The Schwartz brothers are tech-savvy Modern Orthodox Jews, which makes them well-positioned to forecast their customers’ desires. “Anything we find useful that we want in our phone, we’ll develop,” Barry Schwartz said. RustyBrick’s 25 Jewish apps include an iPhone Siddur, an iPhone Tanach, and a Shabbat app that provides candle-lighting times and has been downloaded more than 400,000 times. RustyBrick’s shofar app—a simple, free, and, it must be said, completely irritating application that plays the four distinct shofar sounds, was downloaded thousands of times in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah last year, Barry said.

When the twins were in high school in Monsey, N.Y., the nearby ultra-Orthodox hamlet, Ronnie discovered a knack for design and software development. They formed their company in 1999, while they were both in college; today they have 19 employees. Barry, the charismatic brother, handles the business operations, while Ronnie, more reserved, oversees software development. “Anything not related to technology I do,” Barry said. “We overlap,” Ronnie corrected. Twins.

The Siddur was the first iPhone app they developed, in 2008; Barry, who bought the first-generation iPhone, wanted to have a prayerbook on his new device. “There’s a lot of math put in there,” Ronnie said of the Siddur, which took him several years to complete and which he still tweaks and updates. The Siddur adjusts both to its user and the changing Jewish calendar, enabling a user to store preferences—Ashkenazic or Sephardic, for example—and see what prayers to say on a specific day at a specific time.

Observant Jews, of course, don’t use technology during Shabbat and other holidays, returning to their bound, old-fashioned prayerbooks. RustyBrick’s apps account for that. “It actually grays out certain prayers on Shabbos,” Barry said, “not that we can stop people from opening the app.” The blocking of text is not a rebuke, but a reminder: “We don’t want them to pray a weekday davening on a Shabbos,” Barry said. “We gray out things so they can’t access it.”

One of the more gimmicky yet cool features of the Siddur app is a world map that allows users to see where other people are using the application at that moment. In the mornings, they often see 300 to 400 people on the map, all praying with the Siddur. While users can turn off that feature within the application settings, many don’t. One year, Ronnie recalled, he was in Israel on Yom Kippur, and when the holiday was over, he clicked on the map to find other people in other parts of the world where Yom Kippur was still going on, also using the app. But what can you do?

These products enable a moderately tech-savvy consumer to connect with more traditional elements of worship. The RustyBrick brothers are less inclined to play up this angle of their work, preferring instead to explain the intricate, and impressive, features of their apps. Barry’s favorite part is the interactive mi’ sheberach list, where a user can add the name of a person he wants to pray for. Provided your settings have enabled this feature, other users can see that name. “People in the iPhone community can actually pray for each other,” Barry said.

The Schwartzes’ latest project is poised to move RustyBrick from personal technology to something closer to business services: their recently lauched ShulCloud. Based on the reasonable notion that synagogues generally use outdated, confusing electronic systems, they developed subscription-based software for synagogues—it streamlines email services and offers members the option of online payment. “We’re trying to make the life of anyone involved in running a shul much, much easier,” Barry said.

But for now it’s the apps that remain the heart of the brothers’ business. Through the smart Siddur, you can automatically sync the Jewish calendar with an iPhone or Apple computer’s secular iCalendar. “It brings the Jewish stuff into the secular calendar,” Ronnie said, summing up the feature and, inadvertently, the business.

The one custom for Shavuot is to stay up all night studying Jewish texts. This custom itself was enabled because of a particular innovation in food technology, as historian Elliot Horowitz has explained: the availability of caffeine. Horowitz discusses how once the stimulant became widely available in the 16th century, it enabled even the most sluggish among Jewish scholars to remain in a roused state through the early morning hours of Shavuot. Somehow this tension, between the corporeal (of our need for stimulants, or at least rest) and the spiritual aspects of awaiting revelation feels particularly Jewish to me, given the way our religion is rooted in the body.

The study of text on Shavuot takes no fixed form. Compilations of texts for this nocturnal holiday do exist, and they contain excerpts from the Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, and kabbalistic texts, but these are suggested modes of study. You could read anything really—Art Spiegelman’s Maus or stories by Amir Gutfreund. Shavuot is a time for Jews to focus on what it means to have a text and grapple with it, to be and to celebrate being the people of the book.

But what does it mean to be the people of the book these days? Recently, I went with my 10-year-old daughter to our local Borders, which was having a going-out-of business sale. My daughter looked at me and said, “I don’t think there will be any bookstores when I’m grown up.” This is a child who is notoriously pessimistic; she often fears that she will miss the school bus or doubts that she’ll able to finish her homework. I am usually quick to reassure her. In this case, I couldn’t. I think she’s right.

I appreciate so much about our electronic world, but I worry too, particularly the way it might be changing our approach to reading. Sven Birkerts writes of reading as an “ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself.” In Ethics of the Fathers, Rabbi Ben Bag-bag (whose own name is probably a play on Torah with its repetitive use of the second and third letters of the Hebrew alphabet) writes, “Turn it over and turn it over for all is in it.” How do we do that, how do we manage that sustained attention, let alone valuing one book, our Hebrew Bible, above all others, in our times?

Another historian of the book, Anthony Grafton has written of his Kindle that it “liberates” him because he always has a text to read on a long flight. Yet he also expresses his concern that postmodern reading is “rapid, superficial, appropriative and individualistic.” Physical objects give us information that we can’t glean electronically. Grafton writes of a scholar in an archive noting the smell of vinegar on a text which makes him aware that it had been disinfected during a cholera epidemic, giving us clues about the spread of disease.

I believe that Jewish books as objects will endure even if we move, as we seem to be doing, to a culture in which our texts are wholly electronic. We have been a culture that places a value on hiddur mitzvah, on the aesthetic value behind doing any commandment, so I believe Jews will continue to find value in lovely books for ritual use. Most of Jewish literature—from the Bible through rabbinic literature and modern halachic responsa—is available in electronic form. Yet we still handwrite scrolls and create beautiful book objects. It’s difficult to imagine the Torah ever being read from a Kindle for a congregation; we need rituals around our readings. So, we will have to stay in the corporeal and spiritual once again, using modern book technology as it is valuable, while taking time to sniff the ink on our handwritten Torah scrolls.

The revelation of Shavuot in the Bible, the Ten Commandments, begin with the letter aleph, of the word anokhi. Aleph is a silent sound, so all language that emanates from this revelation begins in silence. The text of the revelation is itself smashed and re-written. Moses creates one set of tablets, which he destroys; then he is told to recreate them; and then the destroyed tablets are still placed in the Ark of the Tabernacle, rendering it in effect the first geniza, a repository for a Jewish text. I think it’s essential that both old and new versions were placed in the ark. Perhaps this most ancient of biblical models can serve as a guideline for the ways we produce and consume texts today, that we can find a way to make an ancient desire to immerse oneself in a text to enlarge and deepen our experience, along with the liberation we find in the information instantly available at our electronically charged fingertips.

Beth Kissileff has taught Hebrew Bible and English literature at Carleton College and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Josie, 8 years old, is going to overnight camp for the first time this year, which has made me reflect on my own experiences as a child at Camp Ramah in New England. I loved the lake, the trees, the pine-fragrant bunks adorned with the vintage scratchitti of long-ago youths who’d presumably left camping behind for cholesterol-lowering drugs and the raising of future campers of their own.

I grew up in a different era, an age before cell phones and personal computing devices. In an era before MTV’s Unplugged, we were perpetually unplugged. As a kid in a small city, I rode my bike all over the neighborhood. I lounged with my friends in Swan Point Cemetery on weekends. We spent hours, unsupervised, in various garages and basements.

My own kids’ childhood is very different. They’re in organized activities all the time. They don’t roam like free-range fowl throughout the city. For Josie, one of the most fascinating things about this year’s marvelous Newbery-winning children’s novel When You Reach Me was its portrait of a latchkey kid on the Upper West Side in the ‘70s; in a book that deals with time travel and foretelling the future, the most astonishing detail for my kid was that the protagonist got to walk around New York City alone.

The most significant difference between my kids and me, though, is that they can’t imagine being unwired. I showed them a picture of Gordon Gekko holding his then-super-futuristic cell phone in the movie Wall Street, and they asked if it was a giant walkie-talkie. Josie recently quizzed me about Superman: What was a phone booth, and how did he change clothes in it? When I tell her we had to stand up and walk over to the television to change the channel and that we only had telephones attached to walls, she stares at me as if I’m speaking Urdu. I showed her Atari’s Pong, the antiquated video game we played on my TV growing up; she thought I was playing a joke. All you could do in this “game” was move a line, slowly, up and down, as a single dot ricocheted in slow motion around the screen? This was once considered fun? Josie and her friends play Toontown and Wizard 101 together, visually rich, hugely complex, multiplayer games with their own elaborate universes. They make plans to “meet” each other on weekends in digital glens and seven-story buildings in their avatar forms.

A couple of summers ago we visited friends in Fire Island. Eyeing my iPhone, an 8-year-old girl said, “Which generation?” I told her it was the earliest version and she rolled her eyes. “I want the new one, but my mom isn’t psyched for me to break my current contract,” she said airily, as bored as a Kardashian. “I’m totally getting it, though.”

So, is today’s sleepaway camp—with its lake, trees, cabins, chadar ochel, and drama and crafts bungalows looking exactly as they did generations earlier—an artifact, an artificial construct belonging to an earlier time, like some New World version of a Roman Vishniac photo? Is it ridiculous to expect kids to give up their iPods, handheld computer games, Facebook, Twitter, IM? Can we really trap them in this historical setting, like bug-spray-scented, cell-phone-less flies in amber?

My answer: We not only can; we should. Kids need unplugging. I’m no Luddite or technophobe, and I was among the snarling parents who objected when Mayor Michael Bloomberg went on his rampage to ban cell phones in schools after September 11. But in the summer—the last vestige of carefree childhood in a high-pressure, high-connectivity world—kids should be forced to interact face-to-face with each other, with their counselors, and with a sylvan world. It’s one of the last great communal spaces for kids.

Every camp has its own rules about the use of technology, of course. Some allow cell phones but let kids use them only right before Shabbat or right before bed. Others allow iPods in the bunk only. (In my day, at rest time, we were allowed our giant, awkward Walkmans that seemed the height of techie cool.) But whatever a camp’s written rules, compliance varies. One Jewish website is rife with whispered tales of texting in bathroom stalls.

“Each camp’s culture is different, of course, but for most part the undergirding value is that camp is a place in which community is built in real time and real space,” says Rabbi Eve Rudin, director of Camp Excellence and Advancement at the Foundation for Jewish Camp. In other words, al tifrosh min hatzibur; don’t separate yourself from the community. The real community, not the virtual one. “When you’re plugged in to your headphones, you’re separated from the world around you,” Rudin says. “There can be appropriate times in the camp day to be separate and quiet—reading a book in your bunk, writing a letter, listening to music. For some camps, then, an iPod is acceptable. But we generally don’t encourage families to send valuables to camp.” Camp, she adds, should be a place where all kids start on equal footing, but “the reality is that parents don’t always want to abide by it.”

Ah, there’s the rub. Is connectivity really so important to the kid, or is it really about the needs and anxieties of the parent? For most kids, camp is a time to be in a completely kid-centric, immersive environment. Kids adjust to camp culture. They learn the camp rituals and songs (speaking of which, OyBaby’s new CD, We Sang That at Camp, is hilariously awesome). They fold themselves into the tradition; they don’t expect the tradition to adapt to them. But parents can be more obstructionist than helpful to the process. I’ve heard stories about camps with no-outside-food policies in which parents smuggle food in care packages, hidden in tennis balls. Websites like bunk1.com and campregister.com help parents stay connected to their little darlings 24-7. In my day, we had to write home twice a week, and we could line up to use the pay phone outside the mercaz. And we walked uphill to the archery range, both ways.

There’s no doubt that camp is Good for the Jews. Research shows that teenagers report greater levels of connection to Judaism at camp, and campers are significantly more likely to send their children to camp themselves when they grow up. According to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, 66 percent of Jews who attended Jewish camps considered their Jewish identity “very important,” as opposed to 29 percent of those who never attended a Jewish camp. Jewish camp alumni are 50 percent more likely to join a synagogue and 90 percent more likely to join a Jewish community center than their non-camp fellows. And camp’s world-unto-itself mystique is part of what makes it so indelible. There’s something primal about the physicality of it all, the intensity of friendships forged at camp. Movie nights feel more special when media is a rarity. Romance feels more thrilling. Shiurim feel less like school when they’re held among pine needles. You can’t Facebook that stuff. Well, you could, but feh.

Israel’s stated reason for the ban is that the iPad “does not conform to the European standards used in Israel.” A technology attorney put it well, calling the excuse “really annoying. It was a nonsense explanation.” Some have speculated that the real cause might be the protection of the monopoly of iDigital, “Apple’s sole official Israeli importer,” owned by President Shimon Peres’s son, or concern that the fancy computer might interfere with military frequencies.

One techie fears ominous implications: “Now it’s the iPad. What’s next?” The way we see it, Israel is just protecting its citizens from the early adopter curse, as defined by Rob Walker in the New York Times Magazine: “What these people are likely to get for their consumption daring is a chance to experience every single glitch or flaw that will be tweaked and patched in the months ahead. Also the guarantee that they’re paying full price.”

Techie Mystery: Why Did Israel Ban the iPad? [Time]

Indeed, even (or especially) Arab businessmen are getting curious, Singer said: “Whenever I go to the Gulf, it’s all they want to talk about, they’re so intrigued by the Israeli model. But everything about the economic strategy of these Gulf countries is about spending money.” American Jews, too, are starting to catch on. “For the longest time, American Jews would not invest in Israeli start-ups. They would give to UJA and they’d give to all these philanthropic organizations, but they kept a firewall up between their business activities and their philanthropic activities. I think for the last three to five years you are, for the first time, really seeing American Jewish investors investing in Israel.”

The Origins of Israel’s Tech Miracle [Atlantic]

The Most Popular Ringtone in the West Bank: Allahu Akbar [Haaretz, in Hebrew]

Although largely secular, my family took the Day of Atonement seriously. We would spend the last moments before the holiday’s descent tearing apart squares of toilet paper, as even this most mundane of acts was deemed disrespectful of Judaism’s most awesome day. Riding a bicycle, a Yom Kippur tradition among young and unobservant Israelis, was similarly judged in my family as excessively profane, and so, as soon as we would return home from synagogue after reciting Kol Nidre, I would run up the stairs and onto the balcony and look around.

The neighborhood, a small and modest enclave in the heart of a small and modest town bordering on Tel Aviv, was shrouded by the thick, ink-blue sky. The glow of television sets, the flickering of refrigerator lights, and all the other ghosts of electricity that haunt our daily lives were nowhere to be seen. The neighborhood was dark, dark and quiet, with mumbles and prayers drowned by the shattering silence. And I, a kid who spent most of his days with his Atari and VCR and various battery-operated trinkets, would just sit there and stare and listen and give myself over to this immense stillness and feel something that wasn’t precisely religious but intensely personal, a feeling I suppose was peace.

It faded fast.

By the early 1990s, as I stumbled into pubescence, Israel was rapidly connecting to cable TV. I still spent Yom Kippur with my grandmother, and I still sat on the same balcony, but it wasn’t the same. Peeking, out of the corner of my eye, at the television, I knew that it now concealed glorious secrets. Even if the Israeli channels darkened their screens for a day on Yom Kippur, MTV in Hong Kong, or the soccer channel out of Milan, or any of the other stations included in our subscription plan went about their business as usual. And they were just there, within reach, hiding behind the reflective screen. All I had to do was turn on the set.

Finally, one year, I did. I was 16, and angry at the world as only a 16-year-old can be. God, it seemed to me back in those days, days soaked in rage and alcohol and self-pity, should ask for my forgiveness, not the other way around. Instead of observing his holiest day, I decided to entertain myself. I abandoned the balcony for the basement. I spent the day watching stale British comedies from the 1970s. It was the most miserable Yom Kippur I’ve ever had.

As I grew older, youth’s rebellious streak mercifully fatigued, I resolved to return to the tranquility I’d known in my childhood. But it was gone, slain, in part, by technology. On Yom Kippur of 1995, for example, now 19 and a soldier, I returned to my perch on the balcony. I surveyed the neighborhood. It was no longer dark. Some neighbors were watching television, however discreetly, and others, I could tell by their open windows, were engaging with a new presence: the Internet.

Despite all my promises to remain disconnected, I was burning with curiosity. It was the day of O.J. Simpson’s verdict. I just had to know how it ended. I slipped into the study and logged on.

And so, with each new year, a new technology joined the parade marching on my peace of mind. Video games got better, phones smarter, the Web more intricate. I finished the army and moved to New York, where the temptation to engage with gadgets became even stronger, especially as the internet now connected me to social networks populated by my friends. As one of Twitter’s earliest users, I felt compelled to spend parts of Yom Kippur 2007, sharing my reflections, in 140 characters or less, with a few dozens of my closest friends. The notion of taking a day off from what media critic Todd Gitlin elegantly dubbed the Torrent seemed ludicrous to me. The whole point of a torrent is that there are no days off, not even for atonement, not even to God.

Or, at least, not for me. Some people, I know, have no problem stepping out not only yearly but weekly, observing Shabbat away from media and machines. I’m incapable of such mastery, partially because I know that no matter how unplugged I manage to become, or for how long, I will never again have that serenity of Yom Kippur on the balcony in Ramat Gan, with the whole world sheltered in soft shadows and everyone sitting wordlessly in the dark. I can be as still as I want, but television, the Internet, the cellular phone, they’ll always be there, emissaries from a bright world of circuitry and screens, a world I’ve come to inhabit and love, a world that Ramat Gan, circa 1985, knew nothing about.

Or on Highway 61. Or on Desolation Row.

Need Direction Home? Ask Bob Dylan [NYT]

Sky News, meantime, is reporting the Iranian opposition is using an Israeli service called Fring to make calls over WiFi networks and bypass text-messaging blocks. And earlier this week, Israel’s consul for media and public affairs, David Saranga—an avid tweeter—told a roomful of Twitter aficionados gathered in New York for the inaugural 140 Character Conference (named for the popular message service’s text limit) that the rise of social media was allowing him and other government PR types to redress “incorrect information” and speak directly to the public, bypassing traditional filters. At the same conference, al Jazeera’s head of new media technology, Moeed Ahmad, told the audience that he was also counting on Twitter as a means to inject “authentic information” into the public sphere.

And in Business Week, Joel Schechtman is reporting that only about 8,600 Twitter users are registered inside Iran—and argues that the mass protests are being organized the old-fashioned way, via text message and word of mouth. “Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground,” Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told Schectman. “The reason social media is so interesting [for the press] is that the international media doesn’t have its members on the ground.”

Which would have to mean—and this is the great part—that the Iranian government’s refusal to extend journalists’ visas is just part of the evil Israeli plot.

JPost Accused of Masterminding ‘Iranian Twitter Revolution’ [JPost]
Iranians Use New Web Tool to Be Heard [Sky News]
Winning the War, in 140 Characters or Less [JPost]
Iran’s Twitter Revolution? Maybe Not Yet [Business Week]

Say-A-Blessing Makes a Better Jew Out of You [Gizmodo]

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.