I fidget sitting next to the bimah or podium as Rabbi Washer officiates services. He effortlessly completes a prayer, acknowledges his congregation, faces me and nods for my a-li-yah or summoning to the bimah. I’m nauseated; sweaty, suffocating in thick tweed.
My Bar Mitzvah was in February 1967, at the Jewish Community Center in Teaneck, New Jersey (pronounced JOY-z). The ceremony should have been in my family’s native Bronx, but our 1958 “white flight” landed us in Teaneck with its other migratory Jews and supposedly good schools. This Bar Mitzvah was a miracle that almost never happened.
By the time I started Hebrew school at age 10 in 1964, my educational career was five-year jinxed. The first day of kindergarten was inauspicious; Mom shepherded me onto the wrong school bus. Upon arrival at Hawthorne School instead of Eugene Field, I tried to explain the mistake, but “Nothing doing, young man!” Several hours later I finally convinced the principal beyond a reasonable doubt, the burden of proof required of children in 1959. Mom finally picked me up. “Imbeciles! Nothing but imbeciles,” she ranted. I understood her meaning and enthusiastically agreed, sealing a half-century mother-child bond cemented by mutual disdain of self-important adults.
Hebrew school was a bust because I just couldn’t concentrate. The nearby New Jersey swamps beckoned, especially as they metamorphosed into Interstate 80 which starts its 3000-mile journey to San Francisco just a mile from home. Each night, I’d lie in bed listening to metronomic pile drivers thump, thump, thump. In 1964 when I was ten, my worried parents took me to a psychiatrist, Dr. Friend, to cure my “nervousness” and lack of concentration. Friend reeked of smoke. He owned two bizarre ashtrays: one with opposite-facing silver storks, each of which could hold a cigarette in its open bill, and one stand-mounted device with a spinning mechanism that forced the butt into a hidden chamber. He preferred board games to actual therapy, relishing his weekly chessboard triumphs. Stymied as Lewis Carroll’s “Alice-the-pawn,” he ridiculed his ten-year old patient for being an angry, ungracious loser. Instead of addressing his own issues—maybe he suffered audio hallucinations and heard the white knight talking backward—the smug fraudmeister prescribed a tranquilizer/antipsychotic, Thorazine, so I could “calm down,” behave, and succeed at school. Not likely.
If Friend wasn’t in such a hurry to die from lung cancer, he would have later learned about Ritalin and a new DSM diagnosis, attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Our last chess game was terminal; Dr. Friend taught me well. 1) Bullies don’t deserve a fair fight, and 2) Their victims could fight dirty while maintaining the moral high ground. I used a unique “castling” maneuver. Instead of rearranging king and rook, I stunned the chess board with a Rod Laver backhand. Pieces flew across Friend’s rigged battlefield, peppering the room. A solitary bishop landed on top of his swirling-ashtray stand, flushing both bishop and Friend from my life.
I stand up and tentatively plod across the bimah to the lectern. Rabbi Washer holds the Torah’s mahogany cylinder handles and gently rolls open the kosher goatskin scroll; it mocks me, my guts flayed, stretched, and etched with fear. He removes a white, note-sized piece of paper from his jacket pocket and surreptitiously tucks it into the scroll. He smiles, nods, and leaves. I’m alone. The paper “cheat sheet” looks new, freshly typed, all in hyphenated C-A-P-S. My transliterated “savior.”
Bar Mitzvah requires mastery of ancient Hebrew, impossible without intense concentration. One must read several paragraphs from an actual Torah sans vowels. Just imagine reading in vowel-less English. In those days you couldn’t even buy a vowel, Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White was barely eleven at the time. Drug-addled, I would zone out after reading only a few English sentences. How then, could I defy the odds, reach Hebraic zenith, and “become a man?”
Enter the enigmatic Rabbi Julius Washer. A conservative pillar of Teaneck’s Jewish community, his stoic countenance and sonorous voice demanded respect, even fear. But concocting the “cheat sheet” belied that image. In a compassionate moment he ignored his rabbinical training, Jewish tradition and even God, extending great kindness to a troubled boy. It wasn’t until years later that I realized Rabbi Washer’s humanity. He graduated from Yeshiva University (rabbinical college) in 1932 and had 35 years of experience by 1967. At the time of his death in 2004 at age 94, he had been a rabbi for 72 years! In the thousands of Bar Mitzvahs he officiated, I wonder how many were like mine. Was I the first?
I take a deep breath and peer at the congregation. My parents, grandparents and baby brother sit in the first two rows. Both yarmulke-crowned grandfathers don silk tallises or prayer shawls. Hebrew might as well have been Chinese or Greek, the intricate calligraphy a mind-numbing blur. Part of the secreted paper, my ersatz Torah, is obstructed, its left side wedged into the scroll. I gingerly tug, not wanting the mahogany cylinder to roll off the lectern, unwinding the Five Books of Moses like toilet paper rolling down the stairs. The Torah cylinder rocks slightly, but I extricate the paper without uncoiling a Talmudic faux pas of biblical proportions.
Like Rabbi Washer, my father’s parents were a contradiction. He was Jewish Orthodox and a Republican; she, an atheist and a socialist Democrat. They had moved from the Bronx to Brighton Beach in 1962, just after their 50th anniversary. The new beachfront high-rise served as a platform from which my cousins and I launched missiles off the 21st-story balcony and watched them go splat, like chopped liver on Ritz crackers, then spritz a “two-cents-plain” soda water directly from the old-fashioned tinted bottle. Ocean winds often propelled these edible treats to other balconies; free food and beverage par avion. Sometimes, wind gusts atomized the soda water into a drenching sea spray. We’d re-enter Apartment 21-D and Grandma would say, “Oy, vat is it? Rain-ink?”
The Grandparents owned an early-60’s invention called color TV and an even cooler contraption, an analog remote control. Working this thing was like crank-starting a Model T. You had to click hard – like a key on Mom’s Royal typewriter when making nine carbon copies – and the green channel dial physically rotated. No jumping from two to nine; seven clicks required. My brother Ben was only three at the time. I’d frighten him with magically moving channels, then accuse him of messing with the TV. I enjoyed being an illusionist, the man behind the curtain, whether parroting Rabbi Washer’s cheat sheet or creating a fantasy world of moving channels. Several years later, I created urinary “wiz-ardry” with impunity. When my brother got his first puppy, I went downstairs, relieved myself, and then complained to Mom about Ben’s new dog pissing up the basement.
Grandma Fuchs was the woman behind the curtain; a beguiling Machiavellian who kept mental note of shit-listed relatives. She hid behind a linguistic “curtain” when venting her un-grandmotherly, XXX-rated spleen. “That shtick drek shmo!” (piece of shit fool!). I wondered if Yiddish was evolution’s way of censoring adult language from children. I’d ask Dad to translate, but he would just blush. I was determined to learn more about this language, so rich in condescension, scatological reference and sex. I wondered about those XXX-rated movies along 42nd Street. Did some old Jew transliterate the script into Yiddish for gentile actors? Did the movies have English subtitles?
Grandma prepared chocolate milk with “U-Bet” kosher chocolate syrup calling these kiddie cocktails “hoyshki-boyshkis.” But hers was not a life of kosher piety. She, the trickster atheist, duped Grandpa, the Jewish orthodox, into believing that his food was kosher; that his meat and dairy were served on their respective, exclusive plates; and that the plates were washed with their respective, exclusive soap. Who thinks up these things? She rejected biblical law in favor of “cheat sheet” pragmatism.In her hoyshki-boyshki mélange of manipulative rascality, razor wit, ironic sarcasm, and uppity atheism, I saw myself.
I especially loved Grandma’s dark, twisted sense of humor. As a stand-up comedian-in-training, I aspired to wow the Catskill Mountain resorts, or “Borscht Belt,” with Fuchs-isms. But if comedy bombed, Bar Mitzvah taught me that there’s always money – I netted over $1000 in 1967 dollars that day – in sleight-of-hand exhibitionism: magician and divorce lawyer came to mind. I loved being a performance artist, a clever boy.
The mahogany cylinders rest quietly. The comforting English phonetic transliteration of my assigned section of the Torah is clearly visible. An eerie silence smothers the sanctuary. Both grandfathers clear their throats. My underarms radiate moist heat like a vaporizer inside the tweed canopy.
I read while chanting in flagrante delicto:
“B-O-A-R-U-C-H A-T-A-H A-D-O-N-A-I
E-L-O-H-E-I-U M-E-L C-H-H-A O-L-A-M....”
Like a barking dog, I can’t hear myself. Is my voice too high, too girl-like? I don’t want to chant in flagrante castrato! Am I intelligible? Suddenly I lose all fear and float dreamily, lip-synching words; a marionette on transliterative strings.
Dead silence. No applause. Did I fool them? Rabbi Washer walks to the lectern, and addresses the congregation. “Now Steven would like to say a few words.” He steps aside, but I can’t remember a word other than “today I am a fountain pen,” a one-liner from the 1930’s when engraved pens were the de rigueur Bar Mitzvah gift. I fumble for my 3x5 cards, galvanizing my guts with visualizations of stand-up comedian Henny Youngman delivering one-liners. Will God cop my comedic cherry?
“Good shabbos.” Show the crowd how I can throw around colloquial Hebrew. “Today I am a man. My five years of hard study made this possible.” Rabbi Washer frowns, perjury compounding our conspiracy. The grandparents kvel and why shouldn’t they be overjoyed, I’m performing for them. “I’m so happy that all my grandparents could be here today. We learned from the Torah it’s all about family, that blood is thicker than water, and there’s plenty of blood in the Bible.” I comically pat the scroll as the glib sacrilege blushes my face.” Henny would shout, “I love this crowd!” to liven things up or divert attention from an awkward moment. But this crowd grows subdued; I need to turn my beet red face into rhetorical gold….
“My Torah reading was from Exodus where God gave unto the Jews the Ten Commandments. When Moses returned from Mt. Sinai after talking with God, his face was bright red, almost burnt, forcing him to wear a veil before his people. I feel like Moses today, reading God’s law from the Torah, my face flush like his.” Maybe Moses and I both blushed for the same reason, because of our bold-faced bubbameisters. They’re buying this shit. I’m in overdrive and it feels good….
“In conclusion, shalom and God bless.” I’m done! My speech moved the crowd. Rabbi “Alibi” and I pulled it off. He shakes my clammy hand. I can’t wait to pee.
Later that day, we all went to see Fiddler on the Roof at the Imperial Theatre. Only my parents and I knew the truth about how I “became a man.” I think Grandma would have appreciated my performance even more if she were privy to the fraud. I knew she was strange, but a child’s wisdom is visceral, right-brained. It lacks articulation. Dr. Ben, my “Brother-the-Shrink” who was Mom’s unwitting therapist and ghoulish keeper of closeted skeletons, later told me Grandma’s story. Orphaned in 1894 at age six, she slept in Polish barns, suckled Polish goats, and was adopted by Polish Jews by age eight. At eighteen Celia Buchbinder was married off to the first man who would have her. As “loving” mother to her first born, she forced Uncle Dave to eat his own excrement as punishment for soiling his underwear. He was three. Oh, Celia! You’re no longer my role model.
The Bar Mitzvah was my metaphorically life-defining event. Clergy ordained in-authenticity, minting a counterfeit man destined to a lifetime of benign frauds. After repeating seventh grade, I decided on a career in law. What better way to become my very own “Rabbi Washer?” I skipped high school, received a GED and headed to college and law school. Like the Egyptian architect Imhotep, I built pyramids; mine of sturdy, durable cubic zirconium; his of authentic stone. I've become the lovechild of two strangers: Rabbi Washer and Celia Buchbinder.
H-O-Y-S-H-K-I – B-O-Y-S-H-I-K-I-S anyone?
U - B-E-T!
