What hath G-d wrought.

The Bar Mitzvah, the late 20th Century invention of affluent American Jews, reached its apotheosis last night in a din of bad taste, bad food, bad noise masquerading as music and the bad over-indulgence of youth and youth culture.

The service itself was of the assembly-line variety, with two boys being Bar Mitzvahd as once with not a dose of reflection or spirituality to be seen. The "ordeal" of this rite, which was meant to impart a rigor to a young man but which for the sake of synangogue finances has been democratized to include young girls, has been dumbed down to rote memorization of the liturgy, a glib rabbi that calls the ancient Jewish Torah by its Christian name (the Bible is a Christian book, ladies and gentlemen. If the Christians in their imperiousness wish to attempt to co-opt the Torah for their own liturgy, if they wish to rename the Torah for their own fascistic purposes, let them. But don't play along)and "speeches" by the Bar Mitzvah victim that are so short and meaningless and canned as to be nothing more than an exercise in reading aloud in public.

The party is a masturbatory melange of noise and excess, with screaming children, jungle music and evidence a culture that has been mangled and mutilated by cliche and conformity that it embarrasses me to be a Jew and an American. "Holla back" white affluent Jewish kids are beckoned to yell by the over-miked, over-bassed, under-brained "d.j." There's a cliche for every well-choreographed slice of over-scripted nonsense. An over-long video tribute set to over-loud lousy music of the Bar Mitzvah victim at every stage of his life from diapers to present pampering. A disgusting display of 13-year-old short-skirted incipient sluts showing off their 13-year-old putative cleavage and rolling on the floor with boys who shed their expensive suit jackets and untuck their shirts and undo their ties and the first blare of "music" composed by "african-american" ex-convicts with a synthesizer and a drum machine that constructs a cacophony of back beat not dissimilar to Zulus banging on Banyan trees before they eat their foes.

The food an underflavored, over-salted indulgence that gets slapped in front of you by latex-glove-wearing (presumably to stop the transmission of food-borne diseases) illegal immigrants making minimum wage and "serving" guests so late that no one can actually eat and 2/3rds of the inedibles were probably thrown out, which is fine, the food being good for nothing but rat poison.

The noise, the excess, the hubris, the lack of spirituality, the marzipan glow of fat entitlement, this is a Bar Mitzvah today.