The Best Friends’ Speech

While the eighteenth century philosopher Voltaire has been branded an anti-semite, the man’s writing clearly points to a political and religious tolerance that is beyond reproach, and a set of values that surely all Jews should share.  Nonetheless I feel obliged to take issue with him, or at least with his admirer and advocate, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who epitomised Voltaire with the quote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.  I take issue because it’s clear that neither of them ever attended a batmitvah party.  If they had surely an unequivocal qualification would have been included in this defence of free speech, for there isn’t a person on the planet who can seriously justify the best friends’ speech given at a girl’s batmitzvah.

The Lynne Truss’s amongst you may at this point be bristling at my use of the apostrophe in “friends’ ”.  This is no grammatical error. As anyone who has witnessed one of these abominations of public speaking will attest, there are always at least three, and usually in excess of five best friends to torture the guests.  If you ask the batmitzvah girl about this peculiar plurality she will explain that her best friends are ranked from “best best friend” down to “worst best friend”, a position that rests the width of a cigarette paper from all her other friends.  What she doesn’t understand is the futility of this whole exercise because within three months her best friends will be her worst enemies and her new best friends will be whichever girls have invited her to make a speeches at their batvitzvahs.

The format and content of the best friends’ speech is so standardised that one only need attend three batmitzvah parties to acquire sufficient competence to deliver it oneself.  I therefore fully expect readers to know all this, but for those who have just arrived from the age of enlightenment here’s what happens.

The best friends stand in a row each holding a copy of the text, passing a microphone up and down the line as the words are revealed, one by one, girl by girl. At some point there’s bound to be an error in this choreography but it doesn’t matter because the whole thing is such an incomprehensible shambles anyway.

This one word relay is unsustainable and it stretches to sentences as the speech evolves into a cutesy version of Monty Python’s four Yorkshire-men sketch – “we’ve been best friends since our first day at senior school two weeks ago”, “we’ve been best friends since we met at tap dancing when we were five years old”, “we’ve been best friends since NCT classes” and then finally one girl trumps all with, “our mums were childhood best friends so we’ve been best friends longer than we’ve been alive!”

No best friends’ speech is complete without the obligatory “you were amaaaazing this morning in shul and you look really amaaaaazing tonight”.  It doesn’t matter that the words were composed several days previously or that the speaker in question was not in shul that morning owing to a fitting appointment for the dress she’ll be wearing at her own Batmitzvah.

Another essential component is a poem, again collectively written.  Truthfully it is less a poem than a series of clichés, some of which vaguely rhyme with each other.  Remembering that most of these girls attend expensive private schools it’s staggering how poor their imagination and command of English proves to be.  If I were a parent I’d be straight to the head-teacher demanding a full refund of the fees.

Finally, the ten-minutes of respite from the evening’s enjoyment is rounded off with the presentation of some useless piece of artwork that will have been painstakingly cobbled together using in-jokes and photographs.  The girls will be supremely proud of their joint effort, representing as it does the amaaaazing time they spent together constructing it and proof of their unimpeachable admiration for the batmitzvah girl.  The recipient will be not the slightest bit interested in it because it didn’t come from Hollister.  It will therefore arrive home from the party crumpled and torn where it will languish in the corner of the girl’s bedroom before eventually finding its sad and neglected way into the bin once those best friends have morphed into the worst enemies they were always destined to become.

It would be nice to imagine a future without best friends’ speeches but like Voltaire’s Candide, I’m not optimistic.

The shuls I wish I didn’t have to go to.

I don’t like visiting other shuls.  Once a person is used to a place, they can daven better.  I understand how things work at my synagogue.  That familiarity means I don’t spend my time looking blankly around, being distracted by unfamiliar movements, the pattern of the light, smells, sounds.  At my shul I know when things will happen and the tunes that they’ll happen to.  I  have my own spot that I like to sit in and it’s near to familiar faces.

Most of all, in my shul people are respectful.  You can hear the layening.  Mobile phones go off only occasionally.  There’s hardly any chatter.  These are the little details that mean so much when, as last shabbat, I was forced to attend another shul to witness some useless pre-pubescent kid recite maf and haf with about as much feeling as a patch of  lichen.  Yes, I was at a Barmitzvah.

It’s the mensch in me that drags me along to these things.  I figure that an invite to the simcha requires me to attend the service, just so I can lie about how marvelously the boy performed.  Of course the boy, the parents, the rabbi and the guests all know that that he was rubbish and the only reason he did it was for the loot.  Still, like all good Jews, we conveniently pretend otherwise, just as the Rabbi, in his sermon, pretends that the family are fine, upstanding members of the community, and great role models for their son.  I wonder if that role modeling includes the classy way in which his father had an affair and dumped the family a couple of years back?  Ah, but I can’t really blame the rabbi for that. After all, he’d never met the family until the rehearsal about three days previously and they probably didn’t get as far as those minor points.

Yet if that nonsense is not infuriating enough, this was without doubt the noisiest service I have ever attended. I should have taken to heart the warning about decorum in the shul  when I saw the posters that decorated every wall and pillar alternately reminding woman how to dress modestly for shul and  everyone to turn of their mobile phones, the idea that they shouldn’t be carrying a phone on Shabbat in the first place long since abandoned.

But I digress.  The noise was so overwhelming that I honestly couldn’t hear a thing from the bimah and I was only three rows back.  Nobody was following the layening, preferring instead to generate several hundred decibels of noise by chatting to their neighbour, and, in a few cases, someone several seats away.

It was only when the tuneless barmitzvah himself ascended that everyone quietened down.  After 10 seconds I was wishing they’d all start up their chatter again, so painful was his voice.  At least at my shul I have plenty of people around me to talk to under such circumstances.

Simcha of the Century

I’m sorry, but what with Pesach I’ve not had time to write my blog for a while.  However, my nephew, Joel, has come to the rescue by agreeing to tell you about his recent barmitzvah.   Over to you, Joel.

My b’mitzvuh was brill.  I can’t tell you how many amazing presents I received, but it wasn’t just about the gifts, the parties were fantastic too.

Everything started off on Friday night.  We didn’t actually go to shul because the restaurant was booked for 7pm.  Mum insisted we went to the Bling Ju restaurant in Chinatown because the ribs are to die for.  It was a quiet “do” for just 180 of our close friends and family and some people my dad knew from work like Robbie Williams and Joan Rivers.

I was so excited about the Shabbat morning because I finally got to wear the Hugo Boss suit I’d been keeping carefully for weeks.  We had to go to shul, obviously, and that was OK.  We’ve been members for as long as I can remember and I’ve been there at least six times so I feel really at home there.  I did Maf and Haf and fortunately it was short which was good because we didn’t want to keep everyone waiting.  As soon as the service was over we dashed out to a stretch limo that whisked us off to the Ritz for lunch.  We thought it was best not to invite people to the shul service in case they didn’t manage to get to the lunch on time.  It’s just as well because the Rabbi had a dig at my mum in his sermon just because she’d had a row with him when he’d insisted that we couldn’t do the service on the Friday morning instead.  She’d wanted to do the b’mitzvuh then to save having to re-arrange the builders who were coming to do a quote for the extension on the Saturday.

My family entered the banqueting room in a procession accompanied by an amazing gospel group who sang some religious songs.  It was great to have Madonna on my table – my parents thought that because it was my b’mitzvuh it would be good to have at least one Jewish person with me.

The food was fab although Gordon Ramsey was a bit rude to my auntie when she looked shocked after he told her that the mushroom vol-au-vents were prawn and not mushroom.  Still, it was understandable that he might be a bit stressed.  After all, he was cooking a 7-course meal for 450 people, and then there were the other 220 that came later just for tea.

In the speeches my dad’s friend Simon Cowell said some really nice things about my parents and me (although he wasn’t very impressed with my own speech).  Russell Brand spoke also and he was hilarious although my grandpa wasn’t too amused by the story about his day nurse.

After lunch we jumped into more limos to drive us to Hyde Park, which we had taken over for a fun fair. Some of my friends asked me if it was OK to ride on the amusements on Shabbat and I told them it was fine because they weren’t actually paying.  I’m really lucky that my Jewish education has enabled me to answer questions like this.  When it was dark we had a firework display like the one they do at new years’ on the Thames, but it went on for longer.

On the Sunday morning I started to go through all my wonderful presents such as a new Ferrari that I can’t wait to drive when I’m seventeen.  I also received a bunch of Jewish prayer books and stuff.  I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to use them but you never know.  My parents also got me a forest in Israel in memory of my other grandpa.  They said when I’m older I can chop down the trees and build a holiday home.

However, I know that presents are not the important thing when it comes to a B’mitzvuh.  In shul the rabbi said it was to do with becoming an adult and responsibility or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what he said because I was fiddling with my new Rolex at the time.