{"id":335,"date":"2013-08-29T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T16:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=335"},"modified":"2013-08-29T09:02:29","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T16:02:29","slug":"bar-mitzvah-speech-for-my-son-nathan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=335","title":{"rendered":"Bar Mitzvah Speech For My Son Nathan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"1146668_10151611723621270_1223433112_n\"<\/a>I suppose it is every father\u2019s dream to have a son.\u00a0 When Nathan was born, I was genuinely surprised.\u00a0 After all, my college roommate had already had three straight girls.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t long before Nathan cracked his first smile, that winning combination of mischief and innocence that you all have seen, and he\u2019s had us in the palm of his hand ever since.<\/p>\n

For those of you who were not at Nathan\u2019s bris, I have to explain his very long Hebrew name \u2013 Nathan Nachman Avraham.\u00a0 Pam and I had decided to name our first son after our two paternal grandfathers.\u00a0 Pam\u2019s grandfather Nathan Mayers was a larger than life figure in her family and we both agreed it would be wonderful to name our son after him.\u00a0 His middle name would be Arnold, after my grandfather, a similarly important figure in my family.\u00a0 While I knew that Arnold\u2019s Hebrew name was Abraham after his own paternal grandfather, I had assumed incorrectly that Nathan Mayers\u2019 Hebrew name was Natan.\u00a0 On the morning of the bris, I learned that his true Hebrew name had been Nachman.\u00a0 I consulted with our mohel, Rabbi Liebovics, who first reminded me of his generous discount offer \u2013 the fifth son is half price!\u00a0 I told him our dilemma, that we had intended to name our son Natan Avraham, but now we learned that it should be Nachman.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s the same price,\u201d the rabbi replied.\u00a0 \u201cJust give him three names.\u201d\u00a0 So that is how our son became Natan Nachman Avraham.<\/p>\n

\"998946_10151614512096270_1109760157_n\"<\/a>The reason I held onto the name Natan was that it reminded me of the famous 18th<\/sup> century play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) by the great German author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.\u00a0 Lessing was close friends with the founder of the Jewish enlightenment or Haskalah, Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn, the famous philosopher who also translated the Hebrew bible and psalms into German, and was the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.\u00a0 In Nathan the Wise, Lessing makes the case for religious pluralism, so strong that the Church initially banned the play during Lessing\u2019s lifetime.\u00a0 In the play, the wise Jewish merchant Nathan is asked by the Muslim Saladin which religion is the true religion.\u00a0 Rather than answer directly, Nathan tells a parable about a magic ring.<\/p>\n

A prince made a beautiful magic ring that was said to make the owner beloved by God and man.\u00a0 He determined that it should be passed on to only his most favorite son, and from him to his favorite son and so on, so that the ruling prince would be the one who received the magic ring.\u00a0 Eventually the ring came to a prince with three sons, but this prince could not decide between his children.\u00a0 So the prince made two more rings, identical in appearance to the first.\u00a0 Upon his death each son received a ring.\u00a0 But which was the true one?\u00a0 No one could tell.<\/p>\n

Each son accused his brothers of being a fraud, possessing only a counterfeit ring.\u00a0 So the three sons went to a wise judge.\u00a0 He said, the magic ring is supposed to make the bearer beloved by God and man.\u00a0 Which one of you is the most beloved by the other two?\u00a0 The sons did not reply.\u00a0 The judge therefore decreed that he could not tell which ring was the true ring, that all three might be counterfeit and the original lost.\u00a0 To find out whether one of them had the real ring, it was up to them to live in such a way that their ring’s powers could prove true, to live a life that is good in the eyes of God and mankind rather than expecting the ring’s miraculous powers to do so. \u00a0In the play, Nathan uses this parable to answer Saladin\u2019s question about religion, saying that each of us (Christian, Muslim or Jew) must live a good life by the religion we have learned from those we respect, without worrying about which one is truer than the other.<\/p>\n

\"1235898_10151611723541270_495611373_n\"<\/a>Reading your Torah portion this week, and thinking about the man that you have become, I was reminded of Nathan the Wise.\u00a0 Nathan, you have a heart of gold, an internal moral compass that sets your course.\u00a0 The Torah has lessons for all different types of people.\u00a0 Some people need to be taught that there are terrible consequences for their bad acts, that they will be rewarded if they do something right, and cursed or punished if they do something wrong.\u00a0 Some people need to believe that they hold a magic ring that steers them on the right course.\u00a0 But you, Nathan, don\u2019t need all those tricks.\u00a0 Think about it.\u00a0 If the list of curses in your portion had been shorter or longer, would that make any difference to you in how you behave?\u00a0 If we told you that the Tallis that you received for your bar mitzvah was magic, would it change you?<\/p>\n

What makes you so special, and what makes your mommy and me so proud of you, is that you know, almost instinctively, what is right and what is wrong.\u00a0 You are a kind and caring person by nature, just exactly what we hoped for when you were born.\u00a0 You treat your siblings and your friends with respect and fairness.\u00a0 You make good decisions and avoid bad ones.\u00a0 In short, you have become just the man we always hoped you would be, and we could not be any more proud and happy to be your parents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suppose it is every father\u2019s dream to have a son.\u00a0 When Nathan was born, I was genuinely surprised.\u00a0 After all, my college roommate had already had three straight girls.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t long before Nathan cracked his first smile, that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions\/338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}