Growing up in Massachusetts in the 1980s, Mark Oppenheimer knew he was Jewish on some level, even though his non-observant parents “practiced leftist politics instead of religion.”
“Leftism, not Torah or Zionism, was what mattered,” reports Oppenheimer in the introduction to his new book, “Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America.”
When Oppenheimer began college at Yale University, his eyes were opened.
“For the first time, I heard the ram’s horn blown on the Jewish New Year, when James Ponet, the brusque, bearded Yale rabbi, barreled into the dining hall where I was eating, stood on a chair, and summoned a long, sharp wail from the shofar. It was bizarre, but intriguing. At Yale’s Kosher Kitchen, I attended my first traditional Sabbath meal,” he writes.
“Slowly, I came to wonder about the absence of Judaism in my childhood.”
More comfortable with studying Judaism than practicing it, he enrolled in religion classes, ultimately earning a Ph.D. in religious history from Yale. He also worked as a religion writer for the Hartford Courant and visited Israel.
Increasingly curious about the resurgent popularity of b’nai mitzvah, Oppenheimer decided to take a trip across the county to investigate the phenomenon firsthand. He details his observations in his book.
His analysis is not scientific. Instead, it takes an admittedly subjective approach that reads like an extended piece from a multifaceted essayist: The religious historian in Oppenheimer slips in enlightening bits of historic background; the journalist in him captures vivid details and dialogue that evoke a documentary film; the spiritual seeker in him vents, laments, marvels and muses about his experiences.
His journey begins in New York state, where “the lack of rigor, the watery Judaism, the shortened service, the relative absence of Hebrew” bother him at a Scarsdale Reform congregation.
Continuing his research at an Upper East Side Reform congregation, Oppenheimer finds that the service has “all the false grandeur of a melodrama in a silent-film movie house.”
After some late-afternoon b’nai mitzvah services, he follows the adolescent cell-phone-and-spaghetti-strap crowd and “crashes” their parties. Consider the casino night in the bowels of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel:
“At one station, boys in blue blazers and girls in little black dresses gathered around a roulette wheel, placing bets with fake money. There were two blackjack tables with regulation green felt tops … dealers were flipping cards, coaching the children to stick when the dealer shows 5 and always to split 8s.”
While in New York, he finds contrast on the Upper West Side at a Conservative synagogue “famous for its lively music.” There, “Saturday services last close to three hours, and seven congregants chant Torah — which means that even two b’nai mitzvah celebrations make up only a fraction of the day’s worship time.”
Even so, he is deflated to see how frequently b’nai mitzvah services are pompous and mechanical, and parties are out of control.
Oppenheimer moves on to New Haven, Conn., where he finds “the antidote to Scarsdale” at a Conservative, egalitarian synagogue.
The congregation is “low-key and haimish, not materialistic or trendy.” The bat mitzvah girl is “venerated for being the kind of young Jew rabbis and teachers and parents hope for, spiritually committed and spiritually gifted.”
And her party, not surprisingly, is typical for the congregation — a buffet lunch hosted by the family for everyone at the synagogue, with people invited to visit the family home afterward.
In Tampa, Fla., Oppenheimer sits around the kitchen table with a colorful Torah tutor and her student. He accompanies them to a rehearsal complete with a cranky rabbi, and follows the last days of the bat mitzvah process to a fulfilling finish.
In the Ozarks, he takes the reader to a Jewish Renewal bar mitzvah in Fayetteville, Ark., where the four-piece klezmer band at the celebration lunch is a non-Jewish group called the Po’ Goys — the least eccentric of the 75 attendees.
Next, in Anchorage, Alaska, he finds a Chassidic family whose bar mitzvah boy can barely contain his eagerness to take on the considerable responsibilities of Lubavitcher manhood.
Finally, in Lake Charles, La., he gets to trace his own roots and gets to know a pair of senior citizen b’nai mitzvah, both “Jews-by-choice.”
Throughout, the author offers opinions and draws conclusions but imposes neither, and asks unanswerable questions. He seeks and uncovers both the unique and the universal in the range of b’nai mitzvah services and celebrations.
“Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America” by Mark Oppenheimer (272 pages, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $24).