They had GONE: JESSIE, HAL, AND MARGOT FROM PHILADELPHIA Airport that afternoon, Anish Patel and his colleague out of JFK.
Although Carla was initially disappointed that Margot had failed in her mission to talk Hal Pearson out of the trip, she was somewhat mollified by Margot’s decision to go along. She had great confidence in her sister. Margot Kaplan might not be lucky in love, but she was successful in everything else. She was a woman of eminent rationality and will—someone you could count on to act effectively in a crisis, and whom one crossed at one’s peril.
Now at seven P.M., Carla imagined that her mother and sister were somewhere over the Atlantic, winging their way to the Gritti Palace, one of the foremost luxury hotels in Venice. The hotel had been chosen by Anish, who said that his grant permitted him to travel in style and that, having lived in squalor for so many years during his childhood, he was not about to stint now, especially when the luxury was paid for by someone else.
Margot had promised to call as soon as they arrived, which would probably be in a few hours. Meanwhile, there was nothing Carla could do, which placed her in a state of welcome calm. She
could concentrate for the time being on the last lap of the bat mitzvah, which was rounding the corner at breakneck speed.
Many things had been done. She and Mr. O’Hare had prepared a checklist and reviewed it together to their mutual satisfaction.
1. The caterer—all wrapped up. Even if there were a world shortfall in soy products, Moishe assured them he had his black-market sources. Not to worry.
2. The band—confirmed for an evening of authentic klezmer tunes. This was the band that Mark had heard coming home from work on Philadelphia’s public radio station. The members were ethnomusicology students at the University of Pennsylvania and turned out not to be Jewish—a fact that pleased Mark, since it assured that the ethnic temperature of the event would be maintained on a refined, academic level.
3. Griffin (aka the entertainment motivator)—on track, now that a small snag had been ironed out. It seemed that Uncle Sid, who had made a miraculous recovery, had wanted a song by Artie Shaw that no one ever heard of to accompany his candle-lighting. Griffin had pronounced that if he didn’t know the song, it didn’t’t exist, a pronouncement that incensed Sid and made him want it all the more. Fortunately, Stephanie’s friend Zack, at twelve already an accomplished computer hacker, managed to locate the song on Kazaa on the Internet and duly burned a copy. This was passed on to Griffin, who conveniently forgot that the song didn’t’t exist and agreed to play it when Sid came up to light his candle. Ergo, problem solved, short of a lawsuit from the Artie Shaw estate for unlicensed performance. But Mr. O’Hare said not to worry on this score: He once knew a girl who dated Artie Shaw (though in a rare deviation from the norm, didn’t marry him), and was sure that he could parlay that connection to their benefit if absolutely necessary.
4. The photographer and videographer—getting along well. While planning his Godfather-with-Fiddler-overtones production, Cass Sunshine had decided that the photographs should resemble Hollywood stills (a new concept that he thought had great marketing potential). The Bennington photographer would certainly have balked at this directive, but the middle-aged photographer saw no problem with it, so long as he got paid on time.
5. The flowers—done. Bennet had gone back to the drawing board and created a just-picked-look centerpiece that was acceptable to Mark and Carla. Of course, as had been predicted, the price of said unpretentious arrangement had knocked the breath out of them.
6. The guest list—finalized! The cancerous growth of invitations had finally been staunched at 200 and now, with RSVPs in, had settled at a reasonable 150. The unexpected shortfall had come from two factors. Number one: A Florida friend of Carla’s’s mother-in-law had suddenly gotten it into her head that the almanac augured a snowstorm for the bat mitzvah weekend, and had scared some of the others, who were terrified by the word “accumulation” (i.e., that they might be stranded up north for an indefinite period to battle the cold and their children). Number two: A popular nurse at Mark’s hospital happened to have her baby shower fall on the day of the bat mitzvah. This obliged many of the nurses to choose between a cozy, familiar event and a possibly uncomfortable, unfamiliar one, with more opting for the former than the latter.
The checklist reassured Carla that the celebratory component of the event was under control.
Less so, the religious aspect—or at least one crucial part of it. Stephanie was fine with her Torah and haftorah portions, the scriptural readings that made up the bulk of her ceremonial performance.
The cantor had reported with gratitude that Stephanie actually had a lovely singing voice and an admirable sense of phrasing. The mumble and screech of many bar mitzvah children as they rushed headlong through their portions was the real strain of the cantor’s job.
The problem lay with the D’var Torah, which is to say, Stephanie’s speech. This was the section of the service when the bar mitzvah child was expected to demonstrate something more than pure rote learning. The D’var Torah was a commentary on the Torah portion, a kind of minisermon, and the one moment in the service when the formalized trappings of the event could be put aside for a glimpse of the child as an individual.
The D’var Torah requirement made sense on a theoretical level. On a practical one, however, it did not. To expect a newly minted thirteen-year-old to write a formal speech of any kind, no less one on a passage from the Bible difficult to fathom even by scholars rigorously trained in theological discourse, and then to expect said thirteen-year-old to perform it for a disparate group of relatives and friends who were itching to get their hands on the hot hors d’oeuvres whose odors were wafting in from the other room, was asking a lot.
The Education Committee at the synagogue, having weathered the process themselves with their own children, had done what they could to facilitate matters. They offered the following guidelines to aid the bar and bat mitzvah child in the preparation of the D’var Torah:
1. Summarize your biblical portion in one or two paragraphs. Keep this simple: No need to enumerate, for example, the number of goats in the entourage or to recite the genealogy accompanying a given character.
2. Relate some point in the passage to some aspect of your own life. For example: “Abraham’s worship of idols reminds me of the
time when I wanted to play Nintendo and didn’t want to do my homework. Just as Abraham eventually realized there was one God, I eventually learned that doing my homework was more important than Nintendo” (Alan Goldberg’s D’var Torah, September 1999). Please notice the parallel structure. Idols are to Nintendo as homework is to one God. Ask your parents to help you outline your portion so that you can see the logical structure more clearly and better organize the lesson you want to discuss.
3. Thank those involved in the making of this sacred and joyous event. Keep this to the basic groups: Mom and Dad, Grandpa and Grandma, siblings, rabbi, and cantor. An influential teacher or relative can also be added, but if you start naming your friends, you’ll never get to your party.
4. Explain your intentions for charity (tzadakah): i.e., where you will donate a portion of your bar or bat mitzvah gift money. Please note that a charity is a nonprofit organization for the public good. It does not include such organizations as the National Football League, the fines accumulated for your overdue video rentals, or Abercrombie and Fitch.
Uncomplicated as this template might seem, it did not, unfortunately, solve the problem. Fits of rage and frustration ensued as children were asked to summarize the densely irrational biblical passage, to extract a lesson that was not utterly unrelated to it, to thank an abhorred sibling, and to negotiate how much money from their bar mitzvah stash would go to the Jewish Federation or the American Cancer Society (groups that to the child seemed to have been designed to cheat them out of the little money that would be left them once Mom and Dad had put the rest away into the alleged college fund).
Most children had the whole thing flogged out of them
through threat and bribe, though not without scenes, biblical in size and intensity.
Stephanie was no exception.
Her portion involved Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. Mark had thought this a great windfall. “I can’t tell you how lucky you are!” he exclaimed. “My portion had to do with hygiene. There was a whole section about menstrual fluid—not the kind of thing a thirteen-year-old boy finds inspiring, at least not in front of his elderly relatives. Your passage is great. The seven fat kine and the seven lean kine—kine are cattle, by the way.”
“Duh,” said Stephanie.
“Joseph and the pharaoh—man, are you lucky!” Mark waxed on. Joseph’s story had always held a place in his affections. As a boy, he had fantasized about being like Joseph and interpreting the dream of a pharaoh, who in his imagination looked a lot like Mr. Rooney, his junior-high-school principal.
“The story is dumb,” said Stephanie sulkily. “Joseph has all these bad things happen to him, then he interprets the pharaoh’s dream and everything is fine. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe it means that life can surprise you,” noted Mark. “You can be down in the dumps one minute and things can suddenly change and put you on top of the world.”
“I think that’s a dumb moral,” said Stephanie. “Everyone knows sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen. Who cares? I’m not going to write that.”
“You don’t have to,” said Carla reassuringly. “Daddy’s only trying to give you some ideas.”
“Think about something else in the story, then,” suggested Mark. “Maybe you want to talk about pharaoh’s dream. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Lean and fat kine, fertility and famine. Joseph was a problem solver. You always liked to solve problems. Think of how good you are at Scrabble.”
“Scrabble isn’t a problem, it’s a game,” said Stephanie.
“You know what I mean—figuring things out, putting things together, that sort of thing.”
“No,” pronounced Stephanie. “Joseph wasn’t problem solving. He was just lucky. Everyone knows that dreams can’t tell the future.”
“But this is the Bible,” Carla pointed out. “All sorts of magical things happen.”
“Well, if it’s magical, there’s no lesson to take out of it. God just made it happen. He wanted Joseph to be right. Can’t I say that?”
“No,” said Carla, who had begun to realize that her daughter actually had the argumentative abilities of a Talmudic scholar with regard to not doing what was expected. “You have to find a lesson.”
The problem was duly brought before the rabbi a few days later in the pre–bat mitzvah interview. Rabbi Barry Newman was a very young man who had lately been catapulted into the position of senior rabbi when that personage, in the throes of a midlife crisis, had suddenly resigned to lead a congregation in Australia.
Newman, who had actually been hired a month earlier as assistant rabbi and had expected to spend years doing relatively nothing, had at first not known what to make of his sudden elevation to eminence and responsibility. During his first few Sabbath services, he had gazed out at the prosperous doctors and lawyers in the congregation, wondering what in the world he could say that they would want to hear. Fortunately, the cogs of the synagogue wheel had ground forward, carrying him along. He had met with the board for a pep talk, consulted some sermon crib sheets on the Internet, and been generally buoyed by a reflexive attitude of respect from congregants who had never noticed him before. He was working on counteracting his callow appearance with the growth of a small beard and the cultivation of a furrowed brow, and the general consensus was that he was “coming along nicely.”
“Okay, what have we here?” said the rabbi to Stephanie now, lowering his voice and trying to sound rabbinical.
“Joseph interprets the pharaoh’s dream,” said Stephanie glumly.
“And what do you think of Joseph’s interpretation of the pharaoh’s dream?” asked the rabbi. He had discovered that by asking questions that piggybacked on his respondent’s previous statement he eventually arrived somewhere.
“Not much,” said Stephanie.
“Okay,” said the rabbi, holding, if falteringly, to his method, “why not much?”
“Because dreams can’t tell the future,” Stephanie reiterated. “My dreams are always about things that don’t happen. Like being in Disney World with my friends or getting a real Kate Spade bag for my birthday.”
“Hmm,” said the young rabbi, taking this in. “Dreams can’t tell the future in your experience, but in Joseph’s they do. What do you make of that?”
“I make of it that it’s a story and not real life,” said Stephanie with dry clarity.
“Hmm,” said the rabbi, chewing his lip, “And why do you think the story is told that way?”
“I suppose so Joseph can get in good with the pharaoh,” said Stephanie.
“And why does he need to get in good with the pharaoh?”
“So he can get powerful and his brothers will come to him for help.”
“And why do his brothers need to come to him for help?”
“So he can forgive them.”
“And why does he need to forgive them?”
“To show that he’s a bigger person.”
“And there you have it!” sighed the young rabbi. The twenty-questions technique was supposed to work, but when the thing dragged on one could begin to have one’s doubts. Fortunately, he had now hit pay dirt. The idea of forgiving a sibling for a misdeed
was as tried-and-true as anything in the bar mitzvah lexicon. It would yield a predictable but charming anecdote of how said sibling had stolen something (a Nintendo game, a favorite hat, a Smash Mouth CD) and had been forgiven by the noble bar mitzvah child. To be sure, this was straying from Joseph’s interpretation of dreams and encroaching onto the passage of the following week, but these kids weren’t Sigmund Freud, and one made do.
“Okay, there’s something to work with,” pronounced the rabbi with relief. “Can you think of a time when you were the bigger person and forgave your brother when he acted badly to you?”
“No,” said Stephanie truthfully.
“Think about it,” said the young rabbi. “I’m sure if you try, you will.” He nodded to Carla, as if to say the ball was now in her court. “Bring in a draft next week for the dry run,” he told Stephanie. “We can put the finishing touches on it then.”
“I don’t want to think about it anymore,” complained Stephanie to Carla in the car on the way home. “I wouldn’t forgive Jeffrey if he sold me into slavery in Egypt and that’s final.”
“Well, maybe you can think of another lesson from the story,” said Carla wearily. “You still have a week to write the draft. Let’s talk about it later.”