There are a lot of interesting bar mitzvah minhagim that people have, and one of them is for the father to stand up and thank the mother for doing everything.
And I know this, not just because I’ve done it at my own sons’ bar mitzvahs, but also because people hire me to write speeches for their simchas that they can pass off as their own, and I always write—without even asking—that the wife did everything. And not a single husband has edited that part of the speech. But did she?
And is part of this minhag for the father to actually do nothing so he could say this in the speech? Because that part I haven’t done.
But the truth is he does plenty. She couldn’t have done it without him either. For example, I don’t want to assume gender roles in your family, but who taught the bar mitzvah boy how to lein?
The father did. This isn’t something they cover in yeshiva. Everyone always says that mothers are the more patient of the parents, on average, but who sat with him for a year and a half, cramming pesukim into his head one at a time as older pesukim leaked out the back?
As a father, you have to teach your son a parsha that was chosen based on when he was born or when it was a good week for your wife to plan a bar mitzvah or for the relatives to come in who are not the ones teaching him the parsha—though they’re perfectly willing to correct him day of—rather than just letting you pick a week with a short parsha and build the whole event around that. Look, he’ll be an adult forever after this. We could have this party literally any week going forward. We made his sister’s kiddush when she was three.
And yes, you didn’t have to teach him the whole parsha, but you already committed when you started from the beginning, instead of from Maftir, and the last thing you want to teach your son is to give up when things get difficult. And anyway, you kind of hoped that once you taught him enough of the parsha, it would register in his head which trup make which sounds, and he would figure out the rest on his own. And by the time you realized it would not kick in, you were far enough along that you had to teach him the whole thing or else answer questions about how you overestimated your son’s musical ability.
And then there’s this mistake he keeps making in this one passuk, and you work hard to correct that mistake, and as soon as you do, he starts making a mistake in another passuk. You finally correct the mistake in that second passuk, and suddenly he’s making the mistake in the first passuk again.
“I thought I fixed this!”
It’s like trying to repair really old plumbing that is determined to leak somewhere, when you’re not a professional plumber but have seen it done a couple of times. And all you have is masking tape.
And every time he goes over the pesukim you’ve already done, he goes either too fast or too slow and too loud or too quiet. Every time.
And then you find out that the whole time he’s been reading from the wrong side of the Tikkun.
“Wait; that was WITH nekudos?”
And you had to do all this work in between chazzering Gemara with him and maybe trying to finish a mesechta on the side and still leaving time to teach him an entirely different set of haftarah trup in a way that won’t confuse him, as well as writing him a couple of speeches that he apparently needs more time to practice saying than you get to come up with them.
Point is, you can spend a year teaching your son how to lein, which is something he can be proud of accomplishing to the point where, for the rest of his life, every time someone mentions that parsha, he has to say, “That’s my bar mitzvah parsha, actually!” and then demonstrate that this is so while everyone else waits so they could continue the conversation they were having.
Or you can spend that year thinking up a reason to tell people when they ask why he didn’t lein.
It’s not easy. With many of the things that women do for a simcha, they find friends who can help them out, like, “This person knows where to pick flowers!” and “This person’s bubby has a dessert gemach!” but there is no help in the leining department. Even when you find out that your brother-in-law has the same parsha as your son and won’t stop breaking into leining pesukim you’ve heard a million times when you’re trying to have a conversation with him, so you say, “Oh! Uncle Shmuel can teach you to lein!” Suddenly Uncle Shmuel turns colors and instantly regrets mentioning that it was his parsha. And he says, “I…I can farher him once.” And you look at him like, “Thanks for your help. That’s where I’m stuck. Farhering him once.”
And nobody speaks about this. Nobody gets up and announces that the father taught the kid to lein. Everyone just assumes that if the kid leins, it was the father. Or the father twisted some rebbi’s arm. Likewise, though, I would argue that people assume that if the bar mitzvah was nice, it’s the mother. The hall didn’t come this way. During the day, this is a school.
I’m not downplaying what she does. I’m just wary of her sitting there during the speech and thinking, “Hey, he really did do nothing! He just said!”
And it’s more than just leining, I think. Stay tuned next week to see if we can figure out if there’s anything else the husband does. Because according to him, there is not.
Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].
