5/17/14

today, a scorchingly-hot, sunny california day in LA, i went to my friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. sheldon mandel, let’s call the friend… or the son. doesn’t matter. a double jewish name, with a particularly challenging first name to bear, for whoever of the two was the name bearer. what were the parents thinking? sheldon? so obviously a name of head turning, of eye-rolling, of clucking… in modern-day america anyway. but perhaps also … to some… maybe the parents… a name, too, of… tradition? a name of weight and beauty… hebrew, jewish, american tradition.

brought me back fifty… three years. to my own mortifying, memory-searing bar mitzvah. on westbury, long island. 1960. before the rabble-rousing had begun. before dylan (nee bobby zimmerman of hibbing, minnesota) landed in the west village.

before the country’s first awareness of the quagmire in vietnam. before long hair, student protests,  and civil rights. long before woodstock and a man on the moon. 1960. still the end of the eisenhower era. button down, conservative, post war prosperity.

i was naturally 13 years old. the date of demarcation of a young jewish boy when he joins the jewish “community” and becomes… “a man”. a day of celebration, at least historically, for most jewish families, throughout the religiously-challenged diaspora. funny word, diaspora, meaning the decentralized world-wide congregation of jews not living in jerusalem, the “holy land”, ever since 1492, when the catholic king and queen of spain, ferdinand and isabella, not only financed christopher  columbus’ “discovery of america”, but also… kicked out every muslim and jew from spain.. unless they, of course, would convert to catholicism. if not, it was… out… into the diaspora of eastern europe, or persia, or turkey, or… beyond. the other choice being… to stay in spain as a jew… or muslim… and meet the torture wracks of the holy inquisition.

so maybe that was my heritage… my association to my bar mitzvah. torture and pain. of course, not the physical torture wracks of the inquisition, but rather… a modern-day, new york jewish-adolescent suburban equivalent.  an ominous day of social pressure, of communal conformity, of personal discomfort and emotionally-scarring humiliation. sounds  a little rough and a wee bit exaggerated, eh? well, listen closer, my incredulous friends.

in 1960, i was in the crush of westbury’s bar mitzvah season fury. all the birchwood boys from the suburban schtetl i was raised in were getting the same. in front of every family member and casual acquaintance that our parents could afford to invite, we all had to recite by memory… the mind numbing and sing-song…. haftorah  (weekly portion of the jewish bible)… in the synagogue’s saturday morning sabbath ceremony… whether it was orthodox, reform, or in our case, middle of the road, conservative. then after the great event, we all had to endure our parents’ pricey country club parties in nearby syosset or woodmere, don’tcha know? pimply 13 year boys forced to invite precocious 13 year girls, without their, the boys, knowing how to dance. without their knowing how to operate out of the boyhood pack. it was painfully awkward. at least it was… to me.

i remember the conversation that i had with my parents… about having the great event at all. i was in their bedroom one saturday morning… an unusual occurrence, my being in their bedroom. they were still under the pastel-checked covers, as i was standing next to my mother’s side of the bed, the side closer to the doorway. i was in my 12 year old cowboy-colored pajamas, and i was fighting for my life. “no, i don’t want to have it!” “are you sure?” my mom asked pointedly, “all your other friends are having them.” “i don’t care! i don’t have any girls to invite.” chuckle, chuckle, from both my parents, neither of whom could possibly understand the pressure i was under. “well, that doesn’t matter. just invite who you want to. a bar mitzvah is not about how many girls come to your party.” what? did they have any idea what they were talking about? “didn’t matter how many girls came?”

i had just started junior high. finished 7th grade. they had moved me out of the general student population into the “e” program, with all the smart, awkward kids. i had begged my mother not to make me go, but she’d insisted. so there i was… with nicky blumfeld, with the coke bottle glasses. and jeffrey glickstein, the one day valedictorian. and all these new girls who were so pretty and attractive, but to whom i certainly didn’t have the courage to send an invitation to my holy bar mitzvah. all the girls of the 6th grade, when just the year before i was class president, they were left far behind. now there was just bernee kaplan, the pushy over achiever who had a crush on me, and patty liguori, the tall, bespectacled volley ball player who was friendly to everyone. i certainly wasn’t brave enough to invite jeanne winters, who i’d had a crush on since first grade. or linda perl-raver, who was on the cheer leading squad. or enid mackey, who was the prettiest girl i ever saw.

“well, it’s totally up to you, son.” my father’s voice reached over my mother’s half-prone body, putting every ounce of pressure that was humanly possible on my 12 year old fragile psyche. “up to me?” what kind of perverse psychological warfare was this? knowing full well how important it was to both my parents to have their only jewish son, their future “son, the doctuh”, bar mitzvahed in front of the eyes of the congregation… that they weren’t even members of. that’s right, my parents didn’t join temple sholom like all their sheep-herded neighbors. they didn’t go to friday evening or saturday morning services. maybe once a year, to the memorial yahrzeit service on yom kippur to honor their deceased parents, when even the most non-religious jews showed up, hoping to be “inscribed in the book of life” for one more year. but they hadn’t been in years. what was all this rigamaroll about my being bar mitzvahed?

“up to me?”

i stood there with my bare feet on the uncarpeted, hard wooden floor. what did i know? my whole life had been formed by my need to please… my parents. i was a “good boy”. i was honest. i told the truth. i got good grades. to get into a good college. the best college. i did everything that was expected of me. “up to me?” that was a mockery. a hypocrisy. even though i couldn’t have stated as much, standing there bedside, so much pressure on my 12 year old shoulders… to make my parents… happy. to make my parents… proud. it certainly wasn’t my desire to see uncle milton, my father’s second cousin, who still lived in bensonhurst, brooklyn. or my fondness for aunt bertha or tanta edna, who i’d see every three years at our “cousin’s club” extended family picnic in alley pond park in queens, right across from creedmoor hospital, the state “loony bin”, where i would intern at age 19, on a ward of state-cared for autistic boys, who we, the staff, medicated on high doses of thorazine, but who still mutilated themselves with physical blows of self-loathing… even worse than me and my 13 year old jewish friends in birchwood, long island, in 1960.

“up to me?” how could i say “no” to my parents, knowing only too well how much they wanted me to be bar mitzvahed. “up to me?” even though i had no girls to invite and hated the stupid hebrew school training where they taught us how to read the archaic, right to left, language of the levant, without ever teaching us what… one word meant. “aboh”, father. “emoh”, mother. hebrew words that we learned isolatedly in school , but which were not used once in the haftorah, which we just had to phonetically memorize and sing in our adolescent-cracking voices for our bar mitzvah service. “up to me?” who couldn’t stand the loud bragging of barry silverman who lived just up the street on valentines road in our all-jewish suburban “development”. or the penny-pinching cheapness of my entire parents’ generation, who had to withstand and survive the cruelty of the depression and the nightmare of the holocaust. “up to me?” who even at twelve, slight 85 pound years old, had already become a “self-hating” jew? how could i possibly say to them… anything other than….

“ok, i’ll get bar mitzvahed.”

i remember the days leading up to the great event, the first saturday after labor day of 1960. it was like waiting on death row. i had… as i’ve explained… only had the courage to invite… bernee kaplan and patty liguori… and patty, at the last minute, had to cancel. now it was going to be up to bernee, alone, to represent her entire gender at my lop-sided bar mitzvah. certainly the most humiliating of the season. twenty five testosterone-forming boys and one, pushy and precocious over-achiever. (i must say, if anyone was up to the task, it was bernee.)

it was the morning of the ceremony. i was feeling sick to my stomach. the last place i wanted to go… was to temple sholom. sure, i had my haftorah down, but my mother had also had me write a special “bar mitzvah speech” that i was supposed to deliver at the end of the service, thanking all the people who had come, and telling them all about, in all my 13 year old wisdom, how happy i was to “become a man”. and what exactly that meant. “i want to thank my wonderful grandparents for all the groceries they brought over every sunday afternoon from their blue collar grocery store in middle village, queens. and i want to thank my black sheep, uncle harvey, for getting arrested so many times during his troubled youth, continually disgracing the rosenberg family, that i will one day make a publicly-embarrassing documentary film about my relationship and identification with him. a film that will be called “the poet and the con”.

of course, i didn’t say that exactly, but rather something far more innocuous and ingratiating. still, i remember rabbi aronov, the mealy-mouth, but kind leader of temple sholom’s congregation, putting his arm around me after the speech, and in front of the whole congregation saying, “i want to congratulate you, eric, for becoming the newest member of our temple sholom congregation. so new… in fact… that you still have the price tag… on the talit around your shoulders.” “hahahahah”… to my surprise… a few twitters of laughter from the congregation. then… “hahahahahahahaha”…. the full congregation’s outburst of belly laughs hurled directly at me. “talit”, the blue and white, prayer shawl that all men of the tribe have to wear in temple when “praying”…. that i too, was wearing this morning, apparently with… the price tag still on it. the audience, perhaps my first, laughed uproariously. and i, for sure… cringed injuriously. it was definitely not a fortuitous or auspicious sign for… “my becoming a man”.

after the ceremony at the temple, things only got worse. we went to the long-anticipated and dreaded party…. not at the syosset or woodmere country club. oh no, that was too conventional, and more importantly, too expensive for mr. and mrs. trules… the same parents who would 5 years later, tell me i had to go to a state college, instead of to a prestigious ivy league one that i had worked so hard to get into… because it was the “only one they could afford”. after making me work my ass off in high school to get into the “best college.” after driving me to cheat on my tests and contest my grades with my teachers and finish 11th ranked academic student out of a class of 700, they tell me, “oh by the way, you have to go to a state school.” just like old skinflint, james tyrone, tells his consumptive son, edmund, that he can only afford to send him to the state hospital, in eugene o’neill’s autobiographical “long day’s journey into night”. but i wouldn’t come to identify with the actual and emotionally-injured o’neill and his skinflint father, james o’neill, until quite a few years later.

in the meantime, on this sad september day… the bar mitzvah party was held in… our back yard. that’s right. no ritzy long island country club like the other bar mitzvah boys, but on the screened in back porch on valentines road. all one hundred guests, including 25 of my best boyhood friends, and… the one girl i had managed to invite, bernee kaplan. it was worse than i even imagined. i wanted to hide the whole afternoon. but instead, i had to meekly accept all the “congratulations” from my uncle miltie and my tanta edna and from what seemed like an endless procession of unknown relatives and parental friends, most of whom would lean over sinisterly, and tuck an envelope of “bar mitzvah gelt” into my suit jacket’s inside pocket. at least it gave me something to do. and at least i used this awesome amount of $850 ten years later, when i got in my 1964 green-camouflaged painted pontiac tempest named “wolfie”, shortly after my college graduation from the state university, to which i didn’t even attend the graduation ceremony, to finally cut the crippling umbilical cord that had kept me doing my parents’ bidding my whole childhood, and to start to discover my true, non jew, “self”… by driving as far away from westbury, new york, as was humanly possible.

but today, there was still the bar mitzvah party on valentines’ road to deal with…. the longest 5 hours of my childhood. i have no idea how, or if, anyone else remembers the day. but i guess that’s not the point. because i do. i remember the crippling feeling of shame and embarrassment that i had anticipated ever since i had “folded” in my parents’ bedroom and accepted the burden of pleasing them one more time. all i can say beyond this, is that at least there was no bar mitzvah band to dance to in the back yard. i think my father, making another financially prudent choice, had decided to put together his own “bar mitzvah” mix that we pumped through his gigantic audiophile speakers for the whole neighborhood to hear. if there was any dancing, i didn’t do it. and you’d have to ask bernee kaplan exactly how many awkward 13 year old boys she’d had the chutzpah to spin around the yard. all i finally remember is… my father being drunk, the only time i’ve ever seen him so, before or since. apparently, he “over-celebrated” a bit, or perhaps he’d allowed his bar mitzvah pride to get the best of him. but he ended up across the street in the bolson estate yard, puking his guts out. all in all, it was a sad, exhausting day for the entire family, and i cannot say that it brought me any closer to my own judaism

.

and now… it’s a scorchingly-hot sunny california day in LA, 53 years later, and i’m sitting at the bar mitzvah of sheldon mandel, father or son, i don’t really know which. i’m sitting in one of the long pews, or whatever you call the seats at a hollywood reform temple, where all my own searingly-silly, childhood bar mitzvah memories are flooding back over me. i feel sad and impotent and empty and emotionally disturbed, all at the same time. i can’t believe how isolated i feel from my own judaism. how disconnected and alone i feel sitting under this high, but not holy, hollow ceiling, amongst invited strangers and fellow member jews of the congregation, wearing yarmulkes (skull calls) and talits, neither of which have i chosen to wear. i haven’t been in temple in years. i have absolutely no desire to ever go to a temple again, even though my christian-raised, indonesian wife has wanted to go. i can’t believe that i am part of no spiritual-religious community whatsoever, jewish or otherwise. that indeed, i have a self-protective arrogant contempt for the jewish friends i know who practice judaism, who are members of a temple. it seems so weak-minded to practice such an antiquated form of… what? worship? faith? belief in god? hah!

yet i’ve struggled my whole life with the word “faith”, a word, a concept, so desired and hungered for, yet so untenable and out of reach. how can you believe in a god made in man’s image? an omniscient, omnipotent being who made the world in six days and then rested? how can you believe in miracles, in saints, in crusades and inquisitions and holy wars in the name of god? the one god. the best god. your own god. the better than “the others” god. a cruel and vindictive god who slaughters and maims in his own name, who listens to countless and endless prayers but who doesn’t really hear or answer any of them, except by coincidence or synchronicity? how can you believe that someone died for your sins or walked on water? that there’s a heaven or a hell, an afterlife, an alchemy of  reincarnation, a fantasy of coming back to life after death?

how? like i said, out of weakness. out of fear. out of need. out of our human beings’ unique ability to… make things up… entire cosmologies, infinite pagan gods of all too human infirmity. zeus. apollo. vulcan. greek. roman. persian. chinese. japanese. norse. aztec. mayan. ad infinitum. all created from our need… to know. to understand. to explain… our own human natures. then… to have the nerve, the chutzpah, to make up the one and only god… the judeo-christian-islamic god. to invent bibles, and miracles, and fatwahs, and bar mitzvahs…. all inventions of the mind, the spirit, all… “the opiate of the masses”… to distract, to rationalize, to comfort. yet… what wouldn’t i do… to be able to… believe? to have a little faith? to put all my too-rational, too-scientific, self-doubting, counter-religious… intelligence… down… for just a bit. to exchange it for some… solace, some comfort, some inspiration, some… faith?

believe me, i’ve tried. judaism, buddhism, baptism, hare krisha-ism, science of mind, chanting, meditating, begging, praying, affirming and claiming, reading, writing, and arithmetic. none of which… have worked for me. none of which… have i allowed… to work for me. leaving me one sad, unrepentant, died in the wool agnostic, turned… confirmed and all-too comfortable atheist… sitting here this saturday morning… in spiritual confusion and pain. god, he/she/it’s a sham, right? a delusion. an excuse. yet again… i so envy those who… believe. who have a little… faith.

in fact, i know a few, alright only two, intelligent christians, who… go to church on sunday. who believe in god. who believe in evolution. who believe that jesus died for their sins. who are kind and considerate and tolerant and compassionate. who aren’t cynical or jaded or angry or too… judgmental. they’ve suffered the same slings and arrows of life that i have. that we all have. they’ve lost loved ones, been disappointed in love, in work, in family, in faith… yet they still choose to believe. because like all spiritual believers, like all spiritual seekers… it’s just too difficult… not to. that’s why it’s called a leap of faith. a leap beyond logic and doubt, beyond intelligence and argument. a leap i’ve yearned to make, and perhaps been able to make, maybe once or twice, but never have been able to sustain, beyond a class or two, beyond a teacher or two, beyond my own skepticism or two… or three… or four… or… as they say, ad infinitum.

after a while, the sing song liturgy of the reform temple’s kantor settles me down. it’s a little “new agey” for me. what happened to the good old eastern european ashkenazy “dovaning” (the repetitive and rhythmic sonic praying of the male-dominated new york religious jews of my youth)? in the middle of the service, an african american security guard with an extended club and gun belted around his waist, bolts into the front of the congregation, wrestles with and removes some guest, who apparently isn’t supposed to be there. it’s sort of funny, at least to me. and at least it jolts my all-consuming bar mitzvah blues reverie from my brain, allowing it to recede back into the tangled cobwebs of tortured emotional memory.

at the bagel nosh after the service in the temporary parking lot set up for an asphalt reception, the bar mitzvah boys’ basketball crashes directly into my 2nd plate of bagels and cream cheese. (the lox has been quickly downed by the ravenous guests; the prudent hosts haven’t bought enough.) i take it as a sign though – the b-ball hitting my bagels – that i’ve had more than enough to eat – and that bar mitzvahs are still indeed, cheesy affairs – and that at least my vietnamese black silk suit has avoided the goopy cream cheese and southern california freshly-squeezed orange juice.

we all go home for a mid day rest. and at 6:30 pm, we all show up again for the bar mitzvah after party.

the one on the decorated hollywood sound stage. the one with an 8 minute video tribute to sheldon, the bar mitzvah boy, if indeed that is his actual name. the one with the hired DJ and the roving appetizers. the one with all the bar mitzvah boy’s friends. 20 boys. and 20 girls! OMG! or something like that. i think that’s what most of the girls are saying, as they play musical chairs and practically kill each other for the last chair standing to win the game. or maybe that’s what they’re saying as they sort of “stab dance” at each other, and occasionally at some of the geeky or cool boys – but only for less that 20 seconds at a time. it seems odd to me, but i guess it’s an indication of their casual indifference – the “stab dancing” – never being too engaged or committed to your dance partner, or even, to the dancing itself. safer that way. more casual. why the hell didn’t they teach me that in the “e” program?

the DJ is good. he gets the kids up, both the boys and gurls, to do hip hop line dances. and he gets us old fogeys up to do “old” line dances – by sending the kids enthusiastically over to the endless gourmet pizza table. i shake my booty hard – to semi-heart attack levels – to make up for all the dancing i never did at my own bar mitzvah – all the dancing i never did at anyone’s bar mitzvah – or party – or wedding – or whatever — until i was 22 years old and finally cut that choking umbilical cord – by becoming, in fact, a professional modern dancer, don’tcha know? a bit of poetic irony, wouldn’t you agree?

but that’s how life is, me thinks. emotional scarring, lifelong compensation… a slow, hopefully-creative trot to the grave. doesn’t matter what you believe? or what you believe in. or maybe it does. because it certainly makes things a little easier to not fight and worry and doubt your whole way through. believe me, i know about fighting. and doubting. and worrying. and resisting. and judging. and fearing. and about bar mitzvah blues…. which i’m quite sure… sheldon mandel, and/or his father… will never have.

two lucky jews………………. indeed.

mazeltov, gentlemen.

 

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