In case you’re ever considering planning a bar mitzvah for the Shabbos (and Sunday) immediately after yom tov, I would not advise it. Despite it sounding like a good way to get rid of yom tov leftovers.
When we were planning our son’s bar mitzvah a couple of years ago (when Yom Tov ended on a Tuesday night), we thought, “Oh, Bereishis is a good week! Because yom tov is over! And the yeshiva that we want to have our Shabbos meals in for 60 immediate family members knayneh hara hasn’t come back from bein hazmanim yet! And then we get the bar mitzvah out of the way, and we get back to life!”
Okay, that’s amazing. But first of all, nobody wants to talk to you until after yom tov. Not gabboim, not guests, not food vendors… “Talk to me after yom tov.” And I get that yom tov is busy for them. But that’s a lot to do in 2 ½ days.
Every place we were ordering food from also sells food for yom tov, surprisingly. They say, “Talk to us after yom tov.”
And then after yom tov, they say, “That’s what you want? We sold out over yom tov. And then all of our vendors were closed on yom tov.”
“Wow, thank you.”
We couldn’t do anything until then either. For the entire yom tov, everything we could possibly have done for the bar mitzvah would have been hachana. Basically, we’d been playing “Red Light Green Light” all month with the bar mitzvah preparations. Charge forward! Rosh Hashana. Charge Forward! Shabbos Shuva. Charge Forward! Yom Kippur.
People don’t think about the hachana issue. You don’t have an extra week of no work to prepare for the bar mitzvah; you have a week of no work to be stressed about all the stuff you could be doing for the bar mitzvah. And writing massive to-do lists for after yom tov with your left hand.
(I’m a lefty.)
Oh, and guess when I’m writing this article! Not on Chol Hamoed; I’ll tell you that. Chol Hamoed is when I worked on the speeches, because I figured that if anything could be worked on during Yom Tov, the speeches are Torah. And if learning Torah is hachana, we’re already in pretty deep, because we’ve been practicing his parsha mostly on Shabbosos for about a year and a half. But at what point while adding jokes to my speeches -- which is definitely expected of me at this point – do I have to wonder how much of it is Torah and how much of it is hachana? I should have asked a shaylah. But which rav was I going to bother with this shaylah, right before yom tov? A rav is always in “3 Days to Prep a Bar Mitzvah” mode, especially right before Yom Tov. Should I have worked on the speeches before yom tov and then cooked for the first days of yom tov on Chol Hamoed?
So I didn’t get to ask. Though in retrospect, there’s no way any rav in the world doesn’t have the answer on his fingertips as to when he can and cannot write speeches.
My wife said, “We have too much to do; take out the whiteboard.” So I take out this huge whiteboard that I’d bought for a summer when I was running a writing workshop for kids who didn’t want to do any of the homework, and she put the entire to-do list on the whiteboard, and I thought, “That’s your entire to-do list. Mine won’t fit on the board now that you wrote yours.” So I’m working off both lists, trying not to burden her with my list, except in the form of audible complaining, and now one thing I had to add to my list is, “Put away this whiteboard before the guests show up.” Otherwise she’s going to start assigning things to guests.
And then certain things we definitely couldn’t do until after Sukkos. I brought a pile of suits to the cleaners the morning after yom tov -- Wednesday morning, as soon as they opened -- and they said, “Okay, pick it up on Friday after 4 o’clock.”
“My guests are coming at 3.”
And speaking of clothes, having a bar mitzvah after yom tov is also not great for fitting into all the clothes you bought for it before yom tov.
“I have 3 days to lose how much?”
And by the way, do you think we’re confirming whether anybody who hasn’t RSVPed is showing up? No. We’re ordering the food immediately after yom tov.
Our one hope here is that everyone comes in still sick of food from yom tov.
In fact, I don’t even think we got around to inviting everybody. I don’t know. We met with the invitation people and they sent us too many follow-up questions considering we’d done this a few times before, and we were too busy for it, and my wife had already sent out “save the dates” to most of our relatives, and then we figured that since my wife had already designed the proof herself, we could just send them all out on our own. Everyone we know well enough to invite, we have their email address, except for my son’s friends to whom he can hand-deliver in yeshiva, and the kids don’t RSVP anyway, and he can also hand-deliver to his former rebbeim for whom all we have is phone numbers they don’t answer, and then we can hand-deliver to our neighbors that we only ever interact with in person. Though hand-delivering is considered less classy, for some reason, like everything else that is done by hand.
“Ew! I don’t come unless you lick a sticker and put it on and send it via a guy in shorts who drives on the wrong side of the street.”
But I don’t think we got to everyone. We invited a bunch of people, and then yom tov happened, and then it was too late. Also, my wife works for an accountant, and here’s a little-known secret: All the tax extensions that people file Pesachtime are due Sukkostime. So invitations never really got done. We still have most of the ones we printed. We’re kind of hoping everyone else just gets wind of it.
Now some of you are probably thinking, “Well, you should have realized all this before you had a baby right after Sukkos!” And the truth is we didn’t have a baby right after Sukkos. Our son was born on Erev Sukkos. We were thinking of making the bar mitzvah on Shabbos Chol Hamoed, but then my wife pointed out the logistics of finding a sukkah big enough to feed our families and also finding people to host on a week when everyone is saying either, “I’m having guests, so I won’t have room,” or “I’m not going to be home.”
“Ooh, that’s better! So you have more rooms available!”
People don’t like it when you say that.
We figured, “Why not Bereishis? Yom tov is done, we don’t have to worry about yom tov anymore, and we can make a bar mitzvah!”
That’s a great idea. First of all, Sukkos is not the most relaxing of yomim tovim. Even Pesach is more relaxing. Yes, Pesach has a lot of prep, but once you get past the first two sedarim, the rest of it is calm. It’s the one week of the year you don’t have to worry about where you leave crumbs. You can eat matzah in bed! In fact, eating matzah while lying down is encouraged. Though you won’t get such great sleep after that. Whereas the entire Sukkos is about getting up and going outside and coming back in and going outside and coming back in and going outside and carrying way too much stuff to shul and then back so you can stick it all in water, except for the tallis, and sitting in shul on edge the entire time, thinking, “Did I just put my siddur down on my lulav? Am I about to knock it off the table?” And then finally on the day you don’t have to do that anymore, you’re running around the shul getting your suit dirty. Every single moment of Sukkos you have to be cognizant of one thing or the other: “Is my sukkah still kosher? Is my lulav still kosher? Is the Sefer Torah still kosher?” And this is after the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah, which is not the most relaxing of times either.
We also have to clean up from yom tov, good enough for guests. People talk about cleaning for yom tov, but no one talks about cleaning up from yom tov. Most yomim tovim, I count the days until my kids go back to school so I can throw out all the half-drunk water bottles and get all shoes out of the living room and move all the things the kids brought home and there’s somehow always grass clippings all over the floor, plus there are leaves everywhere, and nobody ever puts away the machzorim, and is this cake from Rosh Hashana?
So we have to clean all that. Except for our Sukkah. Our sukkah is still going to be up. We don’t have time for that. My wife is thinking about sending people into the Sukkah to eat on Friday when they show up for kugel and I run out for dry cleaning. That way maybe we don’t have to clean the house.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.