Raising a bar mitzvah boy

EMILY SINGER

In this continuing series, Emily Singer shares her family’s aliyah experiences and stories from their first year in Israel, where they live on Kibbutz Maale Gilboa, a small religious community in the lower Galilee.

A few weeks before my son’s recent bar mitzvah, I get a call from my neighbor and friend Orit: “Hi, Emily. Shai’s bar mitzvah is coming up soon. Can I help you? We should get together and talk.”

A few days later, Orit comes over with a notebook full of lists and phone numbers. She begins asking questions. What are out plans? Where will we eat on Shabbat? Where and when is the party? Have we found a caterer?

Unable to answer any of these questions, we sit for more than an hour brainstorming possibilities. Orit suggests the simplest thing would be to have Shabbat meals in the dining hall of the yeshivah, so we can order food from their caterers. I tell her this plan won’t work because we are vegetarian. My friend looks surprised. “You mean you won’t order meat for your guests?” Orit is also vegetarian, but she wouldn’t dare cater a dairy Shabbat.

The next day, I see another friend in the infirmary. She asks how preparations are going. I say fine, but we need to find a good dairy caterer.

“Dairy?!” she asks, stunned. “You can’t have Shabbat with no meat! What will your guests eat?!” She is also vegetarian.

After my meeting with Orit, I receive an e-mail from a third friend, Noga. She wants to help with the bar mitzvah. When can we meet? I tell her Orit is already taking care of me. She replies authoritatively that she, Orit and I should get together and make a plan. We set a time, and Orit and Noga come over to my house with cookies. Noga begins, “So, what would you like the kibbutz to do for you?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, people will bake cakes for kiddush and set up Friday afternoon. And, of course, the youth group will set up the party. But would you also like people to prepare the food for seudah shlishit?”

“Er ...” I reply, embarrassed, “We weren’t planning to invite everyone for seudah shlishit.”

“Of course you weren’t,” she laughs. “They won’t stay. They will just prepare the meal, set it up and go.”

They are going to cook for a party they aren’t even invited to? We tell her thanks, but we are already planning a potluck for seudah shlishit. Our friends coming from out of town are making the food.

“Really?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “They are already asking what they can prepare. We did the same for their bar mitzvahs. One friend even created a sign-up chart on Google Documents for us.”

“Wow!” she says. “It’s like you and your friends have your own virtual kibbutz!”

With the food taken care of, our biggest problem is accommodations. If you recall, we live on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere. We have reserved all available rooms at the kibbutz inn, but this won’t be enough for all our guests. So we turn to the trusty kibbutz Google group.

The Google group is a way of disseminating information to the community in a timely fashion. We receive daily reminders of classes, meetings and store hours. But the bulk of messages (several daily) are about two things: (1) People needing or offering rides, and (2) People needing or offering apartments for Shabbat.

At the beginning of the week, there will be one or two announcements, “Looking for apartment this Shabbat.” As the week progresses, the notices become more frequent and more urgent. “STILL looking for apartment for Shabbat for my in-laws. Please help!” Towards the end of the week, the messages change to, “The Cohen family is going away for Shabbat. First come, first serve!”

Noga suggests we post a request for apartments right away, and repeat it every week. We receive an overwhelming response. The week before the bar mitzvah, we have enough space to include all our guests. By Shabbat, we no longer need most of our rooms reserved at the inn. The secretary for the inn graciously allows us to continue canceling rooms until the last moment. I tell her that a real business in the real world would never let us do this, or at least they would charge a cancellation fee. She says she knows, but they never have in the past, and they aren’t going to start with our son’s bar mitzvah. Finally, we draw our own line by declining the two offers we receive on the street Friday morning.

A week before the big event, I notice on the Google group that Noga has sent a message asking who wants to help with the Singer bar mitzvah. A few days before Shabbat, I am told who is in charge of what. Our friends, Michal and Rutie, are responsible for kiddush, for which I am not to lift a finger. My friend, Esther, known kibbutz-wide for her creativity, will set up the lounge for our meals. The gardener will use his tractor to collect the tables that have been generously loaned by several families. The treasurer, who has extensive experience with party planning, takes charge of the party room design. The youth group will decorate it with our balloons, streamers and Baltimore Ravens pennants.

Friday morning comes and goes in a big blur. While Shai’s friends are putting the finishing touches on the party room, Orit and Esther are setting up and decorating the lounge, laying out the tables, making beautiful, earthy centrepieces, and turning the food stations and counters into works of art. They don’t miss a detail. Esther needs more pine cones for the centrepieces. She sends kids out to collect them. I insist that she really doesn’t need to do so much, but she won’t leave until the place is perfect.

When the caterer arrives, I sort through the food. I am sure there is not enough pasta for 80 people. I frantically ask everyone in the room what they think. Esther also seems uncertain. Ross says not to worry because there is always too much food, but I still worry. Esther loudly assures me that I should trust the caterers because they are professionals. Then she walks over to me and whispers, “I’ll boil you up two extra bags. I’ll bring them by just before dinner.”

An hour and a half before candlelighting, the rooms are set and the guests start arriving. Everything is ready except the cake, which my friend, Tzvi, is picking up along with 10 quiches from a place near Jerusalem. There is a bit of a scare when he goes to pick up the order. The caterer says they don’t have an order for Singer – but, not to worry, they can throw something together. She happens to have these 10 quiches in the freezer.

What about the cake? I had spoken with the caterer the night before, and she had said they would be working on it all morning (a football field, on which I would later add a large 3-D chocolate football that appears to have come crashing into the cake). When Tzvi describes the cake, the caterer, who has said she knows nothing about a cake, says, “Oh! You mean

Emily? Of course I have the order!” ... and out comes the cake.

The rest of the preparations go off without a glitch. Unfortunately, none of our relatives is able to attend but, between the kibbutz community and our friends, we feel like we are surrounded by family. Shabbat is magical – a reunion of friends we know from college, Vancouver, Baltimore and Israel.

Shai reads his parashah beautifully, and receives many compliments. Everyone is excited about the Sunkist chews we have brought from America. As we pelt Shai with the candies, a friend remarks, “The Singers belong in the Guinness Book of World Records!”

“Why is that?” I ask.

“You have succeeded in throwing candy from America all the way to the bimah on Maale Gilboa!”

After kiddush, we go for a tour of the kibbutz, with a long stop to watch them milking the cows. After lunch, there is a giant football game that continues through most of the afternoon. The day flies by. Before we know it, we have an hour to get ready for the party. But no worries – Noga and Orit are already there setting out the food. A young guy from the kibbutz is setting up the music. I barely know him, but he refuses to take money.

The party is supposed to start at nine, but the pizza is delayed. People are milling about and I’m getting nervous. Ross decides to change the schedule and begin with the slide show our daughter Rivital has arranged. As it concludes, he announces into the mic that there are 40 pizzas and sodas, but they are upstairs (four flights, no elevator). If we could get seven volunteers to help shlep, we can get started. Half the room empties, pouring up the stairs. Within minutes, everyone has pizza and the party is ready to begin.

Shai gives a speech about his studies, and Ross gives a beautiful, tearful account of what it was like to prepare with him. Shai’s siblings and good friends sing him a song they wrote: “Tonight, there’s a party on the mountaintop, edge of the world....” Then, his youth group friends do a special dance, dressed in Baltimore Ravens colors, and sing another song about what a good friend he is.

Next, Rivital puts on the dance list she has prepared for the party. The kids dance to “Cotton-eyed Joe” and the “Cha Cha Slide.” After a lot more dancing, one of the kids from Shai’s youth group brings in a giant jump rope. The kids jump rope to the music for another hour. When the party is supposed to be nearing its end, I bring out the enormous football cake. But no one wants to stop dancing. The cake, along with all the beautiful desserts that people from the kibbutz baked, goes untouched.

By the time the party starts to slow down, I look around and realize that the room is almost completely empty. Not of people, but of mess. The food is all packed up in bags and cartons. The chairs have been stacked and the tables folded. Most of what we need to take home has been piled neatly in our car. I guess at this point I’m not surprised with my kibbutz community. Just amazed. And blessed.

Emily Singer is a teacher, social worker and freelance writer. She is currently working on two books. Singer and her husband, Ross, were rebbetzin and rabbi of Vancouver’s Shaarey Tefilah congregation until 2004. The Singers spent two years in Jerusalem and then moved to Baltimore, Md., where Ross was rabbi at Congregation Beth Tfiloh and Emily taught Judaic studies at Beth Tfiloh High School, until they moved to Israel in 2010. They have four children.

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