In 1967, following Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War, the Polish communist government joined other Soviet bloc countries in launching an “anti-Zionist” (read anti-Semitic) campaign, which, by the end of the following year, drove out most of the country’s remaining Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
In the fall of 2007, then-rabbinical student Shmuly Yanklowitz traveled with a few of his colleagues from the Modern Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York to San Diego. Wildfires had just burned through 500,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,500 homes. “I didn’t know what we were going to do,” Yanklowitz said at the time. “I just knew that we had to be there.”
If you imagined the typical Jewish physique, bodybuilder is probably not what would come to mind. In pop culture, Jews are skinny and bespectacled like Woody Allen, or chubby and unshaven like Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill. Sometimes the rare tough and rugged Israeli shows up, fighting terror and being macho. But big, buff and tan — that’s something you rarely see. So how did a nice Jewish girl end up becoming a champion in the sport of hulking supermen like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronnie Coleman?
Indeed, bar or bat mitzvah training today has become increasingly reliant on technology to complement learning — from YouTube videos of kids chanting and online lessons with a cantor or tutor to on-the-go studies with an iPod.
With apologies to Monty Python, the day can best be described as, “And Now for Something Completely Different.” The guests started filing in, anticipating the usual bar mitzvah service at our cozy little temple — maybe the only one named for a city that carries the name of a saint: The Santa Monica Synagogue. Temple members, as well as family and friends who attended our other children’s b’nai mitzvahs, knew what to expect when they arrived. They’d find a physically small but big-of-heart place featuring an amiable guitar-strumming young cantor, Steve Hummel, and a rabbi, Jeffrey Marx, who is as good at telling shtetl stories as Sholom Aleichem.
Ryan Gurman and Brandon Newberg, both 13, have never met. They live in different parts of Los Angeles, go to different schools, attend different synagogues and celebrated their bar mitzvahs almost a year apart. Yet over the past few months, the young men have shared a common purpose: helping sick and injured children at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
When I walked into an on-call catering job a couple of months ago, I was genuinely thrilled to discover that we would be serving food for a bat mitzvah party. Since I had never had a bat mitzvah — let alone attended one — it seemed like a fun opportunity to create some memories around an event that everyone else seems to remember so fondly from their youth. I pictured a beautiful, ceremonial transition into adulthood for this little girl. I had no idea just how “adult” these little ladies and gentlemen were truly about to become.
“Gather, assemble yourselves and let me tell you what will become of you in the end of days,” Jacob says to his sons. These are the closing moments of the book of Bereshit (Genesis), and of all the portions in Bereshit, none is more poetic and none more opaque than Vayechi.
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