High profile bar mitzvah

I think the Issue of the Week for this week is going to be whether or not Rahm Emmanuel is actually coming for his son's bar mitzvah, and whether or not it will be held at the Kotel.

The whole event has become shrouded in secrecy, and to boot, extreme right-wingers Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir are threatening that if he shows up at the Kotel they will do everything they can to ruin his simcha.

This memorial break, I am taking my son, my nephew Noah with Ari my brother, so they can have their bar mitzva in Israel,” Emanuel boasted in the November 10 speech, winning cheers from the crowd. “Not to add humor to this moment, but that’s cheap applause. I’ll take an $18 check on behalf of him if you like. That’s obviously illegal as a public servant. That was a joke.”

But as the bar mitzva date approaches, the White House, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry have declined to give any details whatsoever about the event. A White House representative said Emanuel’s visit to Israel was “a private trip” and diplomatic officials in Jerusalem said they also didn’t provide details when National Security Council official Dennis Ross came for his son’s wedding.

The lack of information has led to speculation in the Hebrew press, with Haaretz reporting incorrectly that Emanuel would arrive in Israel this week and Ma’ariv suggesting that he had moved the bar mitzva away from the Western Wall, either because of threats from right-wingers or because the Obama administration considered the wall in the territory of a future Palestinian capital.

Neither Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz nor Rabbi Jay Karzen, who has conducted more than 2,000 bar mitzvas at the site, was contacted by Emanuel’s family or his office.

“We would have known about it if they inquired about it, so I don’t think they canceled a bar mitzva at the Wall or planned one,” Rabinovitz’s spokesman said.

But an official close to the Emanuel family insisted that the bar mitzva would indeed take place at the Western Wall, while another family friend hinted it was scheduled for Saturday, May 29.

He may have turned out to be a jerk of a court Jew in the White House, but if he is coming to the Kotel for a family simcha maybe there is room for him to get closer to Judaism and change his ways. On the one hand he wants us to give East Jerusalem, possibly including the Kotel and what is on the other side of it, to the Palestinians in an eventual peace agreement, on the other hand he wants to come pray there as if the Jews are the rightful owners. Maybe he will come and have his affair and change his opinion on how things should play out. Maybe people could be instrumental in changing his opinion rather than chasing him away and fortifying that opinion in his head.

I don't know what the right approach is - tell him to get lost because of what he has done, or try to let him be affected by an experience at the Kotel? What do you think?