“The following day, at five o’clock, Ben’s friend stopped by again. Once again, he had forgotten his wallet. Ben scolded his friend, but he gave him a sweet anyway. At six o’clock, Ben got hungry again and took something from the case to silence his growling stomach. And at eight o’clock, the woman in the torn dress returned and Ben gave her food.” Rabbi Fred used a marker to point to the times as he mentioned them, leaving small dots next to the five, six, and eight.
“This pattern repeated every day for one week, then two. Finally, Ben’s boss, the baker, called him in. ‘We have a problem,’ he said. ‘And it has been happening at the exact same time every day for two weeks.’ What do you think the baker said next?”
“ ‘You’re fired’?”
“Well, that’s what you would think, right? But instead, the baker said, ‘I am not going to fire you if you can tell me what time I’m talking about.’ ”
“Five o’clock?” I tried. I figured that giving food away to a friend was worse than giving it to a poor person or grabbing a snack while working. I wasn’t sure where Rabbi Fred was going with this. I never gave away snack-table items. I hadn’t even worked the snack table since the day he and I took a walk.
“Guess again.”
“Six?”
“Nope.”
“It couldn’t be eight o’clock,” I said, thinking out loud, “because giving food away to a poor person at closing time isn’t bad, is it?”
“Any other guesses?” asked Rabbi Fred.
“Not really. Three o’clock is the only other time you mentioned.”
“Correct.”
“I give up,” I said.
“You can’t give up. You just solved it.”
“Three o’clock? That doesn’t make sense.” I pointed at the clock drawing with the rainbow of hands and dots. “He never took anything at three.”
“You’re right,” said Rabbi Fred. “But here’s the thing. At three o’clock each day he would see the baker, his boss. So every day at three o’clock he had the opportunity to explain, or apologize, or offer to pay the baker back. Instead, what did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said quietly.
Rabbi Fred nodded. “And that, according to the baker, was the bigger problem.”
“Oh.”
Rabbi Fred stood up. He took Dash’s phone and left me alone in his office.
I looked at the clock drawing. Then I looked at the books on Rabbi Fred’s shelves. They all seemed to be judging and accusing me. Theories on Evil, read one. Little Failure, another read. Too Late for Redemption? read a third. Sure, the title was stated as a question, but I was pretty sure I knew the answer. Rabbi Fred had just told me.
I waited for him to return with my moms so we could have the awful conversation we had to have together, which I was pretty sure would involve everyone getting mad at me. Maybe even Rabbi Fred, who never raised his voice. I closed my eyes.
The water ran and ran.
Other than that, the silence was deafening. Maybe that is what the song means, I realized. Maybe silence has a sound that you can only hear when it’s so painful to be alone that you’d be grateful for anything that might chase it away.
Even yelling.
A lot of things happened in the days that followed.
Not good things. Bad things.
For example, I had to write a lot of notes.
Like this one:
Dear Grandma Beth,
I hope you are doing well. I am writing to tell you that my bar mitzvah will not be taking place on April 30. I know that date has been on your calendar for a long time, and I know you were planning to come. The good news is that I will be having a bar mitzvah! I’m just not sure when. It’s a long story.
I will let you know my new date when they tell me. Give my love to Grandpa Joe when you visit him.
Sorry and please don’t be mad.
Love,
Noah
I also had to write to the caterers, and the DJ (who, luckily, was a friend of Enid’s), explaining what had happened and asking if they could please consider refunding our deposit. And at Rabbi Fred’s “strong suggestion,” I wrote a letter to my moms apologizing for letting them down.
The letter writing was one of the consequences imposed on me. The other was what the letters were about. It might sound dumb after the Israeli dance fight and Rabbi Fred discovering that I had Dash’s phone, but I have to admit that I didn’t see it coming. I had never heard of that happening to anyone before. I had thought I’d be a Hebrew school legend for inventing the Kings and Queens of Comedy Cabaret. Instead, I would probably go down in Hebrew school history for being the first kid ever to have his bar mitzvah revoked.
It happened like this. After Rabbi Fred left me alone in his office, he returned with both my moms, plus Rabbi Jake and Phyllis. They all looked very serious, like they’d already been talking about me.
Rabbi Fred led off by saying, “Up until this year, Noah’s behavior at Hebrew school has never been a major problem. Perhaps he hasn’t always been a model student at all times, but he’s certainly never done anything that would cause us to question his character or his commitment.” He mentioned the Israeli dance fight and having to speak with me repeatedly about my attitude toward Noa, but he mostly focused on the situation with Dash’s phone. He reviewed the facts as he understood them:
1. I knew the phone I found was Dash’s.
2. I did not return it or turn it in, even though I knew (because Rabbi Fred told me) that it had been reported missing.
3. Instead, I read his private messages.
4. And I lied, claiming I did not know of the phone’s whereabouts.
5. Then I showed Dash that I had the phone, but did not return it to him.
6. And the rabbis only discovered that I had it when it fell out of my backpack in Rabbi Fred’s office.
As Rabbi Fred ticked off my misdeeds on his fingers and calmly explained how I had violated a variety of our temple’s written rules—as well as unwritten expectations—something dawned on me. Dash knew I had the phone, yet he didn’t rat me out to the rabbis. And his mom’s text suggested he’d told her I had it and that he was going to get it back from me. Was he planning to talk to me? Was there hope for our friendship after all?
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of my moms responding to Rabbi Fred.
“I’m not defending Noah’s behavior,” said Karen. “But as I’m sure you’re aware, this has been a rough year for him.”
Jenny chimed in. “Dash and Noah have been close friends for years, and Noah used to sleep over at Gil’s house all the time. And on top of Gil’s death, it seems to Karen and me that things have been a little rocky between the boys lately.”
“We’ve noticed that here, too,” said Rabbi Jake, like I wasn’t even there. “And we’ve certainly taken that into consideration and, at times, cut him some slack.”
“The thing is,” said Rabbi Fred, “we make our b’nei mitzvah schedule very far in advance, in anticipation not only that the children will use the time to prepare, but also that they will become mature enough to take on the increased responsibilities. However—”
“Can I say something?” I asked.
“No,” said both my moms at once. “Wait your turn,” added Karen.
Rabbi Fred continued. “Occasionally, there is a child who demonstrates that he or she is simply not ready to be lifted up, as it were, as a bar or bat mitzvah. When this occurs, the rabbinical staff discusses the circumstances and tries to determine if extra time will benefit the child’s emotional development and readiness. In light of Noah’s behavior recently,” he concluded, “we feel the best recourse may be to defer his bar mitzvah ceremony. We are confident that in six months to a year, he will rise to the challenges and demonstrate his readiness.”
“Can I say something?” I repeated, even though now it definitely seemed like it was too late.
“Of course,” said Rabbi Fred.
“Please don’
t take away my bar mitzvah,” I said. I could feel the tears coming, so I struggled to get the words out before I completely lost it. “I found the phone—I didn’t take it. I tried to give it back, honest! And I took good care of the phone while I had it. I charged it, and put it in our rice jar, and washed it so it wouldn’t smell like pee.”
“Wait, what?” said Jenny.
“The point is,” I continued quickly, “I’m really, really sorry.”
Rabbi Fred spoke gently. “Listen, Noah,” he said, “I know you’ve been working on your Torah portion and looking forward to celebrating with your family and friends. Just to be clear, we’re making a decision not to take that opportunity away but to postpone it for the time being. All the same, I wouldn’t blame you for feeling sad and frustrated and angry. I hope in the days to come you’ll see that what we’re actually doing is fulfilling our jobs as your teachers. In order to embrace you as a full member of our community, we need to believe you are ready.”
“I am!” I said.
“I know that you want to be,” he answered. “And that’s a good thing. It means you’re headed in the right direction.”
The rabbis let us go home and said they would talk some more. But Rabbi Fred called the next day to tell my moms that they stood by their decision. Karen gave me the news, explaining that, according to the rabbis, the consequences needed to be major because I had broken several temple and Hebrew school rules, including fighting, taking something that didn’t belong to me, lying about it, and violating the privacy of a classmate. The rabbis didn’t specifically punish me for sending fake texts to Chris while pretending to be Dash, or for putting text swaps like “fartknocker,” “armadillo butt,” and “wiener” for “hi,” “you,” and “okay” in his phone. Possibly because they were already punishing me for the other reasons. Also because I’m not sure they were aware that I did this stuff.
There were other consequences that didn’t come from the rabbis. Like Chris hating me. Not that we were ever friends, but we didn’t cross over into being actual enemies until the whole Israeli dance war broke out. Now Chris and all the other seventh-grade boys who used to be my friends hated me.
Noa also hated me now. On top of all the seventh-grade boys hating me, the Israeli dance war translated into all the seventh-grade girls hating me, too. For all I knew, the fifth and sixth graders hated me as well, because they looked up to the seventh graders and tried to do whatever they did.
And, of course, Dash hated me most of all.
If anything was worse than that, it was probably knowing I let my moms down. The look on Karen’s face when she got off the phone with Rabbi Fred made me sadder than anything I had ever experienced, except for Gil’s death. Jenny seemed pretty upset, too, and she’s not even Jewish. I thought about all the times my moms had driven me home from Hebrew school or gone to hear me sing in a special youth-choir service when I was little. Neither of them deserved this. They didn’t mess things up. I did.
So I didn’t argue when they decided to ground me for the rest of the school year. This meant that, except for Tuesdays when I still had Hebrew school, I had to come straight home. Which was sort of beside the point because I no longer had any friends. I mean, I still had my regular-school friends, but they were all busy with their own stuff and had no idea what I had been going through. Plus, the only friend that really mattered to me was Dash.
At that point, I was pretty sure things couldn’t get any worse. So sure, in fact, I even perked up when I saw Dash and Noa coming my way during the snack break at Hebrew school.
“What’s up?” I said. “You guys want to work on our Three Stooges presentation?” When the rabbis imposed their consequences, they did me exactly one favor by allowing me to satisfy my mitzvah project requirement with my class. In other words, they didn’t make me sit out of the comedy cabaret and start a new project when and if they ever believed I was ready to become a bar mitzvah.
“Well, actually, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” said Dash, glancing nervously at Noa.
“Yes. We’ve discussed it and we’ve decided,” she announced, “that it would be better for everyone if we didn’t do the Three Stooges as our Kings and Queens of Comedy Cabaret project.”
“Oh,” I said. “What are we going to do instead?”
“We,” said Noa firmly, “are going to do Jerry and Elaine from Seinfeld.”
“Oh,” I said again. And then, to show I could be flexible, I offered, “Okay, I guess I could do George.”
“Actually,” said Noa, “you can do the Stooges by yourself if you want. Rabbi Jake said we don’t have to work with you anymore.” And with that, she led Dash away.
“You can’t fire me. I quit!” I called after them. That was for Dash. It’s what Latka said to Louie on Taxi in a scene Gil had shown us during SND. Dash was supposed to respond with “You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired,” fast and loud like Louie. And then I’d say “I quit, I quit, I quit” even faster.
But Dash didn’t say anything. He didn’t even turn around.
“Plus, I can’t do the Stooges by myself!” I added, acutely aware that I sounded more than a little unhinged. “There are three of them. Four if you count Shemp. Which I don’t!”
I can’t even do George by myself, I thought miserably. George is nothing without Jerry. Everybody knows that.
Because Karen and Jenny were still so disappointed in me for losing my bar mitzvah, I decided not to mention that, on top of that, I had been kicked off my comedy cabaret team. It was one thing to keep something off my moms’ radar. But Enid was another matter. So I was not surprised to find her at my bedroom door within hours of my getting unceremoniously de-Stooged.
“How’s the comedy project going?” she asked.
“Wow, news travels fast,” I said.
“What news?” she said. “I was just asking.”
I groaned. “I don’t have a comedy project,” I admitted. “But you can’t tell them.” Meaning: our moms.
“I thought you were working with Dash and Noa, and doing the Three Stooges?” she said.
“I was. Past tense. I am an ex-Stooge.”
“They’re doing the Three Stooges without you?”
“No. They’re doing Jerry and Elaine without me.”
“So…you can still do the Stooges,” suggested Enid.
“I don’t want to do the Stooges by myself,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound whiny, but I couldn’t help it. “There are three of them. Four if you count Shemp, which I don’t, but there’s never just one. But no one wants to work with me and it doesn’t really matter anyway because they’re not letting me have a bar mitzvah this year and maybe not ever.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Enid. “Hang on a second. First of all, the whole comedy cabaret thing was your idea, right?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain to her that that was before. Before Gil died. Before Dash stopped speaking to me. Before the Israeli dance war. Before I messed everything up and lost my bar mitzvah date and all my friends and everything that mattered.
“And you love this stuff, right? So why drop out when you can just go back to the drawing board and pick someone else?”
I thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I have a lot of favorites.”
“Okay, how about this. What if instead of just focusing on one comedian, you pulled together a reel of the best Jewish comedy clips?”
“I dunno,” I said reluctantly.
Enid raised an eyebrow. “It’s your call,” she said. “But if you did go that route, who would you want to include?”
“The Three Stooges, Jerry Seinfeld, the Marx Brothers, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen…” My mind started racing with the possibilities. “Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner. Oh, and Rachel Bloom, she’s hilarious. You know, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?” It was like creating a fantasy sports roster, which was something some of the guys at school loved but I never saw the point of. However, a fantasy comedy
roster—a sort of Jewish comedy all-stars—now that was something I could wrap my head around.
“What about Joan Rivers?” suggested Enid.
“What about her?”
“She’s really funny. Plus, she’s incredibly brave. Get this: her husband committed suicide. Most people wouldn’t be able to find humor in that, but she did, and she kind of made history by doing so. Hang on, I’ll show you.”
Enid dug around on the Internet for a while. Finally, she came up with a clip from an interview in which Joan Rivers talked about how hard it was after her husband died and how it still affected her, like when their daughter got married and he wasn’t there to walk her down the aisle. That made me think of Noa and Dash, who wouldn’t have their dads at their bar and bat mitzvahs.
But then Joan Rivers explained how she pushed herself to use her pain to find humor. Making fun of herself for being addicted to shopping at a certain fancy store, she told a joke: “My husband killed himself and left a message that I have to visit him every day, so I had him cremated and sprinkled him in Neiman Marcus. Haven’t missed a day.”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed. For the first time in a long time.
“Wow. You think I can use it?” I asked Enid.
“Maybe,” she said. “Let’s put it on the list for now.”
We did some more searching and found more clips. We found Andy Kaufman doing Latka on Taxi. We pulled the one of Krusty the Clown’s bar mitzvah. And we pulled another one of the son on the show Black-ish declaring that he wanted a bar mitzvah, too, even though he wasn’t Jewish. I was torn about including that one because the only Jewish comedian in the scene, Tracee Ellis Ross, had practically no lines, but Enid encouraged me to collect everything and edit later.
Enid and I watched a bunch of Mel Brooks movie clips before deciding which one to go with. I had to admit the project was really taking shape. I only wished that Dash, and even annoying old Noa, were there to work on it with me, too. As fun as it was to get to be in charge and make all the decisions, it wasn’t anywhere near as fun as watching and selecting clips with my friends would’ve been.
All Three Stooges Page 13
