I had been raised to fear debt. My mother had made the mistake of cosigning credit card applications with my father when they were married. They divorced when I was 8, he left Brooklyn for Florida, and my mother got stuck with his bills when he was unable to pay them. My mother, a New York City public school teacher, raised me and my sister alone. Throughout my elementary-school years, our dinners were constantly interrupted by calls from my father’s creditors. Now I almost always pay off my monthly credit-card balances in full and carefully budget for all expenditures. Yet no amount of frugality could decrease the amount I owned to the educational-loan company. As the end of my most recent renewal approached, there was only one place I knew I could turn—my nuptial fund.

By all rights, this money should have already been spent. In the Orthodox community where I grew up, girls my age are married, in which case they are called women. I recently attended my 10-year high-school reunion, and I could count the number of singles on one hand. (And a few of the unattached were divorcees.) The rest of my former classmates had already begun constructing a bayis ne’eman b’Yisroel, a faithful home in Israel, as we had been taught to do in our all-girls yeshiva. I still lived in a studio apartment.

So, the money my mother had set aside for my wedding was still there. That she was able to squirrel away a small yet significant sum of money to pay for the hoped-for ceremony and party on her public servant’s salary and eventually, pension, was impressive and a sign of how much my marrying mattered to her.

I only knew about the money because my mother, in the tradition of older folk, likes to speak about her will. She turned 70 in August, but she has been engaged in this sort of talk since I was in grade school. When I was little and used to light the Sabbath candles with her on Friday night, she’d point to the two brass candlesticks and say, “These will be yours in 120 years.” (Since Moses died at the age of 120, many traditional Jews believe that he set a life-span precedent and people cannot live beyond this age.)

The first time she brought up the wedding money, I was 15, and we were in the car driving to school. “I need to speak to Shloimie,” she said. Shloimie is her nephew and a lawyer and is therefore the family repository of legal advice. “I need to add a clause to my will so there will be money so you can have a wedding as nice as Lisa’s.” My older sister, nearly eight years my senior, had just gotten married, and the affair, while hardly posh, was attended by 200 friends and family.

“Uh-huh,” I answered nonchalantly as I stared out the window. I didn’t like what she was implying—that she wouldn’t be around for my wedding as she had been for my sister’s.

Since then, my mother has brought up the wedding clause many times. I usually brush off her mention of final arrangements by saying, “You’ll be annoying the crap out of me for many years to come.” This makes her chuckle.

Yet knowledge of it is burrowed deep in my mind. I’ve often wondered: How much money had she set aside? Could I ask for some of it?

This past summer, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fund. Why did I have to wait until I got married? What if I never got married? If the point of this money was to increase my happiness by giving me the wedding of my dreams—well, I had other ideas about what would make me happy. I kept repeating these arguments to myself until I almost believed them.

The truth was that I didn’t actually want to give up my wedding. Although I’ve never been the type to fantasize about a dress or flower arrangements, I always thought I’d have a wedding. And I thought it would’ve happened by now. Even as I dropped the trappings of Orthodox observance, I didn’t completely let go of getting married altogether.

I entered my late 20s still single and without a significant relationship under my belt. I might never get married, I realized, and there is nothing I can do about it. My career, on the other hand, is something I can make happen. Even in today’s dismal media marketplace, I can network, hustle, and work several jobs into the wee hours of the morning. But I couldn’t force the universe to introduce me to the right man, and I couldn’t force that man to tolerate me. When I thought about where the money would have the greatest impact on my life, I decided that funding my education and career was a sounder bet than a wedding that might never take place.

Last summer, I asked my mother to meet me in my neighborhood. After my mother parked her car in front of my building, we walked to a local café. It was a muggy August day; I was going slow, but my mother was moving even slower. I realized, as I had been realizing many times over the last few years just how old my mother was getting. If at 15, I nonchalantly believed my mother would be at my wedding, I wasn’t as confident at 27.

At a popular hipster hangout we settled into the lumpy couch with our coffees and desserts. I sat silently for a few minutes, staring at artwork on the walls. I was suddenly nervous. I hadn’t planned how to broach the subject. There hadn’t seemed a point to rehearsing.

Finally, I simply asked. It’s hard for me to remember my exact words, but I muttered something about money and a wedding, and said, “I’d like to pay off my school debt.”

Her face fell. “You’re not going to get married?” she asked me, her lower lip quivering.

I tried to reassure her, even though I too was uncertain. I looked down at my dry scone, wondering why I had even bothered ordering it.

I tried to remember all the reasons I had decided to bring this up. I began speaking: It was a good financial decision for her, I said. Costs are only going up. It’s better to pay for a “wedding” in 2010 than in 2012 or 2015. Also, my mother has always been supportive of my career goals. She understood that by alleviating some of the financial burdens caused by my education debt, I could spend more time writing. And finally as a woman who married late herself—at 31, which was and still is ancient in the Orthodox Jewish community—only to get divorced 18 years later, I think she recognized that the wedding is, in the end, just a party. It can make you happy for just one night whereas student loans can make you unhappy for decades. (In that respect, education debt is like a bad marriage.)

As I finished stating my case, she nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure if she agreed with my points or was acquiescing to my request. She gradually conceded that a big, fancy wedding didn’t fit my personality profile. “I always saw you getting married barefoot on a beach somewhere anyway,” she said, brightening up.

We entered final negotiations in the café. The number we settled on was based on the amount she paid for my sister, nearly eight years my senior, to get married, adjusted for inflation since she wed in 1998. I was insistent on this point since I had been fooled as a child when the discussion was about my mother’s contribution to my college tuition. “I will pay just as much for you to go to college as I did for your sister,” she had said. This seemed perfectly fair and generous to a 7th grader. It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I realized that I got the raw end of the deal. “But tuitions are much higher now than when Lisa was in college,” I told my mother.

“That was our deal,” she would remind me, shaking her head.

Despite my shrewdness this time around, my mother still low-balled me. “I’m keeping a few thousand dollars,” she said, writing a figure on the napkin. “Because when you do get married, I still want to throw you a small party.”

I almost objected to this change but then thought better of it. She didn’t owe me the money. She finished raising me a long time ago, and all of it was a gift. I kissed my mother on the cheek. I liked that she was still planning my wedding, that she was holding out hope that I will eventually find love with a kind and supportive man, even if I don’t believe it will happen for me. Her faith restored a little of my own. As I walked home, I envisioned professional success, a steadier income, and monetary solubility. Maybe, I thought, I will get to use some of this money for my own wedding. Maybe.

In my sophomore year of college, my mother died. Her illness was long, breast cancer that played hide and seek. My grandmother, my co-parent since my parents divorced when I was 7, collapsed under the weight of her daughter’s death. With her went the ability to pay the mortgage on our house.

In the end, our house was foreclosed on. Weeks before, I was told to collect everything—furniture, papers, clothes—I wanted; everything else would be sold or thrown away. I took very little; I had no room for the rocking chair, the loveseat, the vases, the china. For the most part, I don’t regret the things left behind, but although I wasn’t there to see it, I’m haunted by the image of the contents of our home being thrown into a trash bin, leaving the green Victorian an empty coffin.

Walter Benjamin wrote, “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” I visited my grandmother often in the nursing home where she lived before her death in 2007 at the age of 96. Our conversations during that time orbited around two things—how much she wanted to leave the nursing home, and the location of her antiques.

My grandmother began working at the age of 9, at a now-defunct department store in Springfield. She collected her antiques slowly, strategically, filling first her small apartment and then our large house. There were ornate sofas and chairs, curio cabinets, lamps, tea sets, jewelry, picture frames, dolls. This was meant to be our inheritance, my mother’s and mine, in a world where the order of death would be different. When my friends visited the house, they seemed convinced that behind this museum existed a profound aesthetic and enormous wealth, but it simply wasn’t true. For my mother, my grandmother’s collecting was a nuisance, a sign of an old woman’s decline, the misplaced locus of her love and affection.

During the last years of her life, my grandmother became excruciatingly paranoid. She was convinced that my aunt and uncle were pilfering her antiques, hoarding them for their own children, when in reality, they both used the term “crap” liberally to refer to her collections.

The foreclosure freed us from it all, but my grandmother, beset by grief from losing my mother and confused and hurt by no longer being able to care for herself independently, obsessed about her possessions every day, with no idea what had really happened to them. My aunt, uncle, and I resolved to never tell her, and so I lied, athletically. I told her the antiques decorated my dorm rooms and apartments, I pretended to know the exact locations of things, the story of their journey from our old house to my new life.

My mother and grandmother meant to leave me objects when they died, objects that would provide me with money, with safety, with the knowledge that someone had wanted me to be taken care of, to know that I was loved. What remains instead are notions about money that are twisted, yet enduring.

One: Not having money is shameful. My mother worked hard to create the illusion that we had money and to deflect the reality, even if it meant hiding it from me. She became a single mother when she was 40, after she and my father divorced. Her shame was always palpable; not having money meant that she was a failure, asking for help meant that she couldn’t take care of me, that she wasn’t responsible, that she had made bad choices. I see her situation as complicated by these factors and her illness, but I’ve still managed to replicate her emotions about money. I’m surrounded by people with money, and so I avoid open discussion of my own financial state, although I’m quick to point out the overwhelming classism in the Jewish community. I’ve been willfully financially ignorant, broke beyond comprehension, debt free, well appointed, and terrified, all in the 12 years since my mother died. Ironically, I’ve also only worked for nonprofits, and I’ve chosen to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, so maybe, ultimately, I don’t want to have money. It would mean breaking the cycle, becoming someone else.

Two: Home is fleeting, and money will never be able to buy it. I’ve avoided returning to the town where I grew up, and when that’s been impossible, I’ve been sure to avoid driving past our old house, convincing myself that it had been demolished. Last year, on a whim, I Google-mapped it, and there it was, painted a different color, obscured by overgrown grass in the front yard. I wonder who lives there, if there are any remains of my mother, my grandmother, or me.

The places I’ve lived since then have never felt real, or secure. Transience brings me a strange comfort, and I almost always live in small spaces that other people probably wouldn’t tolerate. I know home can disappear quickly, like everything else.

Three: Possessions are dangerous and meaningless. I think sometimes of my mother’s orange house sweater, which hung on the back of her chair at the kitchen table. As far as I know, it remained there until the house was cleaned of its contents. Out of everything left behind, it’s that sweater that I wish I had taken with me, even if years later, the smell of her would be gone. These days, I make it a point to not be trapped by things, to not be defined by the use or the accumulation of them.

Ideas about money are really just ideas about who you are and where you have been. One of the worst things about the cycle of financial need is the inability to conceive of another reality, the perpetual feeling of being at a dead end, the bald, quivering fear. There must be an opportunity for interception, reversal, potential.

There’s a Jewish saying about deriving benefits from the illumination of the Hanukkah menorah; you should not even use the light to count your money. I imagine the three of us hovering around the flickering, inconsistent light of the candles that burn out quickly, struggling to see ourselves and our lives clearly.

Chanel Dubofsky is a writer living in New York City.

Arnon Milchan Moving Back to Israel [Globes]

At Least 139 of the Forbes 400 Are Jewish [JTA]
The Forbes 400 [Forbes]

You describe your father as “the ultimate cheapskate.” Can you give an example?

My father is quite eccentric—he really couldn’t care less what other people think. We had a car named Minnie, and when she was 13 years old he gave her a bat mitzvah. It was more like a baptism—he threw a few pails of water over her. There’s very little written about the psychology of cheapness, but people who are frugal tend to be independent thinkers and not susceptible to pressure.

You also talk about how you used to be ashamed of the cheapness, but that now you see it as somehow virtuous, take pride in it, and even practice it yourself.

Once I started supporting myself I realized how hard it is to get by. Being cheap has allowed me so much freedom in my life, especially when I look around and see people who have become slaves to their jobs. Why is there some shame in being frugal? If my friends want to go to dinner, but I can’t afford it, why should I feel bad about that?

In today’s economic climate, do you see the idea of cheapness being redeemed?

People talk about the “new frugality,” and on some level that’s really gratifying. Many people are being forced to cut back. There are a lot of people who are in serious trouble, but for a lot of other people it just means canceling the cable subscription, the gym membership. But I don’t buy it when people say this is a sea change. We cycle through this sort of thing over and over.

Where does philanthropy fit into the stereotypes about Jews being cheap?

It’s a very flexible stereotype, but it all stems from a link between Jews and money. In some ways, Jews refer to it as the redemptive part of the stereotype: see, it’s not all bad, look how much good were doing in the world! It’s something I’m proud of. But even that is double-edged. Some people might look at it as ostentatious. Michael Bloomberg named a residence hall at Princeton after his daughter. I think if I were her I’d be a little embarrassed about it.

There’s something paradoxical about the connection between Jews and money. There are stereotypes about Jews being tightfisted, but also about Jews being gaudy.

The stereotype combines both admiration and resentment, and that’s a particularly American combination. On the one hand Jews were called miserly, on the other hand they were called ostentatious. Jews would be closed out of certain resorts because they were vulgar. In the book, I talk about this stereotype of the Jew living in a hovel that was secretly opulent inside. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

More on the MASA Ad Controversy [JTA]
Earlier: Ad Calls Non-Israeli Jews ‘Lost’

New U.S.-Israeli Crime Ring Detailed [NYT]
Related: Holy Land Gangland [Tablet]

In the midst of tumultuous economic times, his people struggling with scarcity, uncertainty, and despair, he decides to build himself a new residence. You raise an eyebrow: that particular executive travels constantly, and seems to have little need for a fixed dwelling. But he insists, and construction is soon underway.

You hope that given his enterprise’s dire situation he’d go for something modest, something humble, something sober. You expect him to be practical and austere. You look to him to set an example. But he’s having none of that: he wants his house to be conspicuous and his might apparent.

For his living room, he commissions two statues of angels hammered out of pure gold. He builds the walls out of 48 upright beams, which, for good measure, he has overlaid with gold and held in place by silver foundation sockets. He tosses animal skins and ornate tapestries around, and sprinkles the tables with precious gems.

Oh, and the constant traveling? He’s well aware of that: he has the whole place designed so he could pack it up on a moment’s notice and have it shipped to follow him around as he gallops across the globe. Nowadays, he argues, even a permanent address has to be mobile.

Incensed? Don’t be. We’re not talking John Thain here, the former Merrill Lynch captain with the penchant for costly commodes, or even Frederick H. Waddell, the head of Northern Trust, who accepted $1.5 billion in federal bailout money and fired 450 employees shortly before splurging happily on a corporate retreat that included performances by Chicago, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Sheryl Crow.

No, the executive in question is the Celestial Chairman of the Board, CEO of all that is in heaven and on earth. And in this week’s parasha, he’s in a domestic kind of mood. Gather up 15 fine materials, he tells the Israelites—gold and silver and copper and wood and gems and animal skins and goat hair—and build Me a sanctuary, as I am going to dwell amidst you. And since you’re sort of nomadish these days, make it portable.

Hearing this, I imagine some of the Israelites reacting much like Americans nowadays react when they hear of another bout of executive greed, another corporate jet purchased with federal funds or another bumbling banker piggishly awarding himself and his cabal a hefty bonus. After all, trudging in the desert, the Israelites hadn’t much by way of gems and goat hair lying around, and had immense financial responsibilities on the horizon, like building a homeland or skirmishing with the Jevusites. And I imagine some ancient ancestor of that most fiscally prudent of Jews, Suze Orman, shuffling somberly about the camp, pontificating: “Do not spendeth the money you don’t really haveth on this luxurious sanctuary! Saveth for your retirement! Investeth your gold!”

But to no avail: God, like most Russian oligarchs and American gangsta rappers, wants His to be the coolest crib in the hood. And as much as thrifty tongues might have clucked then as they cluck now, there’s some solid logic to the spending spree.

To understand this rationale, consider the case of two of Manhattan’s finest custom tailors, who, to protect the innocent, shall remain nameless. Both men are at the peak of their prowess, both are masters of cut and hem and pattern, and both are blessed with a discerning and affluent clientele. But their ateliers couldn’t have been more different: one is nestled in a sleek building just off Fifth Avenue, with leather sofas and Persian rugs and espresso machines at hand to sooth and pamper the customers, while the other set up shop in a nondescript office building on Madison Avenue, occupying most of his space with workstations and fabric and paying little attention to what has now come to be called the “retail experience.”

The differences, of course, reflect divergent philosophies: one tailor believes that externalities like plush furniture and hot beverages would just distract him from his demanding craft, while the other thinks less of himself and more of his clients, eager to attract and retain them by whatever means necessary.

Both approaches, of course, are perfectly legitimate, but when it comes to religion, only one tends to work in the long run. No one wants to come and worship at a nondescript office building: we want an extravagant bit of real estate to go along with our spiritual well-being, some stunning surge of interior design to soothe our weary souls. We need our places of worship to be like Apple stores, awe-inspiring and gorgeous and a testament to the will and wonder of a Higher Power.

This is why God insists: the sanctuary is for us, not Him. He’s just bound to provide his people with the best retail experience possible given the inclement conditions.

Let us, then, be more merciful with Thain and Waddell and their looting ilk. Sure, they are greedy and ruthless, but in their vain extravagance they also embody a principle as old as the Exodus itself: when you set forth to build a religion—be it Judaism or capitalism—damn the hardships and the poverty. Build temples—be they sanctuaries or corner offices—and make them lavish. Spend extravagantly. It’s what we need to believe. Always has been.

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.