My Grandson's "Caleb-ration"

 My daughter's youngest son, Raanan Tzvi Kilimnick, celebrated his Bar Mitzvah on the Sabbath of June 13, 2015. Bar Mitzvah means "Son of Commandment;" it signifies that a boy has reached the age when he is legally obligated to observe the 613 commandments of the Jewish faith.  Raanan reached this milestone, appropriately, on 6-13!

To mark the occasion, I prepared a fanciful, illustrated story  book in verse for Raanan. I was inspired by the Torah portion that he would be reading, particularly the tale of the 12 spies. I particularly saw some parallel between him and the spy Caleb; I admired Caleb's grit, his courage, his ability to stand up for what he believed, and I saw some of those same qualities in Raanan. If you want to know what interests Raanan and what kind of student and athlete he is, click on the right side under Newsletters. Therein you will also find unknown details, such as the fact that nicknames are used in Raanan's family and that he is literally in a class of his own!  All this and more will be found in The Book of Raanan.

In sum, the celebration was a great day for Raanan and for all of us. I was so proud to stand before the family and friends to present the book to Raanan on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah. I wanted him to reflect on how life presents us with choices. How we act usually depends on our attitude and how we think. "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," said the great writer Shakespeare. The spies sent by Moses had choices, but the majority chose "stinking thinking" and gave in to fear and doubt: they were leaders of their people but they saw themselves as grasshoppers and, thus, gave negative reports about their mission. Caleb, on the other hand, saw himself as someone who could defeat giants and he went on to become an even great leader.

In the Book of Raanan, I talked about making choices and closing the breach between what is and what should be:

                It's how he conducts himself.

                That a man constructs himself,

                And Raanan like Caleb has true grit,

                They don't flaunt their talents,

                And always keep their balance,

                And what they admit, they admit!

No one made this point better than the great psychologist Viktor Frankl who, I reminded Raanan and the audience, wrote arguably the most famous book of the last century.  "Even in the most difficult circumstance, we can choose," Frankl writes in “Man’s Search for Meaning”: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl quotes the great German poet, Goethe: “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”

It is through the Bar Mitzvah experience that a young person begins to evaluate where he is and where he wishes to be. When we expect little of ourselves and of others, as the majority of the spies did, the  result is total failure and spiritual descent. To be sure, failure is one unvarying constant in life . But there are different ways to fail; we can fail most profoundly by giving up, by not striving. Tal Ben Shahar said it best: "If you don't learn to fail, you fail to learn."

The lesson to Raanan and to ourselves is clear and prescient: what we expect of ourselves is often precisely what we get. We should always aim high, and if we fall short we should, in the words of Samuel Beckett , “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”  With positive aspirations and attitude we can yet claim more personal, spiritual and communal victories than failures.