitzvah instead of just this month, Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World would probably have been among them.

Edited by Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the book would have been given to me to communicate the richness of Jewish tradition, and to make the point that my bat mitzvah was not an isolated experience. I would have already understood those truths; understood, too, that this was an occasion to underline them. Actually reading such a book would have been almost redundant. I might have leafed through it, but otherwise I would have resigned it to the high-up shelf in my bedroom where I put the rest of the well-meaning, impressive-looking books I was given. They were daunting, grown-up volumes, books that signaled a certain kind of responsibility. I knew even then that I might never actually sit down to read them, but that I’d never really be able to get rid of them either.

I vividly pictured all this as I read Today I Am a Woman. Even with no official coming of age bearing down, I figured my reaction to it would hew pretty close to the one I projected on my teenage self. Maybe it had something to do with the absence of the kind of existential pressure that comes along with a bat mitzvah, but reading it curled up on my couch on a cozy fall afternoon earlier this month, I found the book to be a genuinely moving read beneath its academic gloss. Organized by region, each country introduced with a brief description of its Jewish community, the volume includes a story or two from girls who had their bat mitzvahs in those places (or in some cases, the parents of those girls). The editors aimed for variety, gathering anecdotes from Kazakhstan to Colombia, India to New Zealand, Canada to Libya. Some of them are straightforward accounts of a familiar kind of service, while other contributors explain that they didn’t have a formal ceremony or ritual at the usual age but figured out how to lay claim to their Jewish identity in their own way. For Gina Malaka Waldman, born in Tripoli in 1948, leaving her country of origin was the most profound rite of passage. When she arrived in Switzerland to pursue her education, it was “the first time in my life I could say I was Jewish and not be afraid,” she writes. “It was at that moment that I became a bat mitzvah. I had come of age by making a commitment to my people.”

The first bat mitzvah in the United States dates to 1922, when Judith Kaplan (daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement) read from the chumash during a Shabbat morning service. Pinning down the very earliest bat mitzvah in the world is trickier; in her introduction, Barbara Vinick cites the writings of “nineteenth-century sage” Joseph Hayyim ben Elijah al-Hakam of Baghdad, which contain “the first indisputable mention of girls’ public coming-of-age.” But tracking the earliest roots of the ritual is kind of beside the point, as it took many (many!) years for bat mitzvahs to be seen as having any kind of equivalence to bar mitzvahs—and some communities still resist allowing girls to engage in the same level of preparation and participation as boys. A bar mitzvah, by contrast, has changed relatively little over its long history.

Today I Am a Woman is light on stories from kids who had the kind of over-the-top parties that make rabbis shudder. Instead, the accounts in these pages tend to come from families that care deeply about marking their daughters’ coming of age and who often had to think creatively about what that would involve—whether because they were part of communities without a clear tradition or a rabbi on hand, or ones in which women are forbidden from reading Torah. Some took part in group bat mitzvahs that felt a little minor-league compared to the rituals their brothers participated in and were bothered by the difference. Still others found meaning in their ceremonies anyway.

While there’s certainly plenty of immediate significance for a girl to find in this ritual in which she “becomes a woman,” there’s a reason a bat mitzvah is something one becomes—the verb suggesting a process rather than a singular occasion. In the moment, high-minded ideals about responsibility and adulthood and Jewish identity may be mere buzz words, eclipsed by more urgent matters like nervousness and excitement and lipstick (carefully applied to a girl’s own lips on this grown-up occasion, and also smudged on her cheeks from the kisses of doting aunties). That’s not to say the meaning is lost—no matter the extravagance of the party, months of study and preparation make a bat mitzvah’s gravity hard to deflect. But the meaning can take time to soak in. And inevitably—necessarily—it changes and grows along with the girl-turned-woman herself.

So, it’s not surprising that most of these stories come from women who are some distance from the occasion of their own bat mitzvah. There are many poignant reflections from parents. Monica Pastorok Cohen of Lexington, Mass., writes: “As [my daughter] Jocelyn began preparing for her bat mitzvah, I realized that it was the first time that she was doing something that I had not done, and with which I could not help her.” And there are plenty of stories in which a bat mitzvah takes on historical weight: Giorgina Vitale, who became a bat mitzvah in Turin, Italy, in 1937, describes bringing along her bat mitzvah album when her family went into hiding from the Nazis not long after.

Many of the bat mitzvah girls here explain that their ceremonies were meaningful largely because of what they made of them, rather than because of any predetermined part of the ritual. Because the specifics of a bat mitzvah are not constrained, what began as frustrating limitations (and in some places remain so) have become opportunities for girls and their families to craft rituals that have personal and spiritual resonance regardless of what those rituals are “supposed” to include. These can range from outfitting groups of bat mitzvah girls in identical dresses to involving them in social-action projects. In the process, those girls begin to understand that “coming of age” is not just about accepting tradition as it’s handed to them but about creating their own meaning. That’s an insight that can benefit boys, too, and in some communities already has.

At least, that’s the hopeful take-away from the wide-ranging set of experiences in this collection. A girl is an impossibly young 12 or 13 years old when she becomes a bat mitzvah. She has the rest of her life to reckon with what it means, to mull over her experience in relation to the generations of women before her, and to craft the story she wants to tell about it—whether she shares that story publicly (perhaps in a serious book destined to be a bat mitzvah gift) or just whispers it to herself.

It didn’t happen for me until adulthood. I became a bat mitzvah when I was 40, when my growing interest in Judaism made me decide to make up for lost time. I grew up in the Jewish waters of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but I never felt I truly belonged until five years ago, when I joined Manhattan’s Central Synagogue. I began to attend services more regularly at the historic Reform congregation, founded in 1872, and became involved in its community-organizing efforts.

I never used to worry about that lifeless, amorphous concept of “continuity”; it seemed to me Jews were overly worried about other Jews’ Judaism. Then my own children came into the picture. I watched their peers drop out of Hebrew school as soon as they’d crossed the seventh-grade finish line. Even my own son, Ben, despite a bar mitzvah he described as “perfect,” is on the fence as to whether to continue his Jewish studies. Many of Central’s members, when asked about their chief concerns during a recent campaign run by lay leadership, said they’d lost the battle to keep their kids connected—especially in the years between bar mitzvah and wedding.

So, these questions were on my mind when Central’s cantor, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, told me that she and the senior rabbi, Peter J. Rubinstein, were looking for ways to deepen and underscore that moment on Saturday mornings when the b’nei mitzvah have finished their Torah readings. They decided, among other changes, to add a new song that might infuse more resonance and clarity. And they wanted an original composition.

I’m a journalist, not a songwriter. (I wrote my share of overwrought guitar ballads in high school, and I take pride in my spoof lyrics for friends’ birthday parties.) But cantor Buchdahl, whose voice soars through the sanctuary each week, knew I’d begun a double life as a lyricist. My first book, Stars of David, is currently being adapted for the off-Broadway stage, produced by Daryl Roth, who last June won a Tony for The Normal Heart, and by Aaron Harnick, who nudged me three years ago to start writing lyrics for the show (and happens to be Sheldon’s nephew). Harnick paired me with the gifted composer Tom Kitt, a fellow semi-observant Jew who, soon after we met, won a Tony and Pulitzer for Next to Normal.

Buchdahl encouraged me to submit a song, making it clear it might never get sung. I was nervous about attempting any kind of text for the congregation I’ve come to cherish. But I’ve always admired Central’s mission to keep ritual as fluid as it is inviolable. And when I sat down to write, it became a personal opportunity to find the words I wished to tell my children on their b’nei mitzvah: Pause here, I’d wanted to say. Consider what this moment means. You’re joining a line of descendants who have survived against all reason. You are chanting from a book that Jews have kept vital for centuries. Investigate this tradition before you decide it doesn’t fit into your schedule anymore.

Most kids are obviously nervous on the bimah, anxious to just get through their Torah portion, focused on the party. Families get caught up in making sure they’ve ordered the personalized yarmulkes or haven’t left out an uncle from the guest list; they haven’t prefaced “the big day” with a sit-down talk about why they wanted their child to do this in the first place, what it means not just to become a man or woman, but to join a people.

I called the song “Taking Your Place” and tried to keep the lyrics simple, hoping to stave off pretension or schmaltz. Per cantor Buchdahl’s suggestion, I added a line of Hebrew from the Misheberach prayer that’s recited Saturday mornings (not the same as the prayer for healing). Late this past summer, I sent them off to Kitt, who wrote a beautiful melody.

Last week, cantor Buchdahl told me that she would be singing “Taking Your Place” in front of thousands on Yom Kippur morning, because the lyrics dovetailed with Rabbi Rubinstein’s sermon. And she would sing the song at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, no less, because that’s where Central synagogue’s services were held this year.

The fact that I was fasting only compounded the queasiness as I entered Lincoln Center last Saturday. But then as I listened to Rubinstein speak, his words focused me. He asked us to think about how we explain to our children not just why they should care about being (and remaining) Jewish, but why we care. He talked about the fragility of endurance: that the generation before us, who chose to pass on the Torah to their children, could not have been sure it would make it any further.

When he finished, the cantor approached the pulpit as Kitt’s chords began softly. Her voice poured over the packed rows, my daughter squeezed my hand, and my son, who chose to sit up high in the third tier, gave me a visible thumbs-up. After the last note, the rabbi descended the stage to embrace me in the aisle. I hugged him back awkwardly, probably a little too tight.

After the service, as I exited behind the hordes, I spotted Tom Kitt standing amidst emptying seats. He had come to hear it, too, and we looked at each other with a kind of bewilderment.

You can hear the song below, recorded in the synagogue before Yom Kippur. Whatever anyone else thinks of it, my gratitude is acute and the experience imprinted: a snapshot of how Jewish amateurs, when invited, can participate in an ancient conversation.

“Taking Your Place” for Central Synagogue
Lyrics by Abigail Pogrebin, music by Tom Kitt

Taking your place
In an enduring line.
This is the day
that you stood up to say,
“Our tradition is mine.”

You have now read the Torah.
It’s been passed onto you.
It’s our law and our story–But each telling is new.

It is said we stood at Sinai
And today, you know you’re there.
You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

Taking your place
In a resilient line
This is the day
that you stood up to say,
“Our tradition is mine.”

You have now held the Torah,
forged a link to the past.
You’re the face of our future,
and the reason we last.

Lalechet bidrachav v’lishmor mitzvotav kol hayamim.
May you walk in God’s ways and may all of your days be blessings.

It is said we stood at Sinai
And today, you know you’re there.
You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

We met Samuel, along with other teenagers in similar situations, while conducting research for Being Interfaith, a multimedia project on Jewish-Christian families that we created earlier this year while students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. We began the project in part because we were struck by a statistic: Over one in four American adults are married or living with a partner of a different religion. A small but increasing number of these couples are choosing to raise their children in both religions. These families often face opposition from extended family and struggle to be accepted by established congregations and religious organizations, many of which advocate educating children in only one religion.

Then we found an alternative: the Interfaith Community. Founded in 1987 in New York City, with branches now in Denver and Boston, the organization provides support for religiously mixed families, hosting services and celebrations for Jewish and Christian holidays and offering counseling for couples and classes for children and adults. These classes are taught by two instructors, one Jewish and the other Christian, with each sharing his or her own faith’s history, traditions, and practices, to give the teenagers the tools to make informed decisions regardless of the religious path they choose.

We interviewed 10 teenagers we met through the Interfaith Community. These young adults are at the front line of this new generation—often referred to as “half and half”—and we believe it is essential for their own voices to be heard.

Samuel Oliver’s family began attending holiday celebrations at the Interfaith Community
when he turned 12:

Zoe Wolfe took classes at the Interfaith Community from the age of 8 through 12.
Today she considers herself interfaith:

Daniel Froot is one of the few kids at the organization who has chosen one religion over
the other. After four years of attending classes, Daniel decided, when he turned 12,
to have a bar mitzvah:

Elettra Fiumi and Lea Khayata are 2011 graduates of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Janice Erlbaum is the author of Girlbomb and Have You Found Her. You can find more of her stories here. [Running time:10:20.]

Over the past decade, many Jewish schools have added mandatory “mitzvah projects” to the curriculum for their 12-year-old b’nai mitzvah students—designed in part as a counterweight to the increasing extravagance of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, which at their most outrageous have come to include custom-built “synagogue” pavilions on the grounds of five-star resorts and, in the case of Elizabeth Brooks, a $10 million gala at Manhattan’s Rainbow Room headlined by Aerosmith and 50 Cent. Even for teens of more modest means, the remote-controlled airplanes and private telephone lines that once made for memorable gifts have given way to luxuries like strands of Mikimoto pearls—gifts that might turn into heirlooms, sure, but that can still feel disconnected from the idea of passing into adulthood. And with a new Torah cycle getting underway, a new crop of b’nai mitzvah will decide whether to not only include an element of tzedakah in their big day but perhaps to to do the once unthinkable and forgo gifts altogether in favor of increasing their charitable contributions.

“My bar mitzvah should be about me doing something for the community,” said 13-year-old Daniel Kessler, an eighth grader in Potomac, Maryland, who used his low-key luncheon last June to raise $5,000 for a seeing-eye-dog training center in Israel. Kessler was following in the footsteps of his 15-year-old brother, David, who used his own bar mitzvah luncheon two years ago to collect about 1,500 used English books for an Israeli school. “I thought my bar mitzvah isn’t about me getting things, but I really like books, so it would be good to give other people the opportunity to get the love of reading,” he explained—and while he kept the Barnes & Noble gift cards a few guests gave him along with their book donations, the handful of checks pressed on him by particularly insistent relatives and family friends went to defray the costs of shipping the library to its new home in Kfar Saba. “I really think I did something meaningful, and I’m glad.”

Lital Firestone, a 15-year-old from Rockville, Maryland, decided to go a step further and ask her guests to give not just money but time—specifically, to help serve food at a brunch for patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center while she and her theater group put on a musical performance. “My bat mitzvah was seven months after my birthday, so I said, ‘Please do this in lieu of gifts,’ ” said Firestone. “I just felt like it should be a celebration of what I should be working toward as a person, and not just like another birthday party with presents.” She raised more than $3,000, more than covering the cost of sponsoring the brunch, and sent the extra funds to a program at the Tel HaShomer army base hospital that provides support to wounded Israeli soldiers.

The idea of using Jewish life-cycle events—brit milot, bar mitzvahs, weddings—to raise money or awareness for charitable causes can be traced to the founding of Mazon, the Jewish hunger-relief organization, which started in 1985 with a request that celebrants give 3 percent of the money they were spending on parties to help feed those in need. The organization now has an annual budget of about $6.5 million. “It was a way to balance out what we were spending on mitzvah celebrations,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, the author of Putting God on the Guest List, a guide to integrating spiritual traditions into the modern bar or bat mitzvah ceremony. A new wave of philanthropic organizations specifically targets b’nai mitzvah students; one Boston-based group, jchoice.org, recently launched an online registry that allows teenagers to specify the causes they’d like their guests to support in their honor. But, Salkin noted, charity can be as prone to inflation as parties. “I keep waiting for a kid to say that for his bar mitzvah project he worked out a compromise on the territories,” Salkin said, referring to contested settlements in the West Bank. “It’s like a law of physics—we’ve got to compete with each other, so instead of competing with glitz, we compete with meaning.”

For some parents, though, the logical corollary to eliminating gifts is scaling down the size of the accompanying party. “We didn’t want to contribute to this culture of excess,” said Lisa Eisen, a mother of three in a Washington suburb and national director of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which focuses on Jewish youth programs. “We wanted to contribute to a culture that focuses on values and making a difference for others.” When her eldest daughter, Ariella, now 17, was preparing for her bat mitzvah, Eisen suggested she choose a charity rather than make a wish list. In the end, Ariella and her younger sister Tamar collected more than $15,000 between them for a nonprofit founded by their uncle that provides medical services in developing countries, along with money for the American Jewish World Service and a Down Syndrome group, and celebrated with low-key dessert receptions instead of full-scale dinners—and balanced even those events with donations to Mazon. Both girls carried on their volunteer work after their bat mitzvahs, and the whole family has since replaced the tradition of exchanging Hanukkah gifts with picking two charity projects, one in Israel and one at home, each December, Eisen said. Now, with her 11-year-old son beginning to prepare for his bar mitzvah, Eisen said she’s hoping to replace the American-style party with a family celebration in Israel. “I want to commemorate him reaching this milestone without it being about the party and the presents,” said Eisen. “But we’ll see.”

While excommunication has traditionally been reserved for the intermarried offspring of the ultra-Orthodox or Baruch Spinoza, apparently in this touchy age of political celebrities, a controversial figure’s notoriety is enough to keep him from the kiddush table. In a practically WASP-ish sentiment, the head of the South African Beth Din (Jewish ritual court) calls the decision—ostensibly Goldstone’s own—”quite a sensible thing to avert all this unpleasantness.” In our experience, that’s just not how Jews roll.

Breaking News: Judge Richard Goldstone Banned From Attending His Grandson’s Bar Mitzvah [Writing Rights]

Rothfeld’s havdalah bat mitzvah is hardly unique. Although there are no statistics on how many congregations have adopted similar practices, the popularity of havdalah b’nai mitzvah seems to be growing throughout the country, for a host of reasons having to do with observance, convenience, and exclusivity. While some view the trend as evidence of the adaptability of Jewish ritual, others worry that it is simply one more dilution of a rite already hobbled by materialism and general disinterest.

“At first I wasn’t happy with the havdalah bat mitzvah, because it was new to me,” said Rothfeld, now 14. “I felt like I had to learn everything all over again. But then I began to like it. It was a unique and fun experience for me.”

There are several other reasons why families opt for havdalah b’nai mitzvah—to accommodate Orthodox relatives who will not attend non-Orthodox services on Shabbat, for instance, or those who stay too far away to walk to synagogue but could drive to a havdalah ceremony that begins after sundown. Additionally, Haber said, sometimes families opt for a havdalah service because there is less material for a child to master and therefore less pressure. (At Congregation Mishkan Tefila, a Conservative synagogue in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, which has offered havdalah ceremonies for 20 years, they were originally reserved for children with special needs “who could not handle the material or the crowds of a Shabbat morning bar or bar mitzvah,” said Rabbi Geoff Haber.) The havdalah ceremony is a shorter and more exclusive service, since fewer members of the general congregation attend. And, sometimes families choose this option because it means they are excused from sponsoring a mid-day kiddush lunch for the synagogue, which adds extra costs.

Then, of course, there is the fact that some families want to get to the post-service Saturday night festivities without the intervening hiatus of Shabbat afternoon. “Whereas the Shabbat morning service tends to be a little more haimish, the havdalah bar or bat mitzvah feels more like the prelude to a party, more like the opening act, as opposed to the act itself,” said Rabbi Dan Ain of The New Shul, a nondenominational progressive congregation in New York City. “It was a bit striking to see everyone in their Saturday evening dinner attire,” Ain said, recalling his first havdalah bat mitzvah experience. But, he added, “there is almost no way to avoid the ‘party’ aspect of the b’nai mitzvah experience, and to a certain extent, the tail will continue to wag the dog.”

Ain pointed out the merits to the havdalah service as a bar or bat mitzvah. “Havdalah is a beautiful ritual that literally means separation of the holy from the mundane, of Shabbat from the rest of the week, of who we are before to who we are now, from technology to our lived life. These are exactly the concepts that bar and bat mitzvah students are grappling with as they approach adulthood,” he said. “Exploring them—at the time in which they enter our community, as adult members whose voices should be heard and appreciated—seems particularly appropriate.”

Not everybody, however, is a fan of havdalah b’nai mitzvah. Havdalah, after all, does not typically include any Torah reading, a fundamental part of a traditional bar or bat mitzvah. But rabbis who are open to having havdalah bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies are likewise open to incorporating parts of the morning Shabbat service into havdalah.

“It’s an untraditional choice, as Torah is not usually read on Saturday evenings,” said Rabbi Joe Rooks Rapport of the Reform Congregation Adath Israel Brith Sholom in Louisville, Kentucky. “But assuming the family is fine with that, I don’t think there is ever a time when we should not be reading Torah.”

Rapport is more concerned with havdalah b’nai mitzvah forfeiting the communal aspect of the ceremony. “We feel that it is very important that our b’nai mitzvah students step forward to become the leader of our congregation in prayer,” he said. “This seldom happens on Saturday evenings, since the congregation as a whole worships together on Friday nights and Saturday mornings.” Many congregations do not regularly hold communal havdalah services. Rabbi Joseph Meszler of Temple Sinai of Sharon, Massachusetts, said his congregation generally does not offer havdalah bar and bat mitzvahs because they only have one rabbi and one cantor—there is simply not enough staff to run morning services and evening bar mitzvahs. While their main reason for not offering the service is based on logistics, Meszler said, he has other misgivings. “The havdalah service removes any semblance of [the bar or bat mitzvah] being a community event and makes it into almost an exclusively private party,” Meszler noted. “People can also dress in evening clothes that are not usually appropriate for synagogue.”

Still, there’s always freelance clergy. Cantor Debbi Ballard, an independent cantor based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has offered havdalah bar and bat mitzvahs for the past five years. They account for half of the 20 to 30 b’nai mitzvah at which she officiates each year. “A Shabbat morning service can tend to be somewhat predictable and mechanical,” she said. “I like to turn my havdalah services into something more meaningful, more thought provoking, and more inspiring, as we begin a new week. I try to encourage my congregants to envision peace, and to appreciate the peaceful feelings they experience, to attempt to bring more of that into the world.” Jordana Horn is a writer and lawyer at work on her first novel.

Sex and the Suburbs [614]

Lest you think this is just one of those things that only works “in theory,” Dimdim informs us that “Steve Chazin, Marketing Director of Dimdim, decided to change this spending cyclone at his son’s bar mitzvah” and invited certain out-of-town guests via the service; doing so saved him “a small fortune.” Hopefully Chazin’s desire to tighten his own belt doesn’t mean that Dimdim faces a dimdim financial outlook—although that would explain the company’s foray into the haftarah industry.

Anyway, maybe there’s some more room to run with this! Perhaps those in the synagogue can place a laptop upon the central podium and allow a distant relative to say a prayer (admittedly, this would probably only work at reform congregations—very reform congregations). If you are invited via Dimdim, why not reciprocate the cost-saving favor that your “hosts” did for you by virtually sending your gift, also via Dimdim? That way, you can keep the gift! And how about a Dimdim hora: five or ten people, dancing in a circle in a living room, hoisting a laptop atop a chair. You can even supplement the music coming through Dimdim with your own recording on iTunes.

And after it’s all over, and you’ve attended your second-cousin-once-removed’s bat mitzvah from the comfort of your own living room, you’ll be able to look forward to your old college friend’s nephew’s Dimdim bris, just a few months away.

John Goodman and Julie Hagerty in Todd Solondz’s Storytelling

Struggle with pronunciation.
“Probably the most difficult sound to master, because we do not have it in the English language, is the ‘ch’ sound,” Brostoff says. “So I always tell kids, ‘Pretend you’re at the dentist’s office, and he’s asking you to spit into a spittoon, and you kind of are clearing your throat and you kind of have that ‘ch’ sound.’ And somehow a lot of kids can do it. Some cannot do it. It’s very, very difficult for them to make that sound. It’s the same sound you have in German in the composer Bach’s name.”

Go too fast.
“One of my mantras to them is ‘Loud, slow, and clear,’ because they do tend to want to rush. Most students, if they know their portions well, want to go way too fast. I often tell them just to say their names in their heads whenever they get to a period.”

Pretend you’re on American Idol.
“A big thing that I would want to emphasize—something I emphasize with my actual bar mitzvah students—is that it’s not a show. It’s a time to be embraced by the community. It’s not that they’re standing up there waiting for their cue. At different points in the service, when there are congregational readings in English, or even in Hebrew if they know it, they need to partake in that. It’s not just standing and waiting for a little line and going up to recite. You’re a part of the congregation when you’re doing your specific solos. I also tell them, because it’s not a show, not to be waving to their friends—you almost have to ‘stay in character’ as a bar mitzvah person. You can smile, you can be natural, but you’re there to do something of a serious nature, and since you are leading the congregation, you’re expected to be acting in a way that is very adult-like.”

Imagine the world is not like a Todd Solondz movie.
“I would want the actor, and the actual bar mitzvah student, to look at this as almost a day of hope, more so in terms of their interpretation—when they’re writing their speech—their interpretation of their torah or haftorah portion. Often this can be a way to motivate kids to say something to this audience out there that hopefully encourages them to do something better with their lives—a pretty awesome responsibility for a 13-year-old.”

Until then, I knew Israel only through the cousins who came to town for my brother’s bar mitzvah—they wore sweatpants to the party and required kosher food—and what little my father had told me about his childhood. Born in Czechoslovakia, my dad moved with his parents to Israel as a baby in May of 1948, the month it became an official state. He’s shared sun-soaked memories about raising chickens and growing vegetables, but never exactly explained why they left eight years later. How could anyone trade a farm for a one-bedroom apartment in Queens?

My father hasn’t been back to Israel since, and only recently have I started considering going there, as I inch closer to the age cutoff for a free trip. And while I’ve met more Israelis over the years—the paratrooper-turned-Hebrew school teacher who called one student “too fat already,” a college-age couple I drank sangria with in Madrid—what I know about the place itself remains limited more or less to what I’ve gathered from newspapers, books, television, and film.

So when it comes to disengagement, I find myself arguing in favor, yet push me and I’ll quickly add the caveat that I don’t know enough about Israel to take a strong stance. It’s not ambivalence but insecurity. I know, deep down, that my opinions are founded less in a concrete understanding of the nuances of history than in a kind of personal politics, my conception of myself as open-minded. Even when I try to imagine Gaza, or what a settlement looks like, or what it means to remove 8,000 people from their homes, I struggle for comparisons, only to realize how far from the settlers I really feel, how hard it is for me to imagine I might have a divine duty to be anywhere. Israel does not quite exist for me as a real place, only as a land of seldom-told stories, the stop my father’s family took on their trip from their homeland to mine.

Maybe how I feel about Israel is how I feel about my own distant cousins—I’m interested to know they’re there, and I would be upset if anything ever happened to one of them. Still, I don’t ask about them often, and I’m not rushing to visit anytime soon. They are both family and not family, me and not me. And as much as I might want to forge a connection, as much as I feel I should, I can’t help but see the ocean in between.

(“bark mitzvahs”). She also guides readers in creating their own traditions, and explores how traditional communities can move beyond skepticism to turn invented rituals into sanctioned, even beloved, tradition.

What, broadly, is the purpose of religious ritual?

Religious rituals give us ways to shape and focus our experiences, ways that take us out of ourselves and connect us to other people in our tribe, in our community, in our group—both people who are living and historically. And they also link us to God—or to a power, however we’re defining that—which is larger and greater than ourselves. They make our lives not arbitrary. We need new rituals when the old ones don’t work anymore to shape parts of our lives.

Why do the old ones sometimes stop working?

In some cases, our contemporary realities are such that no ritual was ever developed which can mark what’s happening to us. For instance, we need rituals now to mark retirement or menopause, because we expect to live long after those events, and we want rituals to shape and comment upon those things.

But doesn’t religious tradition exist in part to create a sense of something ancient and unchanging, something an individual can turn to during major life events—a stable base when other things are shifting?

I think that often religious people demonstrate their love and commitment to their inherited faith by changing practices. They do it so that their faith can remain vibrant under new, current, or challenging situations…. We usually think of being a stickler for past practices as a sure sign of piety, but we can surely see a different form of piety, that practiced by people who are willing to put up with the discomfort of novelty and experimentation in order to preserve Judaism as a living tradition.

Can new rituals be considered as valid or as important as preexisting ones? For example, how can a “car mitzvah” have as much religious weight as a bar mitzvah? Can an orange on the seder plate be as important, given larger contexts, as, say, the charoset? What about a so-called bark mitzvah, the new practice of bar mitzvahing your dog?

It depends how you define “valid and important.” A bar mitzvah used to be no big deal—a boy went to shul with his dad in the morning, had an aliyah, downed a glass of schnapps, and went off to school. Now it costs thousands of dollars and a year of preparation, it keeps a kid in religious school, and allows families to demonstrate their commitment to Judaism. So in a sense there is a “new” bar mitzvah that has become a very big ritual. As for the car mitzvah—that is, a ritual in which a synagogue gives its new teenage drivers a token, like a tree of life keychain, to remind them to drive carefully—it has a small chance of catching on, I think, only because 16-year-old kids in liberal Judaism don’t tend to go to shul much…. The orange on the seder plate will fade away because there isn’t much to do with it aside from notice it, and, God willing, the inequities in Jewish life that it points out will hopefully be addressed in the coming years.

The bark mitzvah—that’s just silly. What isn’t silly, and what will perhaps expand, is the practice of Jews finding ways to mark the death of their beloved pets.

How, in general, does one go about creating new rituals?

When we are inventing new rituals, we turn to our available cultural practices—what I call the “Jewish ritual toolbox.” You aren’t going to just think out of nowhere, “Okay, what should I do?” You want to make sure that other Jews feel that your practice is within the language of Judaism—not just the verbal language, the prayers, songs, texts and so forth, but also the language of ritual gestures, or ritual objects, such as lighting candles or dipping something in water. Even if there weren’t a ritual to name my baby daughter in my rabbi’s manual, for example, it is incredibly comforting to know that there are psalms and proverbs and sacred texts that I could turn to to create one, that with a little tweaking or some adjustment, I can make use of what has been there all along.

Some of the rituals you describe in your book seem, at least from a more conservative point of view, to stretch the limits of religious practice—or to defy traditional rules outright. For example, you mention the “new ritual” of getting a Star of David tattoo, but isn’t there a law against burying a tattooed body in a Jewish cemetery? Can we really consider such inventions—the ones that are a stretch or an instance of defiance—rituals?

I don’t know that there are really limits on what can and cannot be a ritual. For instance, when someone came up with the idea of the afikomen, I can picture most people going, “Are you kidding? Hide a matzoh?” It’s easy to imagine that it seemed silly at first, but, for whatever reason—whether it had something to do with God’s hiddenness, or with, say, just keeping children interested—we accepted it. And now the seder cannot officially end without it.

Funny about the tattooing rule: People can know next to nothing about Judaism (or even a lot) but they’ll say this they know for sure: that if you have a tattoo, you won’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery. If you speak to members of chevra kadishas ["burial societies"] and Jewish funeral parlor directors, I bet you will never meet anyone who has ever stood in the way of a burial for someone with a tattoo. Studies of the biblical prohibition on tattooing, by the by, reveal that it is not about making a design on oneself, but about gashing oneself, as some non-Jewish peoples did, in antiquity, as a sign of mourning.

While some new practices—Torah yoga, say—might represent a spiritual undertaking, can they always be included in the category of religious ritual? Isn’t it possible to define ritual a little too broadly?

I agree: There are big lifecycle rituals—bris, marriage, death—and big holidays—Passover, Rosh Hashana. And there are less grandiose spiritual practices—having a seder on Tu B’shvat, the new year for trees, an upsherin, a haircutting ceremony for a three-year-old boy about to wear tallit katan for first time, putting tzedaka money in a blue-and-white box before Shabbat. A women’s seder or a torah yoga practice would fall into that category, I think.

In your book, you talk about some of the ways in which even Orthodox Jews are inventing rituals. But is it more acceptable to invent rituals in the Reform movement? How much latitude do Orthodox Jews really have to create within the boundaries of their own beliefs and their communities’ expectations?

What makes things difficult for Orthodox Jews wishing to institute new practices is a strong sense of communal norms. Years ago, when Orthodox feminists wanted to have monthly women’s prayer groups—even when they found rabbis who said this would be acceptable according to halakha, if done in particular ways, which the women were happy to follow—they were told [by community leaders] that having this monthly three-hour service would destroy family unity…. Changes terrify us, because our Jewish practices are so very dear and hold us together, so we think that a bit of change will threaten the whole structure. But change happens: Women’s prayer groups have become a new norm in many Orthodox communities.

Is it okay for people to invent rituals themselves even if they’re not observing many of the normative ones, like keeping kosher or observing Shabbat?

Anyone can invent a new Jewish ritual practice and perform it…. As for “normative Judaism”: Many of the leading rabbis in the Reform movement do not keep kosher; this does not make them, in the eyes of those who have ordained them and those who follow them, illegitimate transmitters of Judaism. The rituals that have the best chance of catching on are made by people with a love of Judaic tradition and some textual knowledge.

Rushing the ten blocks, I thought how brief his newfound maturity had proved. And what kind of maturity was it, anyway, if so quickly compromised?

The story was almost comical. Hearing music, he had been drawn to the orchestra room between classes. Younger students were rehearsing. Standing in the doorway, he caught the eye of one of his fifth-grade friends and started making faces. The friend made faces back. Erez pretended to be choking and lay down on the hallway floor in a feigned death agony. The friend threw a pen at him. Erez threw the pen back. Ha ha. Except that, with an unerring sense for mayhem, the pen flew smack into the side wall of the boy’s violin, breaking it as if it were balsa.

It wasn’t balsa. It was in fact a fine instrument his parents had just bought because of the boy’s promise as a musician.

Andy rushed from work, too, and we found Erez in the office, crying. The head of the middle school, who had taken him out of classes for the afternoon, said she could hardly bear to punish him further because he was so miserable and contrite. She limited his suspension to time served.

We were angry yet relieved. Behind the crime of accidentally hurting his friend’s violin was the fact that he loved to hang out in the orchestra room. This was not such a bad form of adolescent loitering. When he didn’t get home on schedule from school, it was usually because he was practicing there or losing track of time in that other den of iniquity, the library. His disobedience was on a very high plane and oddly nonrebellious—or, to put it another way, his rebellions were neither intentionally nor radically disobedient. He was more apt to take contrarian stands on things we couldn’t really argue about, like his choice of instruments when he signed up for orchestra in the first place. He wanted to play viola. I begged him not to because viola music is written in the one clef I can’t read easily. That sealed his decision.

At every stage of parenting, we have been told, “Just wait.” Wait for the terrible twos, the selfish sevens, the nightmare of adolescence. For me, the paradox of the bar mitzvah was based at least partly on the idea that no 13-year-old could reasonably be called mature; he was in fact at an age when he might instead blow up with immaturity. And we had certainly seen kids behave horribly at bar mitzvah parties, or partake in orgies of self-indulgence as they opened their gifts afterward. Like three-year-olds on a sugar bender, they spend an hour ripping wrappings and ignoring Hallmark wishes, then lay exhausted amid the spoils of their false adulthood, no one knowing who sent the savings bonds.

We have tried to prevent these scenes, and also not to look for them. We have been, by the standards of our generation of urban parents, premodern as Mennonites. No electronic games, computer time limited to ten minutes a day, TV on weekend mornings only. Erez’s cellphone, which we gave him so he could reach us if necessary when he started to walk to school by himself, can only call four numbers, and we programmed which ones they would be. The world in which he could be disobedient was vastly circumscribed by such choices.

And yet the world gets in. He found a way to override the phone’s program. A girl he knows—an older schoolmate who likes to try out her sophistication on anyone who will pay attention—sent him outrageously vulgar emails that appeared blank to the naked eye. (We monitor his email.) Eventually I realized she had used a white font against a white background; only when you highlighted the message by dragging your cursor across it could you see the astonishing contents. Gaping at it, I was reminded of the children’s novel that Charlotte Brontë wrote in the tiniest script she could muster, so no adult could read it, and of the boy—a New York City private school student, of course—who downloaded a high-pitched sound only kids could hear and turned it into a parent-proof ringtone. When the Times provided a sample of the sound on its website, Andy and I played it and scoffed: There was nothing there! But Erez and Lucas started screaming and holding their ears.

As parents, we consider ourselves sensible, but we can only be sensible with what senses we still have. No matter how narrowly you try to limit what your children will read and hear to what you already know how to handle, they will inevitably begin to sense things beyond the safe zone you’ve created for them. This is actually necessary, as the bar mitzvah ceremony demonstrated so beautifully: Erez was sensing the world beyond his parents, and taking steps into it. But the process is also confounding, as the aftermath proved.

We had not thought very much about the gifts Erez would get. When people asked what he might like we deliberately answered a different question: What could we tolerate his having? Books, music—and if cash was easier, not too much. None of these suggestions quite worked out the way we intended. The books generally came in the form of gift cards for bookstores, with the result that he now must buy the equivalent of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica before next March or forfeit their value. Music came largely in the form of coupons for use at the iTunes store, which would have been useless except that two very generous (and, as it turned out, subversive) friends gave him iPods. (The Nano, he kept; the Shuffle, holding fewer songs, he gave to Lucas.) And the money was perplexing as well, not just because people gave so much, but also because it was often accompanied by restrictive covenants such as: “Only to be spent on fun things!”

The first fun thing Erez would spend his bar mitzvah money on was fixing his friend’s violin. But even after that expense, he was left, as of this writing, with almost $10,000 in cash or cash equivalents. Andy and I eyed the mounting total somewhat enviously. The bar mitzvah, tightly budgeted though it was, had dug us into a deep hole, and Erez’s booty would half refill it. Of course we would never really commandeer his gifts; they mostly went into the bank, despite those covenants. But I began to wonder if the bar mitzvah ritual, looked at macroeconomically, had become little more than an elaborate wealth redistribution scheme, transferring money from parents to children at the fairly inefficient rate of 50 percent. Or at least that was the figure in our case; your results may vary.

Ours may too; several months after the fact, these totals aren’t yet final. That’s because of a family rule—devised to control birthday mania—that limits the boys to opening just one gift per day, with a thank-you note required before the process continues.

After the bar mitzvah we gradually realized we had to increase the quota to five gifts per day and eventually ten, or risk stale checks and disgruntled donors. Erez has dutifully written over 100 thank-yous—and yet a few gifts still remain. The bookkeeping has been intense, making us very grateful indeed for those who elected to give nonfungible items like fountain pens. Our favorite so far: a collection of grooming products that make Erez smell like the interior of P. Diddy’s limo. Erez’s favorite so far: a Remote Control Farting Bear from his sportswriter cousin, which he promptly farted to death.

But even when all the money is banked, the pens lost and the tube of body gel empty—and it will be soon, if he keeps using it as hair gel—something of the bar mitzvah will remain. I refer of course to those iPods and the new, private music they contain. As of now, it’s a strange amalgam of Franz Ferdinand and Sweeney Todd. But going forward, no matter what limitations we place on where and how often the devices may be used, we will no longer be connected to the innermost melodies (and provocative words) that shape and color his longings. Until now it has been possible to believe, and to arrange things so the belief was true, that what our boys wanted was the same as what we wanted for them.

I finally understand that the bar mitzvah is not best understood as a signpost indicating arrival at the outskirts of maturity. It is instead a gate of desire. What that desire will mean, and whether it will be achieved, is out of our control, beyond our hearing. It is written in a clef we can’t easily read. We can only hope we were good enough parents not to have locked the gate, even if we kept it gently closed as long as possible.

There was a time when I wanted to get up and chant the Torah as my father had done, and his father, and his before him, and back, and back, and back to the father of us all. Unfortunately, I first had this feeling, quite strongly, when I was seven or eight. It flared again, very briefly, when I lived in Paris after college, plotting ways to relieve my sense of utter loneliness. I imagined that I’d be taken in by a family of Hasidim—I had one in mind; their head was the owner of an old bookshop on the rue des Rosiers. He would lead me through the streets crowded with models and their photographers, past the Picasso museum, and into a quiet old hotel particulier. There, I’d be raised in the ways of peace and paths of righteousness, marry one of their daughters, disappear utterly, change my name to Eliyahu or Gershom. I would speak French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Put on my tzitzit, not even looking at the body in the mirror, my flesh, white, ghostly, fed on the pastrami they called “le pickel” and Glatt falafel. Gradually, I’d shed the trappings and anxieties of the contradiction-ridden, modern, and enlightened world, transform, once and for all, into a Jew. I would “return,” as they say, and, by returning, become, at last, a stranger to myself. Staring into the bookshop window, holding a copy of Plasseraud’s La Lituanie Juive I’d just bought, along with Lévinas’ Totalité et infini, it seemed no more likely that I’d turn around and invite myself for Shabbos dinner than that I’d become a Catholic, an apostasy of which I was incapable.

I’d first raised the subject of my bar mitzvah with my father when I began 7th grade. Every week seemed to bring a handsomely lettered invitation to services at Central or Park Avenue or Temple Emanuel, the bastions of Upper East Side Jewry, followed by promised parties at The Pierre Hotel, Ivy League college clubs, or Tavern on the Green. All this was an unknown world to me. We’d never gone to synagogue as a family. We didn’t go to lavish parties either; our entertainments were concerts at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, or in our living room. “You can have one, if you want,” my father said, “if you really want one. It’s a lot of work, you know. I’m sure that a lot of those boys up there don’t even know what they’re saying. Do you want that? It would be better if you knew the words. We’ll have to find somewhere you can study. I just ask one thing: Don’t do it for the money.” Then he told the joke about the boy who says, “Today I am a fountain pen.” I thought about it. I didn’t thrill to the idea of adding more hard work to a life that seemed to promise nothing but a future of study: all the usual school subjects plus extra French lessons, violin lessons, orchestra on Wednesdays. Study and practice: I’d never give up my weekend touch-football games or my own reading for the sake of another subject, one that seemed of dubious value and yet could only be taken with the utmost seriousness. September became January and I did nothing. Eventually the date approached, grew ever closer, passed.

Had I made my decision by not making one? Was it mere laziness, or something else? Maybe it was just the feeling of insurmountable and unpronounceable difficulty, as though I had a choice between lifting an enormous rock pinning me down, or tunneling out from under it. Back in September, we’d gone far enough to discuss Hebrew Schools. According to my father, the trope taught at Park Avenue synagogue was ugly, Temple Emanuel was disguised Protestantism and run by snobbish German Jews. Closer to home we had the Orthodox Spanish Portugese Synagogue, housed in a neo-Romanesque splendor on 70th Street and Central Park West, and the Reform Stephen Wise around the corner. We would never be Orthodox, and, as for the Reform one, my father only wanted services in Hebrew; also, he didn’t want to feel pressured to attend services so close to home. He’d lack excuses. Anyway, he’d only recently fallen out with the rabbi there who used to be his friend.

My father was turning into the joke about the Jew, who, alone on a desert island, builds two synagogues—so he can have one that he’d never set foot in. On his island, there were many synagogues and they all had something wrong with them. Perhaps without fully understanding, and not for the last time, he presented me with a peculiar dilemma. Was I strong enough to turn my bar mitzvah into an act of disobedience? Or, if it was only a matter for my own autonomous will, neither opposing nor opposed, how much should I account for my father’s own wishes, his apparent disinterest or absence of pride in what I did or didn’t do? My atheist and yet steadfastly Jewish father had actually imposed a Calvinist and Puritan test of faith: Did I feel a calling? Was I one of the elect? Would my latent and natural religious intuitions rise up in me and pour forth, sweeping away all obstacles, like a lion roaring out of the desert? Could my faith redeem his own lack of it?

Another punch line: “Let’s get this straight, son. There’s only one God and we don’t believe in him.” On its own, this feeling, shared by many of the Jews who turned up to synagogue and bar-mitzvahed their children, might not have prevented anything. But my father didn’t really believe in the Jewish people either. Only very recently, coming across a letter of Hannah Arendt’s to Gershom Scholem, did I find the sentence that best articulated his kind of Judaism: “I do not love the Jews, nor do I believe in them, I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.” Jewishness was our nature, our history, but not, for all this, a necessary sphere of action. Why study Torah when you can study biology or literature? Why act out the belonging that merely is and make a fetish of authenticity? Arendt did temper her seemingly cold-hearted, existential account of her Jewishness with an acknowlegement that “there is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and not made….” Arendt is right to some extent: We should be grateful for certain basic conditions of our being, but how and to whom? Where was this gratitude, then, in my childhood?

As a minimum, it seems, a family’s decision to bar mitzvah its children could have been one such expression of gratitude, regardless of actual faith. Even my thoroughly unreflective and already secular grandparents were capable of it. My father, however, clearly wished to hold me back, as if a bar mitzvah were, for him, akin to the sacrifice of Isaac. He would not deliver me up to the God he didn’t believe in unless I went willingly, head bowed, to be bound. The impossibility of the choice is self-evident: To whom should I be grateful? My father or his fathers? By siding with one, I could only betray the other. And wouldn’t my father have felt as though he were betraying me, if he surrendered me to all the institutions and practices of New York Jewish life he already felt so removed from? It was a more crucial choice than either of us had imagined.

Over the past year, while Nextbook columnist Jesse Green has been documenting the preparations leading up to his son Erez’s bar mitzvah, radio producer Emily Botein has been documenting Jesse. If you’ve followed along, you’ve heard Jesse guide Erez in learning his Torah portion (with the help of Trope Trainer software), negotiate with his partner Andy over luncheon fare, and bond with Abdul the suit salesman on the merits of dark tones over bright for an austere occasion such as this one.

Here’s the final act: the big day itself.

That was only partly true. For one thing, there are always more decisions to make, and more to discover you’ve forgotten to make. Yes, we had bought Erez’s clothes, but Andy and I had never agreed on which of the two new ties he should wear, the iridescent check or the mod swirls. (I lost the ensuing “discussion”; he wore the check.) The matter of my own outfit I had completely overlooked. And when we arrived at the synagogue an hour before the service, I found the party room—which was supposed to have been set up the previous night according to the color-coded plan and itemized lists I’d drawn—looked like a prison cafeteria, with long rectangular tables arranged in regimental banks.

I didn’t have time to freak out or start hauling furniture, so I deputized a friend to do just that, and ran downstairs, to the sanctuary, for “rehearsal.” At the time, the idea of

Erez

rehearsing a spiritual occasion seemed bizarre to me, proof that nothing spiritual would be going on that day. “When you sit on the pulpit, please don’t cross your legs,” the rabbi told us. “When I hand you the Torah…” It sounded like a pageant.

But when the service started at 10:30, my anxiety and cynicism dissolved, a sensation not unlike the creeping oblivion of the Valium-Demerol drip during a colonoscopy. Things that normally would freak you out instead look fascinating, even beautiful. Something’s probing your insides, but you don’t actually mind.

Erez, who said he was nervous, appeared anything but. And we had plenty of time to look at him because, to my surprise, he was on the pulpit the entire time, not just during his bits. He was actively involved in all parts of the service, more like an apprentice rabbi than a 13-year-old boy who frequently has to be reminded to brush his teeth. He led prayers with confidence, his Hebrew clear and loud. He looked up and out, often smiling. I was stunned. Who was this person? He was, of course, our son, but (the ceremony seemed to be saying) not only our son.

Eventually, the rabbi called me and Andy and my father to the pulpit. We sat as instructed, with our legs uncrossed, until, at the beginning of the Torah service, she nodded and we walked to our appointed places. She opened the ark behind us and took out a Torah, which she then handed to my father. He handed it to me; I to Andy; Andy to Erez. The symbolism, literally heavy-handed, was no less powerful for that, even including the little nontraditional dogleg from me to Andy. Erez received the Torah as easily as if it were a football, then handed it over to his cousin Michael, whom we had judged most likely not to drop it as we marched through the congregation.

Because our seats were in the front row, and because I had basically frozen in place there since the service began, this was the first time I got to see everyone who had come. The vagaries of availability and the limits of our budget resulted in a congregation that represented a very strange cross-section of our lives. A 19th cousin, a babysitter, a dear friend next to—who was that? They hugged and high-fived us, pushed into the aisles to be part of the moment in the way I’d seen the crowds do at State of the Union addresses, except without the moron in the middle. They seemed unambivalent in their delight. Only then did it really occur to me that the bar mitzvah ceremony is not only for the bar mitzvah family.

Erez proceeded to chant his Torah and haftarah portions as if he’d done so a million times. (Well, of course, he had; thanks, Trope Trainer!) Looking like an irrepressibly genial funeral director, he shook the hands of everyone called for an aliyah, then hugged them when they finished. The biggest hug he saved for his younger brother; Lucas got lifted three feet off the ground after reading the “sibling’s prayer”—which despite the actual words was probably something like “Please, God, don’t make this happen to me.” But even he was ecstatic.

Even he; even I. That moment was a highlight for me because in it I saw my sons pure and openhearted: the dust of cynicism and ’tween attitude, however lightly it normally lay upon them, completely blown off. For others, the highlight was Erez’s militantly anti-Bush d’var Torah: “We were, like the Israelites,” he said, “easily misled by an unreliable leader.” His call for a new Moses (“Her name might be Hillary. His name might even be Barack—or is it Baruch?”) set off a round of thunderous applause as he ended.

Jesse Green

But the most intense—dare I say spiritual?—moment came at the end of the Torah service, when the rabbi stood with Erez in front of the ark to give him her benediction. I certainly was not expecting anything meaningful; the benedictions I was used to were notable only for the extreme anesthetic quality of their clichés and the singsong whine of Received Rabbinical Sprechstimme. I knew that our rabbi wouldn’t give that kind of talk, but I couldn’t imagine what kind she would. And in fact she didn’t give any kind of talk. That is, she talked to Erez—only to him—for two, three, it might as well have been ten minutes. We could not hear what she said; she wasn’t speaking to us but to him. At first I was annoyed: Hey, I paid for this bar mitzvah, I want to hear the climactic words! But then I watched as Erez listened raptly, smiling when she placed her hands upon his head and recited the peculiar, ancient words: “May the Lord cause His countenance to shine upon you…” We in the congregation, 19th cousins no less than us, his parents, were only witnesses to this benediction, not part of it.

I had heard endlessly about the community, how part of becoming a bar mitzvah was taking your place before that august body of synagogue dues-payers and assorted hangers-on. I had never considered myself part of such a community, not for myself and certainly not as an audience for my son’s growth. (Why should I? The community wasn’t helping to pay the bills.) The ritual brilliantly put me in my place by putting Erez in his. It was, after all, his life, and to a greater and greater extent going forward, we would be mere witnesses to it. Even now, he had formed something like an adult relationship with the rabbi, on his own, not triangulated through us, and had private dealings with her.

I can’t speak for God, but many countenances were caused to shine at that moment. The voyage Erez was embarking upon would necessarily leave us onshore; we are all émigrés from our parents. At the lunch immediately following the service—a dreamlike phantasmagoria of images I can still hardly parse—my father made that point in a brief speech he delivered between the main course and dessert. “At my bar mitzvah about 68 years ago,” he said, “my father, as was our custom on those occasions, felt constrained to make some ecclesiastical remarks. In essence he said that you will soon forget the excitement, the gifts and the parties, but you will long remember”—here he paused as if to think—”And while I do remember the excitement, the gifts and the parties,” he went on, “I have totally forgotten what it was he said I would long remember.”

Erez listened dutifully, not only to my father (whose theme was that Erez, having been adopted and raised as a Jew, was a doubly chosen person) but also to Andy and me and the countless (well, 142) guests who shook his hand, hugged him, stuffed envelopes in his hand. But of all the things he will long remember the most memorable may be the thing I tried to prevent. For despite my having ruled against it as an alien intrusion into the bar mitzvah ritual, at some point he was carried aloft in a chair on a sea of people who loved him. Then Lucas was, then Andy, then I. As the klezmer duo wailed its joyful, stinging melodies, we were both above the experience and also in it. And soon enough, as the chairs tipped, below it. Even twentysomethings get tired of holding up middle-aged men.

Nothing failed to go well. The food, the flowers, the music and the room, transformed by the magic of dimmer switches and tea lights (and a hasty rearrangement of the tables), were all lovely. As we packed ourselves into the van at 3:30 that afternoon, Andy and I realized we had carried off our difficult agenda. Between the Scylla of ostentation and the Charybdis of skimpiness, we had steered a narrow course, though even so, it was not without shocking outlays of money. (Modesty is expensive.) It would become tempting later on, as Erez slowly opened those envelopes, to pay for that precision with his mounting booty.

But paying for it was tomorrow’s job. When we got home it was immediately time to turn around and prepare the house for the “boy-girl dance party” that Erez had requested instead of the originally planned stag bowling for his informal all-kid event. At 7 p.m., a parade of stunning 13-year-old girls started arriving, followed by a bunch of awkward Smurfs who were apparently the 13-year-old boys. On the so-called dancing I draw the curtain of privacy, except to say that Erez, in his Hawaiian shirt and cropped cargo pants, was not the child we knew. He was becoming someone else—a yacht’s captain?—and perhaps for this reason, Andy and I holed up in the kitchen with a few friends, heating and quickly delivering into the living room an endless supply of greasy food. We did not want to look too closely; we already knew that the boat, though still in dock, was pointing out to sea.

Andy wants to do social engineering, upending familiar groupings and generational cliques. I say that people forced into new orbits tend to have collisions. But I’m engineering, too. My picture of the room, with its tables for 10 and tables for eight, is a weather map of self-esteem. Who will feel diminished if seated with whom? Who will feel augmented? Andy tends to think: These folks all have young kids; they can talk about that. I think: Will they feel insulted if they’ve clearly been dumped at the breeder table?

So we spin the wheels again and again; the cool young adults coalesce in one spot and then go flying to the four ends of the room. Look, the actress is now at a table of orthodontists! They will be thrilled—but will she? It’s enough to make me wish we had stuck with Andy’s original plan of not assigning tables at all, a plan that was scotched when the caterer sagely told us it wasn’t hostly. Guests are nervous if they have too many choices, she said. They want to know where to go.

I know how they feel; I’m nervous, too. Once the table assignments have been made—and, oops, someone’s just cancelled—I still have to print up the seating cards, cut out the little cedar tree designs with the cedar tree hole punch I found online, then fold the damn things with a grapefruit spoon. (The word erez means “cedar” in Hebrew and Arabic.) That chore is but one on a list several pages long of things that need to be done between now and Friday, when the festivities begin with a pre-synagogue Indian dinner for out-of-towners. Each item on the list is as mind-knotting as the table placements. We have to assign the various ritual honors, like saying prayers and carrying the Torah, carefully balancing sides of the family with linguistic and physical capabilities. We have to contact guests about subway disruptions we barely understand ourselves. We have to review the rental order (where are the 16 table-number holders?) and e-mail Erez’s teachers, begging them not to assign any book reports for the following Monday. Not to mention planning clothing and haircuts for four. I am happy to say I’ve taken care of my haircut several days early, though the result is less like the George Clooney I was going for than a penitential Britney Spears.

None of this has anything to do with the real meaning of the bar mitzvah, of course; any religious issues have disappeared almost irretrievably within a fog of party planning. Indeed, the item on my checklist that keeps being moved forward each day as the rest get crossed off is the only one that speaks directly to the import of the experience: writing my speech. Relevant thoughts flit through my brain at night, but they are quickly chased off by those hostly concerns. At this rate all I will be fit to say to my son as his community watches him accept the duties (or at least the cash) of adulthood is what the chafing dish cost.

And why are we making speeches in the first place? We have eliminated all other fake rituals from our plan for the party: the candle-lighting doggerel, the open-mike roast, the pushy videography and the child-on-chair dancing. During the service itself, Erez will deliver a dvar Torah—an exegesis and interpretation of his Torah portion, Ki Tisa—that compares the Israelites’ fear-based shenanigans at Mt. Sinai to fear-based American foreign policy after 9/11. (In this analogy, Aaron stands for Bush, which seems apt enough; Aaron was a terrible public speaker.) In accordance with the rabbi’s instructions, the talk concludes with the traditional nechemta, or consolation: a hopeful application of Jewish values to the situation under discussion. Erez’s nechemta imagines a new Moses, perhaps in the form of a new president, albeit one who won’t literally break the law when he or she shows up.

Isn’t that enough of a message for the day? But no, Andy and I and my father (and even Erez’s 11-year-old brother, Lucas) each have to say our piece. It’s not a ritual; it’s a reflex. At least Lucas’s will be entertaining. In the draft I typed for him, he interprets Ki Tisa in personal terms, suggesting that if the Israelites had only hidden their golden calf under the bed when Moses got home, they might have avoided all that trouble. (“Believe me,” he wrote, “I know from experience.”) My father will no doubt invoke his own father, who spoke interminably at my bar mitzvah service, and in so doing attempt to trace for Erez the line of Jewishness to which he not only belongs but to which he is now also responsible. Andy is handling the welcome speech and, like me, has no clue what he will say.

What do you say to your son, now or ever? My mother saw herself, adapting the words of the poet James Merrill, as being condemned to talk about real things. This was her professional mantra (she was a therapist) but also her modus vivendi. She was not the type to ignore elephants in the room, but would invite them to come sit by her and unburden. And though she delighted in the mundane and frivolous, such things also needed to be addressed realistically. She would see any speech I might give at Erez’s bar mitzvah as far less important than what I said to him as he went to bed each night.

Would see! Oh, the implacable sadness of that conditional tense! For it was my mother, dead five years now, who gave me the vocabulary to talk about the love between a parent and child—and she seems to have taken it with her.

I try to think what else she would have seen if she were still alive. What would she make of Erez at 13? (His actual birthday is today, as I write this.) She would notice immediately that he is as different from me as I seemed to be from my father. He is cheerful, even-tempered, sturdy, gregarious, fidgety, thick-skinned, if anything too resilient. He says hello to everyone on the street, and remembers their names years later. He tries out his nascent Spanish on people who speak it. With good cause, he loves the way he looks.

I have nothing to teach such a child; he has more to teach me, I should think. Oh, in our normal discourse there may be things I can tell him: how to prioritize his homework, how to fold his pajamas. I can even, within the limits of my ability to analogize, give him advice as he starts to express his feelings for girls, though he’s on his own with the dance moves. What I cannot do is improve him in any larger way; where he is naturally gifted he is already unimprovable, and likewise where he is not. I have often said that he, and Lucas, came to us fully who they were or would ever be, and that’s not merely the consequence of adoption; biological children are just as willfully the product of their genes. Perhaps that’s why this whole bar mitzvah process has seemed so quixotic, highlighting as it does all the surface ways we shape our children: their clothing, their phrasing, their faith. Stand these next to the radiance of who they are without (or despite) our shaping and the whole project of parenting is revealed as less consequential than we usually dare to think.

Yet there’s no denying that many children are disastrously raised. And that some of us feel our parents to be tremendously significant, if only for having joined us in our project of becoming ourselves. I look back on how my mother chose to bend her life to mine; how, even stranger, my father did so almost blindly. Why did they do that? I couldn’t have seemed like anyone’s sure thing. (A theater major? Even worse, an English major?) The trick is not just egolessness, it’s faith. And I don’t mean in God.

As my son turns 13 I wonder what will happen to him in the knotty years that come next. It isn’t so much a question of whether he will be able to follow me as whether I will be able to follow him as he stalks all confident and godlike into the future. Unlike my grandmother, walking to America, I am a fearful person, and may not have faith in where Erez will take me. I am a calf-worshiper. But I’ve learned something from Erez’s dvar Torah, even in draft form: we must not act from such fear because we cannot live without the gods of our future. So perhaps, on Saturday, it’s not for me to tell him something profound between the main course and the cake. Or only as profound as this: I will listen to you; I will try to have faith.

A year ago, when we first began thinking seriously about the big date in March, we were certainly aware of our differing opinions about how it should be celebrated. Andy wanted a giant party and was willing to decrease the quality of what we offered in order to accommodate as many guests as possible; I wanted a smaller, nicer event. Andy wanted a disc jockey spinning rock favorites, or, better, a live band; I recoiled at the image of 60-year-olds doing the hustle and preferred either something more dignified or no music at all. We both sought to avoid the grotesquerie of some b’not mitzvah we’d seen, but Andy wanted to do so by dialing down the pretension, I by restricting spending. Even smaller, seemingly petty issues, like how Erez should dress for the occasion, turned out to be obstacles. Still, we imagined that these obstacles would dissolve on their own, like snow melting, as we moved through the list of things to decide.

Instead, they just sat there, immovable boulders, blocking any deeper consideration of the event looming closer behind them. The überproblem was the guest list. Andy’s initial survey, last March, brought forth a goodly host of more than 250 would-be celebrants. For one thing, he has a huge family, with some 18 first cousins. But it wasn’t just them; he wanted to cast a wider and deeper net of kin, so that even the grandchildren of distant great aunts were included. Of course he planned to invite his old buddies, but also his “old biddies”—friends of his mother, who had died when Erez was too young to notice. And then there were his colleagues: other guidance counselors, administrators, and support staff at the school where he worked. His mantra was a phrase I have never really understood: The more the merrier.

My own survey netted perhaps 20 potential guests. Not only do I have a much smaller family (only three first cousins, whom I rarely see) but also I was loath to invite many friends. To me, the impending milestone felt private, almost internal, and the idea of dragging my every last acquaintance and coworker to an event they would likely only attend as a duty seemed crass, little better than fishing for gifts. And what did they really know of Erez? How would their attendance promote or support his manhood, his covenant with God? Erez himself was not troubled by such concerns; he wanted to invite the entire seventh grade—some 45 kids—as if his bar mitzvah were a pep rally.

Even aside from the disproportion between my list and Andy’s, there was the problem of the absolute total, which at the end of Round One hovered near 300. Even if we stuck to a very modest menu—Andy imagined a light brunch buffet—this was going to get expensive once we added in all the nonfood extras, like waiters and linens and flowers and music and invitations and the rental of a room. Not that we had a budget. It was fruitless contemplating the allocation of funds when the underlying vision was so unsettled. But even if we could afford to take 300 guests to a ten-course dinner at Per Se, the idea of accommodating so many people, including people I barely knew and who barely knew Erez, seemed wrong to me. And so the process came to a halt before it had really begun.

But at the end of December the looming new year made us realize how far behind we were. Panicked, I reverted to type. I entered the names of all possible invitees on an Excel spreadsheet, with tinted columns marked “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” To non-listmakers, the exercise of committing ambiguity to paper can seem foolish; even I used to laugh when my mother, finding life too chaotic on occasion, would call for a pencil and paper, as if these were magic tools for straightening everything out. I may have laughed then, but I was just like her, adjusting slightly for modern equipment. Making a list, I told myself, is at least an action, and once I emailed the spreadsheet to Andy, it was a provocation, too. Let the horse-trading begin!

And yet I had little to trade; the difficult work would mostly be Andy’s. Though he agreed that we had to bring the numbers down substantially, he couldn’t see how to do it by mere pruning. Whole categories would have to go, and how to decide which ones? Happily, fate intervened. A family wedding in Florida was scheduled for the same day as the bar mitzvah, which meant that a whole cell of perhaps 30 could be invited without fear that they would actually accept. Less happily, an ailing aunt we had thought would hang on couldn’t wait any longer. Between these adjustments and some curtailment of Erez’s generosity to schoolmates (some of whom he barely knew), the number of likely “yes” guests had dropped to the low 200s. And yet that was still, I told Andy, too many. Even after dropping a category of outlier friends he had to choose between his work colleagues and his once and twice removed second cousins. His decision was that those cousins would not be removed again: They had often invited us to their simchas, how could we not invite them to ours? The colleagues, some 30 of them, were axed.

Now that we were down to a more reasonable number of likelies—approximately 160, including 40 of Erez’s friends and young cousins—we could at least begin to face the other categories of indecision. I acceded to Andy’s wish to hold the party in the synagogue’s ballroom, which had seen better days but also worse. From that choice it immediately followed that the party would be a luncheon, for what was the point of having people leave the synagogue after services at noon only to return in the evening? Not to mention that we both found bar mitzvah dinner parties absurd, with their mini-tuxes and swing bands and desperate search for novelty. A friend recently told me that he had attended one for which the stars of Lost had been engaged to make a short film in which they were joined on their island by the bar mitzvah boy himself. Conspicuous consumption had come to this, my friend said: a bar mitzvah with a plane crash theme.

Erez himself seemed to like that idea (though he’d never seen Lost); in general, he reflexively grasped for whatever seemed showiest, then accepted pretty much anything. For music, he had at first hoped for a personal appearance by Beyoncé or The Black Eyed Peas but understood when we suggested that lyrics like “My hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps” were perhaps not appropriate in synagogue.

Happily, we had by then stumbled upon a sensible compromise between Andy’s imagined rock band and my imagined string quartet. And yet the klezmer musicians we met at a friend’s Thanksgiving dinner were more than a compromise; they actually promised a kind of music that was relevant to the occasion. We’d listened with pleasure to .mp3 files on their Web site, finding the sour edge in the joy of the clarinet’s whine somehow fitting. Unfortunately, the clarinetist would cost an extra $600 on top of the $1500 for the basic duo of fiddler and accordionist. We tabled that part of the decision and let it be known throughout the family that an endowment opportunity awaited. We imagined a sign on a little chain around the minstrel’s neck: “This instrumentalist courtesy of Your Name Here.”

We economized where we could; during the first weeks of the new year I designed the invitations on my computer and printed them on my printer. This was one of the few areas where, within the limits of my software’s capabilities, I could control what was happening. Erez did not especially care that I had spent hours juggling the colors of the cardstock (gravel, poppy, chartreuse) in search of the most pleasing combination, or that I’d saved a lot of money by buying it online. But he sure liked it when he saw a dapper photo of himself peering out of the transparent envelope as if he were on a catalog cover.

Saving on invitations, however satisfying, was small potatoes, fiscally speaking. The large potatoes were obviously in the domain of the caterer. We met with Paula, who had provided wonderful food, and a measure of comfort, when we’d held shiva at our home after my mother’s death in 2001. I never thought twice about what I spent on that; no amount would have been enough to be felt above my grief. Now, however, as Paula went through the categories of spending necessary to even a buffet lunch, I was reeling. But why? Wasn’t it more appropriate to splurge on life than death?

Meanwhile, Andy’s dream of the cheapest, homiest food—blintzes and hummus and lox and bagels—was going up in a puff of chipotle-infused woodsmoke. It’s not just that Paula, quite naturally, hoped for a bigger contract; it was that she knew more than we did about parties in general, and about bar mitzvahs, specifically. “People like a lot of food,” she told us; it sounded like a warning. “I’m not saying that they necessarily eat a ton of food, but they like the look of plenty.”

I couldn’t argue the point. I understood the need for excess as a way of quelling fears of insufficiency—personal, financial, or communal. I’d often felt it myself, treating myself to an unearned luxury. But a sweater would never sink me. What was maddeningly paradoxical at this scale was that indulging the need to quell such fears made it more likely they would be realized.

So as Paula went on, I both agreed and disagreed with every suggestion. Three entrees, minimum, and, of course, a separate buffet for the kids. Keeping all that running smoothly, she said, would require a waitstaff of 12. (Was each guest to be spoon-fed?) As for dessert, she recommended a wonderful baker who specialized in multi-tier “celebration” cakes based on the event’s theme. But how would she interpret our theme of anxiety and uncertainty? A devil’s food Xanax?

Paula must have noticed our eyes swiveling inward; she insisted she would make the event work at whatever spending level we specified. We’d just take a little out here, pinch a little there, and all would be fine.

Which brought us naturally to the question of what Erez would wear. Andy wanted the name-brand comfort of a Brooks Brothers suit, though it would cost $500, a sum I found unconscionable for an article of clothing that might last two months if we were lucky. I wondered if a hand-me-down might do, or khakis from the Gap paired with a Salvation Army blazer. It was strange being the stingy one when I’m used to being snooty; I even encouraged Andy’s perusal of bargain-basement websites catering to odd-sized men. A “major label” suit (it looked to be a Perry Mellis) went for $109 in what we thought was Erez’s size, but even the phone representative warned us not to economize so much.

Though we discussed the other possibilities, Erez himself was clear that he wanted to wear what he’d seen boys wear at other b’nai mitzvah—a proper suit—and so, on the day after Christmas, we found ourselves at Syms, a discount clothier with a branch near Wall Street, where brokers-in-training and law firm associates buy the off-the-rack, off-price ensembles they make do with until their partnerships come in. Erez made a beeline for flashy pin-stripe numbers that suggested Nathan Detroit, but was quickly put right by our salesman, Abdul. Abdul was part black and part Arab but knew all there was to know about Jewish celebrations. “Stay with the black, blue, or grey,” he said. “Dull, dark, dismal colors are for every purpose.”

Abdul also upped Erez from a size 38 to a size 40 when the 38 he was trying on left little room “in the caboose.”

“He can’t be a size 40,” I complained. “I’m a size 40.”

But when Erez emerged from the dressing room in a size 40 Ungaro suit, it was clear that Abdul was right. Andy and I—and Erez, too, looking at himself in the kaleidoscope of mirrors—fell silent in admiration. For us, it was a “Sunrise, Sunset” moment. Wasn’t it just yesterday we were snapping him into a striped Gap onesie? And now he looked like a banker; indeed, the color of the suit was banker blue.

Myself the son of a banker, I found the moment both terrifying and consoling. For the first time in the process I had a vision, however brief, of my son not just as a mannequin to hang adult clothes on but as a man. More than that, I saw him, for a moment, as a man in the line of men in my family, stretching back in their blue suits at least to my grandfather and forward for who knew how long. The consoling part was realizing that no matter how far I had strayed from that line, Erez would pull me back into it; the terrifying part was exactly the same realization. Was it possible that all the anxiety and procrastination of the process had been precisely to prevent this moment: the moment in which we would be put in our place?

In any case, we bought it—and two shirts and two ties, all for less than $250. As soon as I got back to my office I had Excel calculate how much Syms had saved us. Enough, our guests will be happy to know, to pay for salmon. Or at least salmon-colored napkins.

“I gotta tell you, Rabbi, when you’re a geek, it’s the loneliest thing in the world,” sings Evan, the teenage protagonist of composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown’s new musical, 13. Transplanted from New York City to Indiana in the wake of his parents’ divorce, 13-year-old Evan is anxious to establish a new identity. He’s the only Jew in school, and as far as he’s concerned, the most important detail of his approaching bar mitzvah is whether the popular kids will attend his party.

For the 36-year-old Brown, who created the musical with children’s book author Dan Elish, the themes of 13—the adolescent struggle for self-definition and the competing desire for popularity—were all too easy to recall. “The sense of feeling dislocated, the sense of feeling like I don’t belong…that turns out to be very close and very real,” Brown said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where 13 is playing at the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum. “And not just from when I was 13—my sense of being dissociated from whatever the larger community is, the ‘popular kids,’ turns out to be very close to what I feel a lot of my life.”

If there are any “popular kids” in the musical theater world, it seems like Brown ought to be one of them. Hailed as a musical theater wunderkind, he won his first Tony, for the Broadway musical Parade, while still in his twenties. With his poppy yet sophisticated music and smart, conversational lyrics, he was one of a handful of composers considered to be heirs to Stephen Sondheim. But in 2003, after a string of his productions succumbed to chilly reviews and quick closings, Brown left New York determined to give up writing for the theater. 13 marks his return to the stage, his first full-length musical in five years.

13 did not start out as an autobiographical project for Brown, who grew up in Rockland County, New York—where Jews are far from exotic—with parents who never divorced. He recalls in his program notes that he skipped ahead a grade when he was ten, “and the social fallout from that was absolutely toxic.” After a few years studying at Eastman School of Music, he left without his degree for New York City, where he performed in piano bars, arranged other composers’ work, and established himself as an up-and-coming composer at a time when musical theater was particularly hungry for new voices. He also developed a reputation for egotism and arrogance among theater insiders, perhaps fueled by his rapid professional rise.

In 1995, an off-Broadway revue of Brown’s work, Songs for a New World—a loosely constructed sequence of ballads, comedy songs and rousing gospel numbers—brought him to the attention of legendary Broadway producer and director Hal Prince, whose daughter, Daisy, had directed the show. Prince was developing a musical for Lincoln Center about the 1913 trial and lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta. Longtime collaborator Stephen Sondheim had been slated to compose the score, but when Sondheim changed his mind, Prince chose the 25-year-old Brown as his replacement—the professional equivalent of skipping a grade.

Brown’s score for Parade is sophisticated and tuneful, drawing on traditional American song forms and featuring his signature piano-driven arrangements. Both lyrics and music establish Leo’s alienation by playing up his Jewish identity: “God—all the noise, and on Yontiff yet,” he grumbles when his work is interrupted by the Confederate Memorial Day parade that gives the show its name. At the musical’s conclusion, noose around his neck, Frank sings a mournful a cappella Shema. “Even popular song of the 20s was very much Jewish/vaudeville-oriented,” Brown points out, explaining why the Jewish content in Parade came easily for him. “Trying to find a sound that was authentically Southern was the harder task.”

Brent Carver (foreground) in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Parade. (Photo: Joan Marcus).

The show had a promising pedigree. Its book was by Alfred Uhry, making Parade the third, after the non-musicals Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo, in his loose trilogy of shows about Atlanta Jews. But the expensive, ambitious “book musicals” (such as Follies, Sweeney Todd, and Evita) Prince was famous for bringing to Broadway were a dying breed by the time Parade opened in 1998. With a large, pricey production and a less-than-cheerful premise, Parade needed serious critical and popular support to survive. The major reviewers were complimentary but unenthusiastic; many complained that the show was too preachy, and the central character of Leo too slow to come alive. Parade‘s handful of awards—including the Tony recognizing Brown’s richly dramatic score—came months after its 84th and final performance.

Brown’s follow-up project, The Last Five Years, an intricately constructed, almost entirely sung-through portrait of a failed marriage, premiered in New York in 2002. With a two-person cast, a contemporary setting and sound, and an intimate off-Broadway production, this solo effort was different from Parade in every way. Cathy and Jamie, the protagonists, tell their stories in opposite directions; Jamie journeys from first date to divorce, while Cathy follows a reverse chronology. During the final number, while Jamie lists his reasons for ending the marriage, Cathy reflects hopefully on their first date. The Last Five Years was inspired by Brown’s own divorce and Jamie, a suburban New York Jew who finds professional and artistic success in his early 20s, is plainly a rough self-portrait of the artist. Originally Jamie is thrilled to have found a “shiksa goddess” in Cathy, but as time passes, the couple’s differences drive them apart. “Don’t we get to be happy, Cathy?” Jamie asks. “Don’t we get to relax / Without some new tsuris / To push me yet further from you?”

Critical response to The Last Five Years was again respectful but lukewarm. Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised Brown’s “sparkling facility as a composer,” but had trouble cozying up to the characters; other critics found the show dull. Brown’s ex-wife, meanwhile, felt the project was too inspired by real events, and threatened to sue to prevent its performance. The show ran for only two months.

In 2003 Brown composed a few songs for the widely ridiculed Broadway flop Urban Cowboy, for which he also served as musical director and orchestrator. Brown had no illusions about the overall quality of the show—”One of the main reasons I signed on to Urban Cowboy, The Musical was the opportunity to work with Jenn Colella,” he writes on his website, before adding gleefully, “(The other main reason was the money.)” After that show closed, with no awards and few laments, Brown left New York and announced that he would no longer write for the theater. “I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say in this form anymore,” he recalls in his program notes for 13. “And I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it.”

Jason Robert Brown at the piano. (Courtesy of Center Theatre Group)

Brown headed off to Europe for nearly a year, and on his return resettled in Southern California. He worked on an assortment of musical projects—from composing industrial shows for State Farm Insurance Company, to recording a solo album (Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes) to creating the choral composition “Chanukah Suite,” a Broadway-style setting of traditional holiday songs.

Meanwhile, his fan base continued to grow. Musical-theater enthusiasts cherished the original cast recordings of Songs for a New World, Parade, and The Last Five Years, finding, in close study of the scores, emotional depth and insight. The shows also found new life and new audiences in regional productions around the country, and individual songs began popping up in cabarets.

Brown was pulled back to the theater by librettist Elish, who approached him with the idea for 13. “There is a huge demographic of kids that age who love musicals,” Brown says, “I wanted to create something that they could feel like they owned.”

Since its January 7 opening in L.A., 13 has met with little resistance from critics, an unusual experience for Brown. A few have been disappointed by its lightweight approach—Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times compared it to an “after-school special” and dismissed Brown’s music as “bubblegum rock.” But many reviewers have embraced and endorsed the show (“13 is sheer bliss,” Variety gushed), and performances have been selling out. The show runs through February 18; its life thereafter is still up in the air, but Brown hopes it will eventually be recorded, and perhaps even bring him back to the New York stage. Still, he no longer views theater, or his role in it, with the same intensity he once did: “I’m not sure that I can ever just do theater writing,” he says. “Maybe this show will change it and maybe it won’t, but I’ve always felt that my relationship to the community was very tenuous—that I wasn’t one of the ‘in crowd.’ You know, I keep playing that story throughout my life.”

I have also noticed, while folding the laundry in our all-male household, that I can no longer tell whose underwear is whose, except by secondary markers like the logo and the characteristic pattern of holes. The T-shirt with the Big Dipper on the back: that’s mine. A nebula at the neckline means Erez. Socks are anyone’s guess.

And similarly, without getting into the mortifying details, our weights are converging. At my annual physical in October, my doctor made a deal with me: if I’d shed some pounds by the time I returned to her office in six weeks, she would not perform a spontaneous, involuntary orchiectomy. So I did what any sensible person would do: I made a graph in Excel. I find it so pleasing to watch the “actual weight” line drift down toward that nice ectomorph plateau, even if the data points aren’t so much actual as possible.

Nevertheless, through increased exercise and a careful monitoring of caloric intake (sadly, I learned that chocolate-chip scones are not dietetic) I did start to lose weight. Meanwhile, Erez, using very similar techniques (basketball; staring at his food) was starting to look like the kind of beefy, big-shouldered jock who scared the daylights out of me when I was his age. Oddly, his doctor didn’t seem to mind.

All this shape-shifting has made it hard for us to decide about clothes for Erez’s bar mitzvah, in March. Not only are his weight and shoe size changing so fast that it seems pointless to buy anything until the morning of the event, but we are also unsure what kind of clothes to buy. Ours is an informal temple, but even if it weren’t I am leery of buying a suit for a 13-year-old. Perhaps it’s because of my own history with adolescent haberdashery. Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, I begged my parents to take me to a store called Krass Brothers for my bar mitzvah outfit; every week in its ad in the Jewish Exponent, Krass Brothers published a photo of a lucky boy modeling his wide-lapelled suit, which came with an extra pair of pants, free!

But my mother would have nothing to do with a store named Krass. Instead, she took me to a Main Line institution called Jacob Reed’s Sons, where I was immediately directed to the Husky department, as if I were part of a sledding expedition. There, a salesman suggested that I might do better with a jacket and slacks than a regular suit. Did he actually say “I don’t think anyone makes suits in those proportions”?

In any case, I ended up with a shocking pair of lozenge-patterned bell-bottoms and a navy blue blazer. And a gratuitous (though not unpleasant) little goose from the tailor.

I thought about that tailor, muttering with pins in his mouth as he worked feverishly to make the goods fit a misshapen reality, when I read the recent decision concerning the ordination of gay rabbis and the blessing of gay unions in the Conservative movement. Decisions, really: The 25 rabbis on the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards approved three grossly clashing responsa. Two affirmed the status quo, one baldly and one with the bizarre concession that homosexuals who seek to be ordained or married might do so after reparative therapy that made them ungay. Good idea, seeing how well it’s worked for the evangelical Christians.

But the third of the approved responsa—in some ways the best of those that passed—is the real monstrosity. This one allows for gay rabbis and gay unions as long as those involved do not “practice sodomy.” Apparently lesbians can claim their pulpits immediately because this euphemism only refers to men; the verse of Leviticus on which the homosexual proscriptions are rather tenuously based ignores women altogether except as the designated objects of male lust: “Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman.”

To my mind, this passage only prohibits such activities as snoring too loud and watching football in bed, but generations of hair-splitters and demagogues have created an exegetical industry in merging its cryptic implications with the Anglo-Saxon legal notion of sodomy, itself now largely abandoned as unworkable. For myself, following Potter Stewart, I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I feel it. Some gay Orthodox narrowly and hopefully define it as meaning only anal sex, thus granting absolution to all their other gay activities. Others, looking back to the Biblical story of Sodom itself, interpret the word as meaning rape. But the only definition that matters is that of the homophobes who enshrine it as policy. To them, it’s whatever gay men do.

In any case, though committee members told The New York Times that this little no-sodomy caveat will, in practice, “never be policed” (I’d like to see that subcommittee at work), such an expectation only underlines the shocking hypocrisy of a religious ruling that welcomes people who love each other to all the blessings of union except the blessing that, in most cases, brought them together in the first place. I can see the rabbis now, consulting their notes while instructing pairs of grooms, standing under hand-decoupaged chuppas, that they may now kiss—but just on the forehead please. A little to the left. No! Not there!

To the extent that this ruling debases the holiness of physical love between adults, I don’t blame the four members of the committee who resigned in protest, even though they favored upholding the ban, not reversing it. At least they made sense. But the practical result at Conservative seminaries and synagogues—like the one my father still belongs to—will be a choice among three internally and externally contradictory instructions. This is a compromise without a conscience: Don’t Ask, Don’t Kvell.

Though Erez’s bar mitzvah will take place in a Reform temple, where such hateful niggling is passé, I bring my Conservative heart with me no matter how far I stray from Conservative practice. And it’s not just me. Andy also has a nostalgia streak so wide you might as well call it his personality. Everything that has become so burdensome about planning what is meant to be a joyous event is the result of memory: the kind we want to respect, the kind we want to revise. There’s also the burden of forethought. Who does not resent a little, even as he looks on with awe and pride, his son’s overtaking him?

It’s an illusion to think that any of these issues can be resolved with a Brooks Brothers outfit—or, for that matter, with the right flowers, the most apt menu, the least annoying music. (And no, stop bothering me, we haven’t reached decisions on any of those yet; we haven’t even agreed on the guest list.)

However dispiriting they may prove in endorsing basic rights, contradictory options are useful in choosing clothes. At the moment, it looks like Erez will be wearing a mix-and-match ensemble: a simple blue blazer and classic Joe Boxer sweatpants. As for me, I’ve promised myself—if I reach my goal weight by mid-February—a new bar mitzvah suit. And if enjoying the food at the feast means I can’t wear it for long, the money won’t have been wasted. It will fit Erez soon enough.

Andy and I have not been doing much compromising in either sense. Almost six months into our bar mitzvah year, by which I of course mean Erez’s, we are still mostly at a stalemate as to how we will celebrate the occasion come March. We have eliminated some options, but have not replaced them with others we both like. Out of kindness to one another, we have not much bruited our conflicting expectations, and yet that has not transformed them into agreements. So the basic questions have barely begun to be resolved: What kind of party or parties will there be? Where should those events be held? Should there be music, and if so what kind? How many people can we each invite? How much money can we afford to spend? As always, it’s that last one forcing our hand; already our synagogue is asking for a $1,000 deposit to reserve its party room. Do we want to use it? Now that the ceiling has stopped leaking and the old chandelier has been reinstalled in place of a bare 9000-watt bulb, Andy thinks we do.

What has become clear is that we come to our incompatible hopes from contradictory experiences. Andy has nothing but unhappy memories of his own bar mitzvah: it was something done to him, without his consultation. Mine was everything I wanted it to be: a public display not of my faith but of my abilities and taste. Andy wants to repair the past. I don’t need to; I just don’t want to compete with it.

Neither motive should be relevant to an event supposedly about our son, let alone a supposedly spiritual event. But the modern American bar mitzvah is mostly an exercise in managed hypocrisy. Only a very few Jewish 13-year-olds seem to take their religion seriously as ethical inquiry and supernatural instruction—how could they, when their secularized families deal with Judaism, if at all, as a collection of confusing parables and high-cholesterol recipes? Rabbis like ours work heroically to crank up the machinery of “meaningful” preparation, complete with Torah study and moral treasure hunts. (Visit the infirm? Check.) But they wouldn’t have to if the process were religiously meaningful already, instead of a treceañera with tallises.

But there are other kinds of values beside religious ones that can be addressed, even in apparently religious ceremonies. Many people, Andy among them, seem to play a substitution game: Replace “God” in your mind with “community” and everything’s all right. (What self-respecting secular humanist wouldn’t kvell as a boy took on the yoke of his covenant with “community”?) My own accommodation is perhaps even more abstract: Meaning can be derived from the ways you are forced to confront its absence. My teacher in this was my mother, who grew up in the famous Atheist-Communist branch of Judaism but became more observant, at least in the sense of watchful, after marrying my Conservadox father. She found a way to join a tradition that was not her own while remaining, however contradictorily, herself. She studied Talmud and, in the back of the freezer where my father never ventured, kept a stash of treyf.

Perhaps it is the very longevity of Judaism that has allowed—or forced—it to include in its tradition the means of unmaking and remaking itself. The Talmud, with its Byzantine struggles for interpretive supremacy, is as likely to encourage subversion as faith, or maybe subversion within faith. At least it did for my mother. I remember her working on a passage in which the rabbis argue over how to determine the exact moment of sundown so that Sabbath could begin. The answer—”when blue cannot be told from green”—was shockingly lovely, but living as we do in brightly lit cities and not observing Sabbath anyway, what could such an argument possibly teach us now?

“How to argue,” my mother said.

Heresy to believers, of course: the same heresy that Joan of Arc (as voiced by Shaw) expressed in her testimony before the Inquisition. (“What other judgment can I judge by but my own?”) The Talmud does not permit lay interpretation. But like parents who smoke and advocate nonsmoking, that prohibition often becomes a temptation, or even a prescription. And once the arguments become more impressive than the issues being argued, why would a thinking person relinquish her judgment in favor of someone else’s?

In any case, after her wedding, at which she felt like a hired prop in a production staged by her in-laws, my mother vowed never again to let others’ judgments dictate the rituals of her life. As her children were bar mitzvahed and confirmed and married, she moved progressively further away from prescribed formulas toward more personally meaningful expressions. It was, to her, a form of tikkun olam—repairing the world. Though usually construed as a form of faith-based community service, she argued that it could just as well be interior and small, a way of tailoring off-the-rack observance so it fit better. Appalling some suburban matrons, she handwrote the invitations to my bar mitzvah on simple stationery, not requesting the engraved “honour” of anyone’s presence but merely asking friends to “join us.” For wedding gifts she usually gave new couples matched copies of The Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex. The evening before my own brother’s wedding, she broke into the locked sanctuary to rearrange the chairs and fine-tune the chuppa; what were some petty administrator’s “rules” to the mother of the groom? Leaving 20 minutes later, we (for I was with her) set off a shrieking alarm. Violators of the temple! We hightailed it home.

No one found out about our intrusion, but the baton of self-determination—some might call it selfishness—had been passed. The next day, outside the sanctuary, as my brother nervously fiddled with his new suit, I clipped on my highly unorthodox yarmulke: a side-panel from a small round evening bag that my grandmother had left incomplete on her dressing table when she died. Wearing it was not meant as a provocation but as a modest rebellion against the institution of marriage, from which I was restricted, and perhaps also against the religion that enforced the restriction. Mostly, though, I liked the way it looked, especially compared to the synagogue-issued puffy white skullcaps that work well enough on bald men but give anyone with hair that snow-capped mountaintop look. The standard embroidered dome—blue velour, with silver stars of David—is only an improvement if you’ve always wanted to resemble a pinhead.

Mine was perfectly flat. In fact, for years I’d used it as a coaster. The jet beading was hardly noticeable if you weren’t staring right at it, which, at that moment, the rabbi was.

“You can’t wear that!” he exclaimed.

Oh yes I could.

But replacing one god with another, even with the god of self, has its consequences, as we would learn.

At the beginning of this summer, the rabbi (not the no-gay-yarmulkes rabbi, but the rabbi at our Reform temple in Brooklyn) asked Erez to select the dozen or so verses of his torah portion, Ki Tissa, that he would like to learn to chant. Without thinking, he chose the first 12, which even the greatest scholars of antiquity could not make interesting. But upon reading the whole portion in English, and upon our reading it too, he switched to a selection beginning with Exodus 32. That’s when the Israelites, wondering what happened to Moses up there on Mt. Sinai, make the golden calf and dance around it—a celebration that believers read as a treasonous riot but that seems to secular sensibilities as innocuous as a bar mitzvah hora.

Thus begins what must be one of the strangest treatments of divine power and human free will ever committed to print. The Lord, seeing that the Israelites are what he calls “a stiffnecked people”—they will not accept the burden of His yoke—tells Moses to get out of His way so that He may destroy them. Moses reasons with the Lord, essentially arguing that it wouldn’t look good to the goyim. This calms the Lord down, but soon enough Moses himself is enraged by the sight of his people adoring their shiny ruminant and he destroys the Ten Commandments. (Less famously, he grinds the golden calf into a powder and makes everyone drink it as punishment, or fortification, like cod liver oil.) Then he orders the Levites—the priestly and most loyal clan—to do what he’d argued God out of: to “go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay brother, neighbor, and kin.” Three thousand die that day.

While it takes a lot of exegetical ingenuity to make this passage palatable to modern sensibilities, it takes absolutely none to make it familiar. A classic Jewish case of overindulgence followed by overreaction, it exemplifies the dangers of teaching children (or subjects) that they can fashion a form of power from their own intelligence, for they will use it, and not necessarily intelligently. Though people may aspire to be godlike in goodness, given half a chance they will match Him in other traits as well, with the clerical class more than happy to assist and provide the rationalizations.

If we are a stiffnecked people—the word is a fairly literal translation of the Hebrew phrase k’sheh oref—we have cause. We always have cause. Luckily for my mother, she was still flexible and unformed enough at 20 that she and my father could in most ways grow together. But aside from the fact that we are both men, Andy and I were planted too far apart and too long ago to make that process happen naturally; when Erez chants Ki Tissa in March, Andy will be 57 and I 48. If we each believe that compromise is nothing more than a way of achieving fairness through mutual dissatisfaction, we are too old to rethink our positions. We are stiffnecked. How could we not be? The head, though it weighs just 12 pounds or so, is an enormous burden, and like the ears only gets bigger with age.

Still we try. One day as summer ended, we spent two hours behind closed doors trying to work through some of the issues. It was a good talk, if sometimes a loud one, and yet once again we got nowhere. The only firm, positive decision either of us made about the bar mitzvah was that I would wear my jet bead yarmulke.

But progress was being made in the next room. The boys don’t like it when we “have discussions,” so they busied themselves with the old Windows laptop I had recently found: a slow and heavy vestige of my PC days, long forgotten in a cabinet but able to run Trope Trainer without defiling the MacHoly of Holies. The colors highlighting “trope groups” were garish, and the synthesized voice produced by selecting the “child” setting should probably have been labeled “chipmunk.” But by the time Andy and I emerged from our fruitless discussion, Erez had learned the first verse of Ki Tissa—the one in which everyone wonders what’s taking so long on the mountain.

Since we began studying bar mitzvahs more closely in anticipation of our son Erez’s, next March, we have seen many variants on what I call the Family Flambé. In its classic incarnation, the rite is introduced when the emcee welcomes the adolescent honoree to the dais at the beginning of the luncheon or dinner. The cake, often shaped like a Torah, is then paraded from the kitchen for a preview, with much the same pomp that accompanies a real Torah when it’s brought from the ark. The cake, however, is studded with tapers—at least 13, and as many as two dozen. Each, we soon learn, is dedicated to a friend or family member, or sometimes an entire nuclear unit, whom the bar mitzvah eulogizes with a fitting (though metrically unorthodox) piece of doggerel. “You’re always there when I need to relax / Please come up, Uncle Milt, Aunt Elaine, cousins Becca and Max.” After Becca and Max fight over the propane match and light their candle, the cycle starts again with Nana Sylvia; by the time all the candles are lit, everyone in the room has been called to the buttercream Torah—and voila, when they return to their seats the salad has been placed.

But if these faux aliyot make a peculiar ritual, they pale in comparison to the supposedly real ones. The signal event of the bar mitzvah ceremony, religiously at least, is the 13-year-old’s first public reading from the Torah. In many congregations, in addition to his portion of this ancient text, the bar mitzvah also reads a haftarah portion—a related selection from a slightly less ancient text that is meant to bear a revealing connection to the biblical story under consideration. As part of his first assignment in preparation for his bar mitzvah, Erez was recently asked by our rabbi to read both his Torah and haftarah portions, in English, and see if he could find such a connection. He couldn’t, unless it was the frequent use of the word “the” in each. Ki Tisa, the Torah portion, concerned, among other things, Moses’s destruction of the Ten Commandments when he found the Israelites cavorting with the Golden Calf. In the haftarah, taken from the first book of Kings, the prophet Elijah instructs the followers of Baal to sacrifice a bull. Was livestock the connection? Possibly, though it was hard to tell because, in literary style, the stories were about as related as The Iliad and Valley of the Dolls.

If intertextual connections were not forthcoming, intergenerational ones certainly were. Watching Erez’s eyes glaze over just trying to understand the English, Andy and I flashed back to our own bar mitzvah ordeals, and realized how much work lay ahead. For Erez would not be reciting lines he more or less understood; this was not like his Drama class’s recent presentation of My Most Embarrassing Moment, in which the words made sense and admitted of paraphrase. No, his bar mitzvah readings are supposed to be perfect despite being in Hebrew, which is mostly gibberish to an American child not raised in a yeshiva. And yet the texts can barely be read, either, because as presented in an actual Torah scroll they are virtually in code. They contain neither vowels (in Hebrew, a semaphore of dots) nor punctuation nor diacritical marks that distinguish, say, the letter that sounds like an s from the one that sounds like a sh. Imagine being asked to sing a song presented to you, in thickly handwritten strokes, as MR HD LTL LM. Or as ML LTL DH RM—because Hebrew, of course, reads from right to left. Would you grasp that Mary had a little lamb? Or would you surmise, just as reasonably by Hebraic rules, that Morey hid a lethal loom?

And even if you got the words right, would you sing them properly? No modern notion of song prepares you for the difficulty of chanting Torah. Words are not set into long-line melodies consisting of regular-length phrases, as in a proper Rodgers and Hammerstein number; instead, every word, and often every syllable of a word, gets its own little tune of three to ten notes, which must be strung together just so. These melodic cells are commonly called trope, and there are about 27 of them, indicated by a mark the size of a sesame seed—also, sadistically, not printed in the scroll.

And so, except for the rare 13-year-old who is already a cryptographer, a gifted musician, and a scholar of ancient Hebrew, a great deal of rote memorization is involved. Putting aside the question of meaning, which I find a lot to put aside, the bar mitzvah Torah reading is a totally abstract and intimidating chore. Teaching a son how to do it, or more likely watching someone else teach him, is for many fathers an act of nostalgia and also revenge, as perhaps circumcision was some years earlier in the process. The Torah does not get any less arcane, or difficult to utter correctly, as each generation goes by.

Erez is fairly musical and a quick study at languages. But he’s no Alan Turing, and the enigma of Biblical cantillation seemed likely to dwarf such sixth grade challenges as Latin and viola. To ease the process, our rabbi suggested that parents of the coming year’s crop of b’nai mitzvah consider purchasing a computer program called Trope Trainer, which could be customized for each student’s Torah and haftarah portion, plus the relevant blessings and even our synagogue’s preferred pronunciations. The program, manufactured by a company called Kinnor, which means “harp” in Hebrew, would not only help our kids learn their material but also, because it might loosely be classified as a computer game, keep them interested in doing so. With its technical bells and whistles—its variable pace and pitch, its cheerful color-coding and robotic sound snippets—Trope Trainer might even make the dreaded process fun. Well, if not fun, then at least less onerous than it was when supervised by harried adults. A motto on Kinnor’s website seemed to allude to this tension: “The software with infinite patience.”

Lacking infinite patience, and sensing a bargain at just $59.95—not to mention a rabbinical discount of 20 percent—I immediately set out to buy the program. But there was one problem. It only runs on Windows.

When we met, Andy and I worried about the stresses of a mixed marriage. I had been using Windows since the beginning of personal computing; he was an early adopter of Mac. Andy was an early adopter in another sense, too: he’d adopted Erez and his younger brother, Lucas, nearly at birth. I adopted them later—a story I’ve told at length elsewhere.

As with all mixed marriages, the big question was: How would we raise the children? While they were toddlers the matter could be tabled. But as school came along, and with it, amazingly soon, assignments involving web searches and typed papers, we realized we had to face the disparity of our customs and beliefs. There were arguments to be made for both systems. Windows was more universally applicable, and had a pleasing Old Testament volatility. Its crashes came like thunderous punishments. Mac was all promises of love and peace. If there were crashes at all, there were pretty resurrections. But it was really because it made our electronic communications simpler that I converted. It was, in a family, simpler to be on the same platform.

This was, in some ways, a version of the religious conflict that had simmered beneath the surface of our relationship from the beginning. While Andy and I are both atheist Jews, we are different kinds of atheist Jews. (The subdivisions of faith within atheism far outnumber those among believers.) Andy, never having been very observant, is content to accept the contradiction implicit in his enjoyment of whatever observance fits into his schedule. I, having been raised more religiously, find that approach not just uncomfortable but untenable: a woolen shirt I can only wear for a few seconds before feeling the need to tear it off. Nevertheless, when we began to discuss how the boys would be raised—in effect, which nonfaith we would try to inculcate—I once again converted. Atheism certainly suited me; but how could I know what would suit them? We often said that a little religion now would be a good inoculation against too much later: a hair of the dogma that bit you.

But I did not think clearly enough about what a little religion leads to before it gets to faithlessness. It first leads to faith. And soon enough a bar mitzvah.

And so, as the Trope Trainer sat useless in its jewel box, here we were trying to figure out what Elijah and the bull had to do with Moses and the Golden Calf or, indeed, with anything. Then I read a line I had somehow missed the first time: “Elijah approached all the people and said, ‘How long will you keep hopping between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; and if Baal, follow him!’ ” Whereupon he sacrifices the bull in a blaze of fire to prove his God’s supremacy, thus bringing the idolaters back to their faith. (Though that’s not, unfortunately, the end of the story.) As Elijah might have put it were he a bar mitzvah today, “You’re always there to help me when I fall / please join me at the altar, ye followers of Baal.”

So that was the connection: Elijah, like Moses, wanted people to decide once and for all who they would be. Belief, it seemed, had always been a problem of platforms, the most difficult kind of knot to untangle because it is less about content than habit.

Our computing problem was more easily solved. Sid, a customer representative at Kinnor, suggested I purchase Virtual Windows—a $200 program that allows your Mac computer to pretend it runs in the dominant faith, much as the crypto-Jews of Inquisition-era Spain, in their outward lives, appeared to embrace Catholicism. Sid said that Trope Trainer would work well enough in this neither-fish-nor-fowl environment, though it might seem a bit poky and would use up a huge amount of our computer’s resources in making its constant internal translations and compromises.

I knew what he meant.

Andy left the envelope, with the warning “Brace Yourself” scrawled next to our address, sandwiched between the meatball hero and the wilting salad in my lunch bag. Inside, a form letter from the temple treasurer outlined the fees associated with our son’s bar mitzvah, which had not yet been scheduled, nor indeed agreed upon, for Erez was not yet 12 when the letter came in February and we, his parents, were not yet clear about what—if anything—the ceremony should be. Actually, “not yet clear” is putting it too mildly. We were at loggerheads.

Unaware of our conflict, and hoping that the letter would assist us “in planning for the upcoming simcha,” the treasurer enumerated some of the financial responsibilities we would be taking on if Erez became a son of the commandment (the usual translation of bar mitzvah) during fiscal year 2006-2007. Including private lessons with the rabbi, additional Hebrew school training and the “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Hospitality Package” consisting of kiddush for the congregation and flowers for the bimah, the total came to $1,500. It wasn’t the figure, though, that Andy had felt I might want to brace myself for; $1,500 is not especially high. At the synagogue where I grew up and became a bar mitzvah in suburban Philadelphia, the going rate for manhood is something like $2,000.

But the synagogue fee was merely an hors d’oeuvre. It did not include what has in many cases replaced the rite itself as the main course of the “simcha”: the party. We have attended bar mitzvah celebrations that must have cost $20,000, and heard of some much fancier. We have looked in awe upon the elaborate catering, the deafening entertainment, the photo booths and dance motivators and chopped-liver sculptures of the boy and his family. I almost said the bride and his family; indeed, sometime during the 34 years since I was called to the Torah (and accepted Cross pen-and-pencil sets and Israel Bonds at a self-consciously dignified dairy luncheon with peonies), bar mitzvahs have come to entail the kind of ostentation that used to be reserved for sweet sixteens or, before that, weddings. It seems that the age at which a person merits such Lucullan excess has plummeted in inverse proportion as the age at which anyone might possibly be considered mature has risen. Soon there will be billion-dollar brises, and no adults to engender them.

Even if we no longer expect a 13-year-old to shoulder the adult responsibilities associated with the original ritual—indeed, if we barely expect him to brush his teeth unreminded, let alone end his schooling or understand his relationship to God—he is apparently old enough to prompt a yearlong, ruinously expensive trauma. At first, when Erez’s bar mitzvah was still hypothetical, it seemed easy to avoid the problem by focusing on what we wouldn’t do instead of what we would. We knew, for instance, that we would not be offering our son and his friends the opportunity to enjoy the entertainment offered at one Florida bat mitzvah we’d heard about: a Plexiglas booth equipped with high-power fans blowing paper money. (Guests were invited to spend a minute inside, ignoring the uncomfortable imagery while grabbing as much cash as they could.) If anything, it would be us in the booth, with the fans not blowing but sucking.

But the money was just a convenient cover story for our anxiety. After all, we willingly spend, even overspend, on a good coat, a new roof, piano lessons. And our Brooklyn synagogue, having fallen on hard times since Andy himself became a bar mitzvah there in 1963, is not the kind of place that encourages ostentation. Sabbath dinners, no less than services, are mostly potluck. That we were first contacted about Erez’s bar mitzvah when he was already almost 12 suggests how few children were in the pipeline; at larger congregations, families reserve dates several years in advance, and often compete for (or end up sharing) the most desirable weekends. In short, Union Temple—informal and Reform and egalitarian enough to welcome atheist gay dads like us—is not a wealthy, starchy Goodbye, Columbus country club. Until it recently managed to sell its parking lot to a condo developer, it was even unclear whether the temple could afford to maintain its 77-year-old infrastructure; floods from the top-floor pool, leased to a health club, had a nasty habit of inundating the sanctuary and derailing what little lavishness the occasional bar mitzvah might muster.

No, the onslaught for which we needed to brace ourselves would be existential. How were we to make sense of the bar mitzvah ceremony today—not just generically, but for us, for our son? What were we meant to be marking and celebrating? And whose maturity was being tested in the process? This last was not an idle question. Shortly before the World Trade Center was destroyed, a friend attended a formal bar mitzvah party at Windows on the World: multiple bands, a rock-climbing wall, black tie all around, even for kids. Toward the end of the evening, a procession of waiters bore a giant sheet cake, blazing with candles, into the darkened room. After the newly minted man made his wish and the lights were restored, everyone could read what his parents had chosen to say to their son in the buttercream icing: “Don’t ask us for anything ever again, ever.” Which seemed to me to be a misdelivered message.

As our own bar mitzvah year began, I thought a lot about that cake. What were we asking of ourselves, and of Erez? Perhaps more than other couples, Andy and I came to these questions with dramatically contrasting experiences and expectations. Having grown up in a moderately observant, Conservative family—the kind that kept kosher except at Chinese restaurants—I had more to abandon in abandoning religion, and thus more qualms about any sort of rapprochement. Entering a synagogue feels almost hypocritical to me, unless it’s for a cultural or political function. Even so, while questioning the value of what passes for a religious education today, I have been unwilling to do anything about it, and many years ago consented in Andy’s plan to send Erez and his younger brother, Lucas, to Sunday classes at Union Temple. Even before that, they’d attended preschool at a Lubavitcher synagogue, where the fusion of practice and belief, however compulsory, rendered questions of hypocrisy moot. Observing observance there was a joy, because they believed what they believed without reservation.

But lacking that kind of ecstatic credulity, I can only see the rituals of Judaism—however beloved, however much I enjoyed enacting them when I was young, however comforting they may still remain—as more or less empty obligations to be filled, if at all, with imported meaning. Without that meaning, I feared we were running toward a pool both dry and dangerous. Not Andy, who seeing people swimming believes there must be water. For him, the bar mitzvah is uncomplicated except by my doubts. Having adopted Erez and Lucas when each was just a few weeks old—and having done so against the advice of many around him, let alone in a society that seemed to feel he was, as a gay man, bound to fail—the bar mitzvah was a chance to share the joy of his success, mixed with a bit of I-told-you-so. And perhaps it was also a chance to welcome his older son into the tradition of not understanding everything you must do.

In any case, the arrival of the “financial responsibility” letter initiated a series of (let us call them) discussions that have revealed—more than any other disagreement we’ve faced in the raising of our children—the rough terrain to be traversed between our muddy assumptions and common ground. Guest lists, music, menu, budget, the arrangement and content of the service itself: Each issue intersected maddeningly with the others. If we increased the number of people invited, then either the budget ballooned or the hypothetical menu dwindled. (Goodbye, poached salmon; hello, six-foot heroes.) And the number of people did keep increasing. Andy has a large family, with infinite cousins, very few of whom would be likely to miss the happy event. My guest list, tiny to begin with, seemed further limited by the one sure no-show at its epicenter: my late mother. The last large party we gave was her shiva.

With such emotions and imperatives in play, arguing became gridlock. And yet, for all our wrangling, we barely consulted the one person the wrangling was presumably for. But Erez is not tormented by such concerns. He is cheerfully fatalistic about what he views as an upcoming performance, not unlike playing viola for relatives or participating in a piano recital. These he always claims to dread and then in fact enjoys. He knows that the bar mitzvah ceremony will involve even more practice, in an even more abstruse language: not just vowelless Biblical Hebrew but the code of cantillation embedded in the tiny, runic markings called trope. On the other hand, he likes the opportunity to do well and somehow suspects that, once again, he will. Furthermore, having been a Jew since he was circumcised (a bit belatedly) at three weeks of age, he seems to accept this as an unavoidable milestone that has toppled in his path. If it cannot be circumvented, it must be gotten over.

And so, with a calm child but unsettled feelings, we made the first firm choice of our bar mitzvah year. One Sunday last month, while Erez and Lucas and their Hebrew school friends reviewed the Four Questions and Ten Plagues elsewhere in the building, we and the parents of six other prospective b’nai mitzvah met with the rabbi for background information and the fateful scheduling. There were plenty of Saturdays near Erez’s birthday to choose among; in the end, we selected March 10 on the basis of what the rabbi called its “juicy” Torah portion, Ki Tisa. She was right, even though it begins unpromisingly with head counts and tax policy and the tedious specifications for the oil to be used in anointing the ark—a passage in which God comes across as a kind of fussy party planner. What part of “no myrrh” do you not understand? But fittingly enough, it ends with the Golden Calf.

Theodore Bikel, Cloris Leachman, and Ernest Borgnine in The Bar Mitzvah of Major Orlovsky (CBS/Photofest)

Here, then, are 10 memorable TV b’nai mitzvah, moving over the years from well-meaning, almost saccharine reverence for ritual to critical, even scathing send-ups.

1. “The Bar Mitzvah of Major Orlovsky,” 1962. In this installment of General Electric Theater, Orlovsky, a Russian defector, falls in love with Miriam Raskin, the widowed daughter of a rabbi. Although Orlovsky fell away from religion as a child—fleeing home, serving in the Russian army—he re-connects to his tradition through Miriam, who is preparing to celebrate her son’s bar mitzvah. Orlovsky returns to Judaism and decides to become a bar mitzvah.

2. Car 54, Where Are You?, 1963. Joey Pokrass, about to become a bar mitzvah boy, is afraid no one will attend his big day; his father is a widely loathed landlord, and the Pokrass name is mud in town. So officers Toody and Muldoon bring over prisoners from night court to watch Joey at the bima; others show up, too, persuaded by the cops’ genuine pleadings. Old Man Pokrass is so touched at this outpouring for his son that he mends his ways and begins to fix up his tenants’ apartments. “Yesterday my son was bar mitzvahed,” he says, “but it was me who became a man.”

3. The Dick Van Dyke Show, 1966. Buddy Sorrell, played by Morey Amsterdam, has been acting funny, ducking out of the office for unclear reasons and with odd excuses. Rob and Sally speculate whether he’s having an affair, but it turns out that he’s been meeting with a rabbi: As a young child, he had to work and was unable to become a bar mitzvah, and now he is planning to rectify the omission from his youth.

4. Archie Bunker’s Place, 1981. Stephanie, the young Jewish girl whom Archie and Edith adopted after her mother’s death, wants to celebrate a bat mitzvah on this successor to All in the Family. Stephanie’s biological grandmother gets involved in the planning and insists on a big, lavish affair, but Stephanie will have none of it. After a synagogue service in which she chants in Hebrew alongside a rabbi and a female cantor, Stephanie has her party back at Archie’s house. It’s the one time Archie Bunker wears a yarmulke, and Rob “Meathead” Reiner isn’t even around to see it.

5. Diff’rent Strokes, 1984. Arnold, the young, black adopted son of “Mr. D,” attends a friend’s bar mitzvah and is attracted to a religion that gives a 13-year-old boy cash and premature adult privileges, which, he thinks, include getting into X-rated movies. Arnold consults a rabbi about converting, but when he hears about some of the challenges of Judaism—learning Hebrew, fasting on Yom Kippur—his interest cools. At the end of the episode, he goes to church with his father.

6. The Wonder Years, 1989. Kevin, played by Fred Savage, is jealous of his friend Paul, who is about to become a bar mitzvah. Kevin is moved when, having dinner at Paul’s house, he sees Paul’s grandfather give him, in anticipation of the big day, not a TV or watch but a prayer book that his father had given him. Kevin goes home and asks his parents, “What are we?” His parents fumble about, come up with a few bland European ancestries. Since it happens to fall on his birthday, Kevin, overcome by a jealousy he can’t quite name, refuses to attend Paul’s bar mitzvah. Paul is understandably wounded. In the end, Kevin relents, showing up at the synagogue in time to see Paul read from Torah. The episode ends with the two boys dancing a rousing hora.

7. Seinfeld, 1997. “The Serenity Now” episode features this fine exchange among Elaine, a bar mitzvah boy, and his father:

Elaine: Congratulations, Mr. Lippman.

Lippman: Oh, Elaine. My boy’s a man today. Can you believe it? He’s a man.

Elaine: Oh, congratulations, Adam.

[Adam zealously French-kisses Elaine.]

Adam: I’m a man!

Later, both Mr. Lippman and the rabbi hit on Elaine.

8. Sex and the City, 2000. Publicist Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, is hired to help plan the party of Jenny Brier, a precocious, young New Yorker. “My father has invited over 300 of his most powerful friends to this event,” Jenny tells a skeptical Samantha. “They’re not all coming. The Clintons can’t make it, of course. But like I told Daddy, we’ll be lucky if we can swing this for under a mil. But what do I know? I’m just a kid.”

9. Frasier, 2002. Eager to put in a fine performance at the bar mitzvah of his son (who is being raised by his ex-wife, Lilith), Frasier wants to deliver a brief blessing in Hebrew. When he accidentally infuriates his Hebrew tutor, a Star Trek fan, Frasier is deceived into memorizing the blessing in Klingon. At the big event, Frasier chants, “Pookh lod wih le koo…” then concludes, “Shabbat shalom.”

“Today, I Am a Clown,” The Simpsons

10. The Simpsons, 2003. Krusty the Klown, the prodigal son of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, is moved to celebrate an adult bar mitzvah when he discovers that he cannot get a star on the Jewish Walk of Fame without having passed that milestone. In a nod to reality TV, Krusty’s bar mitzvah becomes a television special, a big spectacle that infuriates his rabbi father, voiced by Jackie Mason. But at the end, to reconcile with his father, Krusty celebrates a low-key affair at the synagogue.