Have you ever been sitting at a bar mitzvah and wondering when the father is going to wrap up what he’s talking about already?
Last week, I started speaking about bar mitzvahs, and how the father always says, in his speech, that he would like to thank his wife for doing everything. Everything. And everyone in the audience is looking around the room, at all the decorations and the colors that she’s turning, and thinking, “Yeah! It looks like she did do everything!” The wife is thinking that too. Is anyone thinking, “Well, I mean he’s giving the speech, though, isn’t he?”
But as a father, putting this into your speech is a minhag that was handed down to you by your father, who got it from his father, back through several generations of men who wanted to remain married. Because to be honest, you definitely did stuff. You did things that your wife can’t even imagine. Just like there are things that she did that you can’t even imagine. That’s why there are two of you.
For example, last week, I spoke extensively about how you have to teach your child to lein, one passuk at a time, which takes approximately a year and a half. If you have boys closer in age than that, then someone’s not leining. You have to choose which child you think has the most potential and make it very obvious that you feel that. Or you can have them both do the same parsha. No one knows when your son’s birthday is anyway, outside of his immediate family, unless he was born near a yom tov. Whereas if your wife is spending a year and a half planning the bar mitzvah, that’s maybe too much. What’s she going to do when your kids get married? Talk everyone into an 18-month engagement?
And then there’s the fact that every guy in the world who doesn’t like speaking still has to MC a bar mitzvah. And he has to look up a d’var Torah. Luckily, he’s been through the parsha a thousand times, so he has a pretty good idea of what’s in it. And what’s in it is very hard to apply to bar mitzvahs. Yet he has to write at least four speeches -- even more if he’s trying to convince his other kids to speak.
Or for maybe one of the speeches, you can just have your child say whatever d’var Torah his rebbi is sending home that week, sight unseen. Let all your relatives hear your son mispronounce “Reb Yeruchom Levovitz” for the 50th week in a row.
And you also have to ask several relatives to speak, including at least one relative from each side, because if you only ask one side, the other side might be offended, even though no one on that side actually wants to speak. You have to beg your brother-in-law to speak so that your father-in-law, who does not speak at these things, will not be offended. And your brother-in-law does not care.
And, as much as your wife complains, you’re the one who has to sit at the dais. And daises (Daii?) are the worst. There is no one across from you. It’s like you’re spending the entire evening giving a public performance, and that public performance is: eating. Your conversation choices – in a simcha that you are paying for – are the person to your immediate right and the person to your immediate left, and that’s it. And one of those is your son. If you want to talk to anyone else at the table, you have to lean WAY forward or WAY back. Like imagine you set up your dining room table like that one Friday night. Just everyone in a row on one side of the table. It’s like is your roof leaking on the other side, or what?
I understand that the wife does plenty for the bar mitzvah that the husband doesn’t even think about, and I’m not denying those things, if I know what’s good for me. 100%. I’ve spoken about this in numerous articles. But at the end of the day, if the wife made the simcha without any help from the husband, there would be no pshetl, no other speakers, the boy wouldn’t lein, and everything heavy would still be in the car.
And that’s not all you do. Speaking of things that the father has done over the course of several years, how about taking the kid to shul? Forget a year and a half – this has been going on for almost ten years. At some point this commitment was suddenly foisted on the father to bring a wriggly jumping jack to shul and teach it to sit still for progressively more and more parts of davening, while all the fathers around him don’t seem to be doing the same for their sons, as far as he can tell. You can’t just leave the house and run out to shul anymore; it has to become a ten-minute process that begins with the finding of the shoes. You have to hang up your son’s coat when you get there, which by the way is a coat that neither you nor he wanted to bring. You have to get him to behave. You have to help him find the place every five minutes.
“Do you know what everyone’s saying? They’re saying Shema! You know Shema!”
“I said Shema like five minutes after I got here. You said to daven everything I daven in school. How much do you think I daven in school?”
Plus you have to get the child food at the kiddush before you feed yourself, you have to make sure the kid gets something from the candy man every week and then doesn’t touch anything afterward with those sticky hands, you have to walk him home while holding his hand that is for some reason still sticky, and also your other kids’ hands and also your tallis and seforim, all while keeping your hat on against the wind with… the power of prayer, I guess.
And this is all so that when your child’s bar mitzvah comes, he’s not standing in shul like a deer in the headlights.
“So when is leining?”
“Which one’s the bimah again?”
“Where do they keep the Torah?”
“Which way do I assume is mizrach?”
And this is all fine and part of chinuch. But it’s every single week for like ten years. And you have to do this with multiple kids at once, all on their individual levels. And every time you bring another kid to shul, your wife’s Shabbos morning gets easier. And if you point that out, boy are you in trouble.
And then, over time, you have to show the kid how to follow leining. Particularly the week that the child turns twelve, and a baal koreh gets up, and you say, “Pay attention to how this guy leins. This is your parsha!” And then the baal koreh proceeds to do everything you tell your child not to do. He’s using an entirely different havarah, making mistakes galore, he pronounces several letters differently than you do, and it doesn’t matter that much anyway because your kid has been on the wrong page since Sheini.
Again, this isn’t a complaint, but let’s not pretend it’s not a job. Let’s not pretend that doing this has made your life easier.
And who went with the child to buy a bar mitzvah suit? Sure, sometimes the mother comes, but never without the father. The two of you also had to buy him a weekday hat and a Shabbos hat, and you had to make sure the weekday hat is somewhat collapsible, because if it’s not, his friends will make it collapsible. But the mother said, “I don’t know anything about hats,” as if they are more complicated than the sheitels she expects her husband to understand, and then the husband had to take him. Or at least come along so he can pick one hat out of an entire store of what as far as the mother can tell are entirely identical hats.
Also, let’s face it, your wife is not teaching your son how to put on his tefillin. And particularly the finger-wrapping part that is based on your family minhag that you personally don’t know how to talk your son through. You have to just do it on yourself, like a necktie.
And then which parent is managing the dancing during the bar mitzvah, exactly? It’s you. You have to figure out how to manage fifty 12-year-olds whose names you don’t know, because no one else is parenting them. And also making sure they don’t walk off with the schnapps. Or pour coke in the centerpieces. Is your wife doing any of that? The only reason you’re not parenting them all now, during the speech, from your position at the mic, is that a lot of them seem to have walked out when you started speaking. That said, maybe you need to cut the speech short.
So anyway, in closing this article, I would like to thank my wife for doing everything. I couldn’t have done this article without her. I would also like to thank my parents, who are here in spirit but in actuality are in their own home because they don’t show up every week to watch me write my articles. I would also like to thank my rebbeim, who always said I would never amount to anything, and thanks to them, I was able to manage my expectations. I would also like to thank everyone who came from far and wide to interrupt my writing process, including my kids, who have been home for weeks now, and apparently also some baby chickens. Most of all, I would like to thank G-d that I’m done.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.