Please Join Us as We Celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of Our Son Jacob or Benjamin or Whatever Nosowitz
The Twelfth of June, Two Thousand and Thirty-Two at Nine O’Clock in the Morning, Lunar Standard Time
Services will be held at Temple Beth Israel in the Imbrium Crater, just north of the Carpatus Mountains. Transportation will be provided from New Westchester. Beth Israel provides its own holo-yarmulkes, though of course you are welcome to bring your own if you’d like. The reception will be held immediately following the service at the Imbrium Hilton’s ballroom. The Hilton offers plenty of parking for local rovers as well as a direct magno-rail line from the Light Side Station for those taking the Gingrich Express from Earth. The food choices will be chicken, vegetarian, and genetically-modified salmon legs.
For our non-Jewish friends: We will ask that you turn off your augmented-reality non-corrective contact lens communicators (“phones”) in accordance with the rules of Shabbat. Gifts are not required, but the number 18 (“chai”) is considered a spiritually lucky number in the Jewish culture, and 180 spaceyuan is a customary gift. We’re sure he’d also love a Judaica ebook.
After the service, it is customary to hurl candies at the Bar/Bat Mitzvah boy/girl; Beth Israel will provide a bowl of multi-colored, theoretically fruit-flavored gummi discs for this purpose, and has an excellent gravity simulator to avoid any low-grav-related injuries from enthusiastically-thrown candy.
Each Bar Mitzvah requires a reading of one particular Torah portion, which our son has been learning for months. He will be reading from a Torah scroll; it’s a large analog ink-and-parchment device containing the textual data of the five books of Moses.
Dress code is fairly casual; boys usually wear a navy blue graphene blazer and a pair of synthetic spider-silk khakis, and the various Tavi Gevinson’s outlets usually have a nice selection of dresses for girls. The service will be mostly in Hebrew, with some English and Mandarin.
The reception is a party to celebrate all the hard work our son has been doing with his RoboTutor for the past six months. He wanted a “music” theme, so we’ve gotten some fun inflatable theremins and virtual sunglasses like David Aykroyd wore in Blues Brothers: The Next Generation. And we’ve programmed in some of his favorite songs to the auto-DJ; he’s been going through a bit of a “retro” phase, seems like he’s always listening to that classic Das Racist album. Boy, have those songs held up well!
We hope you’ll be able to join us in Imbrium, but we’ll be hiring a great young videographer from Northwestern University’s Buzzfeed School of Media Aggregation–our niece Sarah!--to live-stream the entire event, so even if you’re living the hip urban Earth life on Staten Island or the California Republic, it’ll feel like you’re right here with us, celebrating our son’s big day.
Dan Nosowitz lives in Brooklyn and writes words for money, mostly at Popular Science. He has serious opinions about fruit.
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