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.

If you build it…

Kevin Costner has been coming to mind while reading the JC recently.  Rarely does a week go by without one synagogue or another revealing plans for a new building.

What has struck me most about these announcements is that many seem to follow an inordinately long period of gestation.  It’s not uncommon, for example, to read that a community has, after 36 years, finally found a course of action that satisfies the neighbours, the local planning department and the members (especially the members), such that ground will be broken for their magnificent new home in weeks.  And by weeks I suspect they mean “some unspecified time in the future when we have raised enough money for a builder to take us seriously”.

How can the Shard be piercing the sky within days of the unveiling of its plans, yet it takes years for any quick drying cement to make its acquaintance with the foundations of what is, let’s face it, the equivalent of a small warehouse space?

I’ll tell you how. Outside a synagogue everyone’s an anti-Semite, and inside a synagogue everyone’s an architect, a planning expert or an interior designer.  Especially an interior designer. Or more accurately, everyone is all three of them.  Everyone knows best and everyone else is a schmuck.  If one person says the walls should be green, everyone else says it should be another colour.  What colour should it be?  “I don’t know’, one will admit, “but definitely not green.  What about gold? Gold is nice.  Or Magenta?” Then another expert will cry out “Gold?  Magenta? Don’t be ridiculous!” And so it goes.

The simple truth is that no Jew should be allowed anywhere near shul design, especially not the internal bits. Not unless you want the inside of your prayer house to be in the style of Juif Quatorze.  You know what I mean: white marble floors, Ionic columns everywhere, plastic protectors covering burgundy velour upholstery.  Do you want the walls of your shul festooned with bronze and gold lamé drapes?  Do you want your ark to be in mahogany veneer with rolling doors like a 1970’s television cabinet? Do you want a four-ton crystal ner tamid with a thousand glistening lamps hanging off it?

As far as prayer venue design is concerned we’d do well to look to our Christian neighbours for inspiration. They have a penchant for images of nearly naked men being tortured, there’s neither leg-room nor sufficient comfort for a quick shluf, and they have clearly never heard of heating.

All this is deliberate.  Vicars realise that the last thing they want is for their places of worship to be welcoming.  This will only lead to people hanging around and arguing with each other about the curtains, the furniture and the minister.  Whereas we Jews lay on a small feast after the service, priests give their congregants one wafer, a sip of wine, then shoo them on their way, standing by the door to make sure they all disappear quickly.

That’s the attitude to adopt.   If you build it they won’t come.

Fame at last, without the fame.

I received one of those annoying joke emails today.  They’re usually more of an irritating distraction than an amusing diversion.  This one had come from a very close friend and, unusually, I enjoyed reading it immensely.  It looked as if it had come from America but it hadn’t.

It was one of my own articles and it had been picked up somewhere, probably the JC website, and was now floating around in the internet ocean like a great big oil slick.   No wonder I enjoyed reading it, I later mused.

I decided to do a Google search for the article and found that it had made its way, without acknowledgement, onto several websites in America and Canada, with ever such slight changes in the wording for those audiences.

Flattered, and yet feeling a sense of injustice, I contacted those website owners asking them to add my nom de plume.  Some did immediately, others have still not.  Ach, so what?

The friend who sent it to me has no idea that I am the original author.  The only people who know my true identity are one or two people at the JC and my wife.  Not my parents, not my children, not my doctor, not even my rabbi, boruch Hashem.

And so here I sit, the originator of one of those stupid viral emails, and nobody, except my wife, to be famous for.

Perhaps that’s how it should be.