The Bar Mitzvah that was

If you were there, thank you for coming and being part of it.

We had a great, and meaningful, Bar Mitzvah weekend, starting from Wednesday and extending through Shabbos.

It was a lot of work, a really lot of work, and in the end it all worked out great. My wife gets most of the credit, as she is the one who arranged and prepared most of it. I kinda just made sure not to get in the way too much.

Wednesday night we had a seudas chaveirim for his class, and then invited a few friends and relatives for dessert. This was a seudas mitzva because it was the actual birthday.
Thursday morning, we went to Chevron to daven shacharis. The parsha being Chayei Sara, in which Avraham purchases the Me'aras HaMachpela in order to bury Sarah, makes this a very special period in Chevron. We could not go for shabbos, so we went on Thursday for davening. The Bar Mitzvah boy leined in the Me'ara, and we brought some burekas and juice which we shared with the soldiers after davening.

Shabbos we had the shabbos meals with our family and guests who came in for the Bar Mitzvah. Friday night we fed abot 35 people in our house. Shabbos morning was the big day, with the bar mitzvah boy leining the parsha. He did a fabulous job, and I, surprisingly, had not chased away too many people with my butchered rendition of leading the shacharis services.

After davening was a grand kiddush in which lots of people showed up from all over the neighborhood to say mazel tov. Near the end of the kiddush I ran out to say mazel tov by the bar mitzvah of a friend. After kiddush, we had lunch for our family and some additional cousins, totaling about 50 people. After having a few too many l'chaims with afew too many people, I think I was seeing everything in triplicate, so it looked like there were 150 or so people at lunch!

We were going economical, so my wife cooked everything and nothing was catered. That was a ton of work on my wife, but it came out beautiful and everything worked out much smoother than expected.

Now it will take a few days to get our house back in order, but the return to a daily, normal, routine looks like a possibility in the near future..

I will post my divrei torah from the bar mitzvah a bit later.