Praised are You, O Lord our God, who has freed me from the punishment (i.e. responsibility for the deeds) of this one.
-Traditional parent's blessing at a bar/bat mitzvah
Here at Shorashim, a hilltop rural community of about 100 families
(~450 people), a typical Shabbat morning service draws about 20-25
worshippers, all of them residents, with an occasional guest family
staying the weekend. When a Shorashim kid celebrates a bar/bat mitzvah,
the synagogue is packed (80 seats plus standees in the margins). Of
course there are family and friends from outside, but the crowd is
mostly us. The celebration is a big deal – besides participation in the
service and Torah reading, there are skits and speeches, and usually a
Kiddush lunch set up and served by volunteers. A real ceremony of
acceptance into the community. Of these there are about 8-10 in a year.
But
then there are also "outside" bar/bat mitzvah celebrations, by families
from surrounding communities that don't have an active synagogue, or
who are seeking an egalitarian setting. These too occur once a month or
less, though recently we had a wave of three weeks in a row. Awkwardly,
the attendance of Shorashim congregants tends to drop on these days, and
sometimes we barely reach a minyan of our own members. We should, of
course, welcome these guests and try to make them feel at home and to
show them our brand of Judaism. However, many of us feel that the mass
of "strangers" who are just here for the bar/bat mitzvah (including the
kid and family) – usually people who wouldn't think of taking a prayer
book unless an usher thrusts it into their hands – sort of take over the
service and make us feel like strangers. We sing. They watch. Throwing
the candy is the highlight for them (recently, the barrage actually drew
blood from the bar mitzvah boy). This past week there was a whole
peanut gallery of the celebrant's peers who had to be shushed until they
finally fled outdoors. It's a dilemma: On the one hand the regular
attendees are entitled to their customary worship experience; on the
other hand, a synagogue should be open for anyone – you really can't
judge people's intentions, or know the impact the experience might have.
Needless to say, Shorashim is not unique in this regard. I know that
most Reform and many Conservative congregations all over the world
suffer from this syndrome; here in Israel, at least, it is rare to find a
Reform synagogue that even has a Shabbat morning service unless there
is a bar/bat mitzvah: there is no "regular" community of morning
worshippers, so the bar/bat mitzvah becomes purely a family event, not a
rite of passage into a community. Interestingly, early Reform tried to
eliminate bar mitzvah and replace it with confirmation. The leadership
felt that the bar mitzvah was at too young an age to have meaning today,
and preferred confirmation as a group ceremony, at a more mature age,
so that it properly was a kind of graduation. If their plan had worked, I
wonder if our synagogues would look different today on Saturday
morning. Did the bar/bat mitzvah kill Shabbat morning worship? Or did it
save it from simply fading away altogether due to a lack of interest in
a Shabbat that lasts beyond Friday evening, or to an alienation from
the synagogue prayer experience?
Here at Shorashim, most weeks we're just us, and there's a sufficient
core of old and new members to support a lovely, participatory service,
a praying community. It is pretty stable, probably growing – but if so,
very slowly. Will welcoming guest bar/bat mitzvahs do us in?
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