A Friend's Bar Mitzvah

I went to a friend's son's bar mitzvah yesterday morning. I had asked Mr. Boss for time off last week and he was upset because I only gave him a week's notice to take 4 hours off. So guiltily off I went.

A friend of hers came in especially from England. I was actually nervous about meeting her because she had given me her beautiful long-haired, calico cat to keep when she went back to England 3 years ago and a year later it got run over by a car. How was I to tell her this. Friends told me to lie to her and say "Wow the cat's great, etc." But I'm a terrible liar. Fortunately, either someone told her about the mishap or she forgot, because she never asked me about her cat.

Getting on to tradition - when the bar mitzvah boy is called up to read from the Torah, it is customary to throw candies at the kid. This is everyone's favorite part. You usually try to hit the kid in the face because of all the torment he gives his folks. No, that's not really why you throw candies, but it's the reason "I" throw candies. The real reason is that the Torah is sweet and you pelt him with sweetness. And then all the little kids scurry to pick them up from the ground. But yesterday, the little girls were dishing out to everyone Hershey's Kisses and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups to throw to the kid. I turned around to my friend and said -

"I'm not throwing these. They're too good to throw and have all the bratty little kids scoop them up."

Behind me, I heard all the women express the same thing. No one was going to throw all those rare treats and waste them on children.

They're hard to get in Israel and if you do get them, they're expensive. So most of us took about 4 or 5 of them and stashed them for ourselves. When it was time to "pelt" only a few were thrown here and there. You saw most of us already with these goodies in our mouths. I saw one little kid with two handfulls, after he had collected them from the floor, run to his mom with the loot and put it in her bag. Too bad I didn't have a little kid to do that for me.