Word: mitzvah
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...vote rhetoric in seventh grade, when my civics teacher told our class that, if we didn't vote, we'd forfeit our right to complain. There is no more effective scare tactic on a class filled with 13-year-old Jewish boys, other than to mess with our Bar Mitzvah money. But voting so that you can whine is probably not what the framers had in mind. I don't remember seeing the phrase "bitching and moaning" anywhere in the Bill of Rights. Besides, voting actually endangers your right to complain because you might vote for the winner, thus making...
...went to the bat mitzvah of the daughter of my childhood friend. My friend said she considered canceling the bat mitzvah because of all the rioting but decided that she would be giving them - the Arabs - a victory. I sat at a table with two friends. The first lives in Givon, past Ramot on the edge of Jerusalem, right near Ramallah. She said that after the lynching, she took her three children and moved in with her mother. She took everything that was valuable to her - photographs and jewelry - because she was afraid the house might get ransacked. It struck...
...performance was a drama of arrival - a presidential bar mitzvah. The son took over. The torch passed. That was a grown man addressing the convention in Philadelphia - speaking with the seasoned authority of a life that is manifestly his own. That is an odd thing to say of someone in his mid-50s, perhaps, but you know the Baby Boomers. There have been detours and delays...
...days every autumn, I accompanied my dad to synagogue while my mom stayed home making matzo-ball soup, brisket and kasha. At services I sometimes crept from the auditorium and found a game room, where I played pinball like an uptight burglar, braced against discovery. I had a Bar Mitzvah and recited the Hebrew words of my service from memory without comprehending them, but my Little League game later that day still sticks in my memory better than my supposed passage into manhood...
...apparent has slurped milk from a cow's teat, snorkeled for pennies in a shopping-mall fountain, worn an ELVIS SUCKS T shirt at Graceland, fought Monica Lewinsky with a lightsaber and gargled with mustard. Contrary to rumor, however, he did not dress as Hitler to attend a bar mitzvah. Although it is true that he humped a dead moose on camera...