Pants and a Sport Coat
Saturday was the anniversary of my bar mitzvah weekend, the first extravaganza of my (then) young life. This was 1967 in the rapid run up to the style that became ascendant in Jewish America: a cluster of events played out over days, rivalling a wedding in its ambition and complexity. There were out-of-town guests, Hungarian tortes, a live band and hors d’oeuvres, and sparkly ball gowns.
There was no east-coast sushi or Dallas cowboy cheerleaders, but that didn’t happen until a couple of decades later, when Jewish oligarchs began to celebrate the coming-of-age of their scions. We are living to see the end of that vogue, because even an oligarch can see the absurdity of it, and everything religious has been hollowed out and devalued. You don’t get much of a bar mitzvah in a Synagogue unless your kid attends some version of Hebrew School. There are still oligarchs who care about Hebrew School, but they are typically more focused on soccer-league stardom.
My parents actually cared about Hebrew School. We carpooled to the Synagogue four days a week. I learned to read and chant the liturgy and generally acquitted myself as a student. No one in my cohort actually learned Hebrew, but we could generate the sounds of Jewish prayer and give a passing-fair simulation of Jewish worship.
You wouldn’t know it from the recording of my celebration. My father had a beautiful singing voice and he was a boy cantor in a neighborhood synagogue in Detroit. He managed to transmit some of that good stuff to me. But this remains a point of contention to this day, at least in circles of rabbis and educators. We call it Hebrew School, but we don’t teach Hebrew. At this point we have actually stopped pretending.
But my parents also cared about appearances and keeping up with our very middle-class neighbors. A bar mitzvah celebration meant a sit-down dinner. It meant a candle-lighting ceremony and “social” dancing. It most certainly meant a photographer and a theme, some thread of continuity to organize the decor. You will be interested to know that my theme was “Trains,” reflecting the considerable energy we invested in model railroading.
By the time of my bar mitzvah we had exhausted this pastime, and I don’t think I ever ran my trains again. But there was my N Scale Lionel multi-car train set, circling the punch bowl and the Hungarian tortes. Because of a miscalculation, the table looked naked: too much tablecloth and too few tortes, but people had never seen a train at a bar mitzvah. My parents, who didn’t have much money, had done the work on the set-ups themselves, and they were delighted with the reaction of our friends and relations. They had also done the flowers and the skirting, sewing a million plastic buds to the apron of the sweets table. My parents were hardly social climbers, but they knew how to hold their place in our suburb.
And they also managed to take some risks. The Sixties were arguably a time of breaking free. Parents of a friend actually smoked dope, which scandalized my mother and father to the core. But my parents struck an interesting balance between suffocating conformity and freedom from constraint. When I stepped onto the bimah on Saturday morning to chant the portion that made me a man, I did so in a classic blue blazer and a pair of pants. They were a high-contrast alternative to the standard bar mitzvah suit and a major affront to the rule book for celebrations. Wearing a bar mitzvah suit was God’s will for the Jewish people. Not wearing a bar mitzvah suit was like taunting a rabbi with shrimp.
No one criticized me at the ceremony in the Synagogue, but the episode reverberated for many years afterward. “Can you believe they dressed him in houndstooth pants?” It was a small act of rebellion against the norms of the day, which bumped out the space of my very young life. From that moment forward, I wore my hair long, wrote nasty parodies about organized Jewish life, and developed a taste for non-conformity. I wish I could say that I was a rebel with a cause, but that would be stretching the extent of my willingness to confront.
What I got instead was a taste for operating within the systems and structures of my own community, while at the same time communicating that I was not particularly trustworthy. That turned out to be the right combination for me.