Bat Mitzvah Planning with COVID-19

Initially we were going to have the girls Bat Mitzvahs in February in Phoenix.  Then we decided to move to Israel so we had to cancel the Feb date.  We decided to delay it from then until the end of the year (which is now) to give ourselves more time to settle in and we chose this weekend specifically because it was after the school year was over in the US and before summer camp started, so that our friends would be able to attend.  When I first met with the woman who would be teaching the girls their Torah readings, I opened my jewish calendar app to find what the Torah reading was for that weekend and it said Behalotcha – I told that to the teacher and the girls started working on it.  We didn’t know how many people would be coming, so we didn’t really know how to plan, but we decided to rent an event hall in another shul since our shul didn’t have one.  The guy at that other shul (with the event hall that we wanted to rent for the weekend) who manages their calendar hardly speaks any English, so I had to use my broken Hebrew to communicate to him what exactly we wanted and when.  I texted him the date we wanted, but because the US and Israeli/European date format is different (i.e. month-day-year vs day-month-year) and I didn’t want him to get confused, I figured I’d just tell him the name of the Torah reading for that shabbat – as an orthodox guy and leader in his Shul, he’d certainly be able to get the correct weekend from that.  So I texted him both the date, and the name of the parsha – Behalotcha.  And he texted me back, no, its Shelach – a different Torah reading.  So I figured with my bad Hebrew and his bad English, there must be some mistake, and I texted him an actual screenshot of the app on my phone showing the correct date, displaying the correct parsha – Behalotcha.  After which he texted me a copy of his app on his phone, which says Shelach!  At which point I almost had a heart attack because my girls had been studying Behalotcha for the past several months already.  How could that not be the right parsha?  And then I had a vague memory of hearing a podcast some time ago talking about how annoying it was that the in-Israel and outside-of-Israel Torah readings were different for part of the year.  And I froze.  I thought, no – it can’t be.  That rare, random, weird thing is actually happening to us right now, for real?  So I called the Bat Mitzvah teacher and explained the issue.  And sure enough, she agreed.  The correct parsha here in Israel for that weekend was Shelach.  Behalotcha was the correct Torah reading in the US for that weekend, but here in Israel it would be Shelach.  OMG.  What do we do now.  She suggested that because the girls has put so much time in to learning that reading, that we consider changing the date.  If we moved it back one week then it would line up – since Israel was just one week ahead of the US at this time, by moving it one week earlier they could just keep the Torah reading they had already started learning.  I checked with some of my family, but a few of them had already had their vacations set specifically to include that weekend here in Israel, and some had already even booked plane tickets.  No, there was no way we could move the weekend.  So I had to break the news to the girls that they were going to have to start from scratch and learn a whole new Torah portion.  After the initial shock and anger, they understood the situation and resigned themselves to the task at hand.  As we say in Hebrew, Ain Mah La’asot – אין מה לעשות – literally, “there is not what to do,” meaning, there’s nothing else to be done – you just have to accept it.  What I learned later is that when the second day of a Jewish holiday falls on shabbat in the US, they read the special Torah reading for the holiday instead of the regular shabbat Torah reading for that week – the regular shabbat Torah reading that would have been read that week gets pushed off until the next shabbat.  However, in Israel, where the holidays are only one day instead of two they don’t have that issue, so here they just read the normal shabbat Torah reading, without pushing it off until next week.  Thus it ends up that the US (and anywhere outside of Israel) ends up one week behind Israel as far as the weekly Torah readings are concerned.  This gets remedied a few months later when there are two short Torah portions in a row, because the US will read them both together in one week so they can “catch up” to Israel, where we in Israel will read them separately over two separate weeks, allowing our fellow diaspora Jews to catch up to us. 😀

Once we had the Torah portion settled, we settled on the dining hall, and the party room for the party.  We had planned a Friday night dinner for out of town guests, the Saturday morning shabbat service, and we had decided to have the party on Sunday night because shabbat ends very late in the summer and it would be too late to have the party Saturday night after shabbat.  No sooner had we booked all the arrangements, than the corona pandemic swept in.  As everyone knows, everything was completely cancelled.  As it turns out, we could have just changed the week, avoiding the girls having to learn an entirely new reading, because the week didn’t matter since no one could come anyway.  Then we were faced with the issue of what else to do. Some said postpone the entire thing for another six months or a year, so then people would be able to come – just wait it out and proceed with a “normal” Bat Mitzvah.  We opted against that since first of all we didn’t really know when the virus would be over anyway, and second, we had already postponed the event just by moving to Israel, and we didn’t even know for sure where we would be in another year, Israel or the US.  We decided we had to just press on and continue as is.  By that time we had seen a few zoom Bar or Bat Mitvzvah celebrations at conservative and reform synagogues in the US, where the use of electricity on shabbat was less of an issue, so they were able to just zoom the Saturday morning service.  But for our orthodox shul that wasn’t an option – you can’t use electricity on shabbat.  (and as an interesting aside, while there was briefly talk, even among the orthodox community, about the possibility of using zoom for the passover seder, eventually most of the orthodox community came down on the side of not allowing it.  They simply did not want to allow the intrusion of electronic devices, “screens” and such, into the shabbat experience.  You were allowed to leave your phone on, and even answer it if it was a call from the hospital or a doctor about your health or a test result or something, but zooming services was a line they were not willing to cross.  And while we ourselves are not fully “shomer shabbat,” I leave it to you to decide the wisdom of having one day a week without screens…)  

Anyway, the bottom line is that we were not able to simply zoom the shabbat service.  We decided that we would have to create a separate service specifically for the purpose of “zooming” it to all of our not-in-Israel guests (which is basically everyone).  In our discussions with the Rabbi, we settled on two options: either sunday night here/sunday morning in the US, which is not a day when you typically read Torah, so the entire service would be totally made up; or Thursday late afternoon here/morning in the US which could at least be a normal mincha (afternoon) service, and the Torah is usually read on Thursday’s anyway, so we could incorporate that into the service as well.  We decided to just add on the Haftorah reading (the reading from the books of the prophets, after the Torah reading), even though that’s not usually read on Thursday, just so everyone could hear that.  We also knew that with the time difference, we wouldn’t be able to be “praying” the same service at the same time, here and in the US/Cananda.  Whatever service we did here couldn’t be too long therefore, because everyone watching the zoom wouldn’t actually be praying with us – it would not be the right time there for the service we were doing here.  Therefore we eventually decided to just to a quick mincha/afternoon service without a minyan, which would shorten it even more and have less time just standing around on the zoom line.  In the end, despite the mild artificiality of the whole thing, I think it turned out very well, and it also means that we will have a video of the service itself, which we would not have had if it had been only on shabbat as we had originally planned.  

And one final thought….   Behalotcha, the original parsha based on the US schedule, tells the story of the role of the ancient levites which is interesting for us because we actually are from the tribe of levi.  However, the way it turned out it was the Land of Israel itself, or at least our moving here, that forced the change so that instead the girls read Shelach.  That parsha tells the story of the spies who were sent into the Land of Israel and who unfortunately returned with a negative report, signifying that the people were not ready to enter the land, thereby sealing their fate to wander in the desert for 40 years.  The Haftorah tells the parallel story of the spies that Joshua sends in to the Land at the end of the 40 years right before they actually do enter the Promised Land.  I found it to be such an interesting parallel to our current lives, these stories about coming the the Land of Israel, spying/trying it out, deciding if they should or should not enter the land, etc.  Its more or less the situation our family finds ourselves in today.  At this point, all I can say is “yihiyeh asher yiheyeh” – יהיה אשר יהיה – literally, it will be that it will be, meaning whatever will be, will be.