Three weeks before the darkness — Coronavirus, not the JC’s final-demand electricity bill —we attended our eldest grandson’s barmitzvah. Thank you, thank you, please God by you.
It was a genial occasion, enjoyed by one and all including to my surprise the celebrant himself, who was cool enough to share a joke with his anxious ancestor as I stood beside him on the bimah.
“Were they any grandparents at your barmitzvah?” I quizzed a senior relative at the kiddush. “Nah,” he shook his head. “They never lived long enough in the 1950s.”
I shouldn’t have asked. Barely had the words left his lips than the plague descended and men of my age began filling the obituary pages, a generation wiped out like that of Noah’s Flood. Maybe grandads were never meant to be seen at barmitzvahs, after all. But let’s not be morbid.
What struck me was that the boy was having a tremendously good time, which goes against human nature and Jewish tradition, not to say my own personal history.
I hated every minute of my barmitzvah and can still remember puking up my guts some time on the Sabbath afternoon, whether from puerile gluttony, post-traumatic stress or a careless caterer. It was a hot July day, so I’d narrow it down to the plate of glatt-kosher tongue.
Throwing up was the least of my discomforts. No part of a barmitzvah in those days was designed with the boy’s interests at heart. It began with invitation rows — who not to invite —and continued with a visit to a dimly-lit branch of Burton Menswear, there to be fitted for a suit of no definable colour and decidedly scratchy texture.
The suit, precisely one size too large (“so he can grow into it”), would be sent to Gateshead to be ripped apart for prohibited wool-linen threads, acquiring a shape even more crumpled than the boy it was meant to adorn.
The business of learning one’s Torah reading was not too arduous, just a matter of memorisation, but having to do it in that exaggerated barmitzvah-boy singsong offended my sense of propriety so I deliberately mumbled bits of it just to retain self-respect. Afterwards, I was rebuked from the rostrum by Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld who announced that “the barmitzvah boy kept looking up to see if the rabbi was following; well he was”. He twinkled at me, one rule-bender to another, and that was my only joyous moment.
The party involved keeping hostile persons at opposite ends of the lawn from each other and the presents were, frankly, uninspiring. A watch, six Parker pens, some lovingly embroidered religious requisites and enough books to barricade my room against German invaders if I piled them strategically, as I did, against the door. The books were of an improving and religious character. They were well intended. I still have a few of them, unopened.
Several were inscribed to me by the author, giving me my first lesson in the secrets of that long-suffering occupation. I understood, at 13, that the main reason for writing a book was so that you could give it away with a flourish as a barmitzvah present. But how many barmitzvah invitations does an author receive in a lifetime, and how many unsold books must he shift? Some day, they would be dumped on a skip. There is no happy ending to a writer’s life.
Today I look at barmitzvah boys and think how unbelievably fortunate they are in the galaxy of branded phones, video games and motorised gadgets that parental friends have flung their way, how utterly carefree they are on their coming-of-age day, burdened only by the mountain of thank-you letters they must write.
But then I look again and my envy evaporates. Today’s barmitzvah boys have challenges we never foresaw. At all synagogues, except among the ultras, girls have won batmitzvah parity and, being generally brighter, more articulate and better-looking, they outshine the poor boys in every field except snot-balling.
A barmitzvah boy is but a stuttering substitute for a terrifyingly cool young woman in her first heels who dazzles the community with a riff of scriptural commentaries by Rashi, the Rosh and, yes, the Rif (he’s in Wikipedia and see me later for page refs).
If I were a barmitzvah boy today, I would hide in the loo. But they don’t, do they? These boys are my heroes. They confront certain defeat with the spirit of Dunkirk. Like Nelson at Copenhagen, they turn a blind eye to the enemy and, from the bimah, sing their blessings note-perfect to the gallery. The enemy can wait. These boys are just so cool.
