When my father turned 13 years old, he celebrated his bar mitzvah in a cramped, aging synagogue in Depression-racked Newark, N.J.
After the religious ceremony, which marked his ascent to manhood, his parents followed tradition and hosted a modest celebration in the synagogue’s basement, where the guests, all as poor as my father’s family, presented him with gifts: little bags of raisins and nuts.
All that changed when my father and millions of other veterans returned from World War II with no intention of repopulating the industrial cities or farm towns they’d grown up in — and with every intention of getting good jobs and then new homes.
Indeed, once they’d saved enough, they moved their new wives and infants to what they viewed as idyllic, middle-class suburbs — suburbs with strands of gleaming new houses neatly framed by front and back lawns — suburbs that clearly epitomized what these new homeowners were seeking: “the good life.”
By the close of the 1950s, many U.S. Jewish veterans had enough disposable income to underwrite the b’nai mitzvah of their children.
This age-old ceremony called for b’nai mitzvah to stand in front of relatives and friends packing a synagogue. They would read and chant Hebrew passages from Scripture — passages they’d spent months learning with tutors in a bid to keep pace with their peers and to meet their parents’ demands.
The parents also wanted to impress and entertain their guests, and so, by the early 1960s, they were removing Jewish traditions from the ceremonies and emphasizing lavish parties that would bump them up a notch on the social totem pole. If the party was impressive enough, they reasoned, they could rake in enough cash to amortize their party and still pocket a nice haul for themselves.
When the bar mitzvah boys of the 1960s finished college in the 1970s, a slew of them became investment bankers, surgeons, attorneys, CEOs and so on.
And as new tenants of the upper-middle class or higher, they not surprisingly wanted their own sons to have unrivaled b’nai mitzvah.
Which is why from the 1980s to the present, many parents have shelled out $15,000, some $25,000, to stage pyrotechnic celebrations, some with themes, ranging from Broadway and sports to the Old West or “Casablanca.”
To make this happen, parents hire stellar “party planners” who script the event and deploy specialists to handle the ballroom, lighting grid, seating plan, table decor and giant video screens on which guests can watch themselves, each other or movie clips expressing the theme.
The guests, of course, show up in costumes pegged to the theme.
Even the parking valets are theme-attired.
Meanwhile, another party feature is the retention of a professional camera crew to videotape the ceremony and the party, and then edit the footage, arrange the music, weave in a narrator, add computer graphics and in the end produce a touching, three-hour video.
While the camera crew shoots, the b’nai mitzvah star, prompted by parents, “works the room,” pocketing gift envelopes filled with untold amounts of cash, stocks, corporate bonds and similar financial goodies.
Not to mention generous gift certificates for teen couture at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue.
In addition, the areas around the parents’ tables are heaped with high-end offerings, including computers, video cameras, scuba gear, gold I.D. bracelets, CD players and companion libraries of the hottest films and music.
Such material gifts, in tandem with all the liquid counterparts, produce what so many parents want: the complete conversion of a bar or bat mitzvah into a handsome monetary proposition.
So now, in too many congregations, the relationship between Jewish religious tradition and the b’nai mitzvah is at best illusory and at worst dead.
Nevertheless, concerned rabbis, caring synagogue members and Jewish communities at large hope to heal this fracture by returning the b’nai mitzvah to its original simplicity and dignity.
I’m not sure what this would entail.
But God just might smile on some raisins and nuts.