Mazel Tov: Celebrities' Bar and Bat Mitzvah Memories (7 page)

Turning fifty was fabulous for Howie Mandel; he really made the right deal when he agreed to host the megahit game show
Deal or No Deal
on NBC. Millions now know him as the man who can help them make a million, or not. After more than thirty years in show business, funnyman Howie Mandel is now laughing all the way to the bank.

Born on November 29, 1955, Howie Mandel grew up in Toronto, Ontario, and attended Beth David B’nai Israel Beth Am’s Hebrew school. As a young man, he had a carpet business before making the career move that would change his life. One night in 1979, while on vacation, Mandel attended an amateur event at L.A.’s Comedy Store club. Unable to resist his prescient friends’ daring him to try out, Mandel did, and impressed a producer, who got him a spot on the game show
Make Me Laugh.
Howie Mandel made them laugh and went on to work in a wide variety of entertainment venues: network and cable television, movies and theater. In 1982, he became a doctor, on TV. For the next six years, he was Dr. Wayne Fiscus on the Emmy Award–winning
St. Elsewhere.
Then, in 1990, he became creator, executive producer and voice of the cartoon children’s series
Bobby’s World.
Also an Emmy Award–winner, the show was on Fox for eight seasons and is now in syndication, appearing six days a week in sixty-five countries. Mandel says that the show’s continuing success is because the stories are believable, because they’re inspired by real life. He had already proved his appeal to children as the voice of the character Gizmo in the 1984 film
Gremlins.

Howie Mandel continues to be seen in comedy specials on television and on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,
showing the hidden camera segments that he’s known for. In 1998 and 1999, he hosted
The Howie Mandel Show
talk show and is who Regis Philbin first thinks of when it’s time to go on vacation. Mandel frequently steps in as a guest host on
Live with Regis and Kelly.
Live performances are a big part of the Mandel’s long career as a performer, and every year he does some two hundred concerts in the U.S. and Canada.

Residing in Los Angeles, Howie Mandel and his wife, Terry, have three children.

HOWIE MANDEL, THE REAL DEAL, EVEN AT THIRTEEN

I was bar mitzvahed on December 7, 1968. The reason I know that it was December 7 is because there was a lot of talk about Pearl Harbor. I was Canadian; Pearl Harbor doesn’t have the same significance, but every day we talked about how it’s a special day. And the fact that all the women there were named Pearl. All my mother’s friends, ironically, seemed to be named Pearl, but for old Jewish women, that’s like being named Smith.

There were all these speeches about Pearl Harbor. It’s just a big mess in my mind. It was just this huge responsibility, and the only light at the end of the tunnel was that I didn’t have to go to the Hebrew school anymore. I was told I could go up until my bar mitzvah. It was like a really bad graduation ceremony as far as I was concerned.

You know, these celebrations never really made sense to me as a Jew. The word
celebrate,
as we learned it, has a sense of festivity and fun and laughter and holiday. But it never really felt that way. When I got off of school for Yom Kippur, which was supposed to be a holiday, and the Yom Kippur celebration, there was no food or water. That doesn’t lend itself to celebrating. The earliest memory I have of a celebration was inviting a lot of people over to the house for a bris, which was a celebration. I didn’t really understand the celebration connected with the slicing off of the end of one’s penis. And they serve and cater. I never really understood that.

BUT YOU HAVE TO ADMIT, HOWIE, WHEN YOU TURN THIRTEEN, THEY GIVE YOU THIS FABULOUS PARTY. YOU GET A LOT OF GIFTS, A LOT OF GELT. OR GUILT, DEPENDING ON YOUR PARENTS.

Well, I just remember a lot of strangers. I was very short. They said today I’m a man but I didn’t have a job. I didn’t earn a living. I lived with other people. I shared a room. So how does this make me a man, I ask you? I was at a big party with music. I didn’t know how to do the alley cat. A lot of people were doing the alley cat. I saw a lot of asses. And a lot of gowns with sequins.

I was four foot ten. Two years later, at fifteen, I was on the wrestling team, and I was in the eighty-nine-pound class. So I know I weighed less and was shorter at my bar mitzvah.

I was not popular. First of all, in my school, I was one of very few Jews. And when you’re four foot ten and you weigh seventy-something and you explain to all your non-Jewish friends that you can’t go out this Saturday because you’re having a party celebrating the fact that you’re a man. And this is a guy who had a woman’s voice. My voice hadn’t changed. And I had to shave. I stood on a crate to see up to the altar to read from the Torah.

WHAT ABOUT GIRLS? WERE YOU A BABE MAGNET BACK THEN?

I was just very different. I was very little, very tiny. I couldn’t meet girls, but I figured out that I could get close to them because I looked like a girl. I could stand in the girls’ bathroom in front of the mirror brushing my hair, and nobody would know that I was a boy.

WERE YOU FUNNY? DID YOU HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR?

I think I looked funnier than I actually was.

THERE WAS NO BUDDING COMEDIAN AT THAT POINT IN YOUR LIFE?

The budding comedian really didn’t come out until I was twenty-three. I was not funny at thirteen. Not at that point in my life. And at my bar mitzvah, nobody I knew was there. In fact, I wonder if this has happened at any other bar mitzvah. I remember wandering around aimlessly, but as a Jew, that’s what we do. We wander. I was wandering around this room, and older people who I had never seen in my life and have never seen since would come up to me and go, “You don’t know who I am, do you? Guess who I am? You don’t remember me, do you? I was at your bris.” I don’t remember anybody from my bris. But they hand you envelopes and I was stuffed with envelopes. And I didn’t get to keep any of it.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHAT HAPPENED? IT WENT TOWARD COLLEGE?

No, toward the bar mitzvah. It went toward the bar mitzvah.

THEY TOOK YOUR ENVELOPES TO PAY FOR THE PARTY?

Yes. And let me tell you the best part of the night, or the worst. My father’s best friend was a courtroom sketch artist. So they hired this sketch artist from the court to capture the bar mitzvah.

YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THEY HIRED A SKETCH ARTIST INSTEAD OF A PHOTOGRAPHER?

Yes, can you believe it? So we had, like you see on the news, courtroom sketches of my bar mitzvah. This is what we did and it made the evening miserable: it would take him ten minutes to sketch us in a certain pose…“Oh, you’re dancing with your mother. Just stay right there.” We weren’t allowed to move as he sketched us. We had no video, just these pencil sketches of the evening, and in all of them I’m standing uncomfortably still in bad positions.

Oy, what a night!

Born and raised in New York City, twins Josh and Andy Bernstein have made careers out of helping others to cope with the challenges of their surroundings. Yet while Josh’s clients master the skills needed to survive in the wilderness, Andy teaches his audiences the skills needed to manage the stress of the corporate jungle. Despite their different environments, both have earned widespread acclaim with their constructive and entertaining approaches to common—and uncommon—problems.

Andy Bernstein is the founder of ActivInsight, an intelligent new way to eliminate stress and handle change. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Andy spent many years studying a wide variety of transformational processes. His work has been featured in
O
magazine, and he now teaches ActivInsight at companies like Johnson & Johnson, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch; at nonprofits like Phoenix House; and through top business schools like Wharton.

While Andy explored the inner world of the mind, Josh headed into the wild. Josh is the president and CEO of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, the oldest and largest wilderness survival school in the world. In 2004, Josh became host of the History Channel’s hit show,
Digging for the Truth
, sharing his enthusiasm for travel and adventure to active and armchair explorers alike. In 2007, Josh changed channels, moving to the Discovery Channel where he is hosting and producing series and specials on a variety of subjects, such as the environment, archaeology, and anthropology. With a winning combination of talent and rugged good looks, Josh has been featured in publications such as
Men’s Vogue
and the Style section of
The New York Times.

JOSH AND ANDY BERNSTEIN THE JOSH AND ANDY SHOW

J
OSH:
I think that the bar mitzvah is one of the few remaining rites of passage in our world today. It’s an event that celebrates the transition from boy to man. So for me, it was a big event. It was the thing that I, and we, worked so hard for. And it was nice that my brother and I were working so hard together. Twice the fun, half the work and twice the party.

We split the haftarah portion. I did the first portion. Andy did the second half. It was twenty-six years ago so it’s hard to remember the specifics. But I recall investing a lot of time in it, and wanted to not screw up.

We had our bar mitzvahs on February 4, 1984, at Park Avenue Synagogue on East 87th Street at Madison Avenue in New York. It was three weeks before our thirteenth birthday. We both invited our friends and there must have been about a hundred forty or a hundred fifty people there.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE THIRTEEN YEAR OLDS WHO ARE GOING TO BE READING THIS BOOK?

J
OSH:
You should smile, do your best, it will all be over soon. But at the same time, you’re surrounded by the people who love you the most in a setting where the most learned of rabbis and scholars are right there next to you to help you. So smile, and say your haftarah.

A
NDY:
And then dance.

J
OSH:
And then dance. I do remember that we had the best party. Being the Bernstein twins, we could have twice the party at once. The guest list was twice as long. So we had the best bar mitzvah in our class.

A
NDY:
It was great. It was at the Pierre [hotel]. There was a fifteen-person band with smoke machines and T-shirts for the kids. And we had these beautiful cakes that I think we may still have pieces of in the freezer. And we danced and we had so much fun. Our friends were there, almost our whole class from Horace Mann, which is a private school in Riverdale. There were maybe a hundred people in our grade and most of them were Jewish.

I do remember that the girls were taller than we were.

YOUR PARENTS WERE DIVORCED. WERE BOTH EQUALLY INVOLVED IN YOUR BAR MITZVAH?

J
OSH:
It was a coming together of the families, our mom’s side and her friends, and our dad’s side and his friends, and our friends. We merged them together and we had a big party. Our mom’s grandmother was old-school, old-world Judaism, Orthodox, a kosher home. And so, Judaism and the importance of Jewish culture, the tradition, the family values were very clear in that household. And our father, who grew up in Israel—Judaism was just a fact of life. It was more the secular version of Judaism. You were born in Israel, you were Jewish, and so the idea of the bar mitzvah ceremony wasn’t as strong in his family. Being raised in our mom’s house after the divorce instilled in us the importance of Jewish tradition. It meant a lot more to her. Our dad was very proud of our bar mitzvah after the fact.

A
NDY:
There was a lot of tension in our family between our mother and father after the divorce. It was not a friendly divorce. And our father would have some difficulty in public appearances with our mother.

He came to the bar mitzvah, and not only was he in the photos and cutting the cake with our mother and us, and doing all of the things that one does, but he was there emotionally as well. And he took our mother aside and said, “You’ve done a great job raising our boys.”

J
OSH:
Which was a huge thing for a not-very-forthcoming Israeli man to say.

A
NDY:
I think that the spirit of it being a rite of passage and a point of transformation is that way for everyone. It’s a chance to really step out and reflect.

WERE EITHER OF YOU NERVOUS?

J
OSH:
I don’t remember being nervous. But I remember having to sing in front of all these people in a squeaky voice because your voice is changing. And it was like, God, I hope I don’t mess up.

A
NDY:
I remember being nervous. And one boy in our class—he’s a legend now—threw up. Or he partially threw up during his bar mitzvah. When he got up there, there was a gagging thing happening. Everyone was discussing it, because we were all having our bar mitzvahs around the same time period. And so I remember feeling really nervous and thinking, “Oh my God, I hope I don’t live on as the one who…” And Josh went first, and then I went. And we had partnered symbolically with two Russian Jews. So he represented a Russian Jew, I represented a Russian Jew, and they bar mitzvahed through us. It was really a beautiful symbol of that rite of passage that Josh was talking about.

J
OSH:
We each had the name of a boy in Russia. Edward Doks was one of them. What I understood from my thirteen-year-old perspective was that they lived in a community where Judaism was not openly encouraged, and there was no way for them to have a bar mitzvah. So through this twinning, it’s like we were basically bar mitzvahing them through our ceremony. I asked my teacher if she could help me write a letter to my twin in Russia. And then I got his mom on the phone and we read the letter to her: “Hi, my name is Josh Bernstein, and I’m twinning your son in a bar mitzvah this weekend.” And she started crying, saying “Thank you, thank you.” It was very special. I think that…that that was a way for…for me to connect with the culture of Judaism around the world and the significance of that tradition.

Later on, my perspective on Judaism changed. I spent a year after college studying Judaism, the mysticism and halacha in Jerusalem. I’d say I know far more now than I did at the age of thirteen, or even just growing up in America. Judaism in the Diaspora is very different than Judaism in Israel. And then that is very different from traditional Judaic culture. The one thing that impressed me the most in Israel was how deep the tradition is, how rich the culture is, and how family oriented it is. There’s so much to the laws about how you treat your spouse, how you raise your children, what kind of household you create, and the significance of the heritage gets passed on from one generation to the next. And so, I came away from that year in Israel, 1993–1994, feeling like this is so much more than just saying a few words in temple on your bar mitzvah and now you’re a man. There’s a world to Judaism that is not quite so profoundly understood in America today. That’s my sense.

A
NDY:
When we were little, we would sing and dance for guests. And there was no embarrassment. There was no sense of self-consciousness. But at our bar mitzvah, there was the beginning of a sense of self-consciousness. Where you’re very aware of how you look and what other people might think.

I think the bar mitzvah marks a transition not just spiritually or in terms of religion, but also psychologically. And for me, I think that the value of that rite of passage was to be aware of myself as a boy becoming a man in a Jewish tradition and also in a modern, more just consciousness-based sense.

Looking back at my bar mitzvah now, I have a lot of memories of my childhood. The joke in our family is I got all the memory cells. I remember from the age of two on. Josh doesn’t remember last week. I can look back and see my childhood memories as different in some way than what took place from thirteen on. So it really is an amazing point of change, I think, in a boy’s or a girl’s life. It’s hard to think about who am I, what is this? What is my culture about? How do these traditions affect me personally? What is this that I’m actually saying here in this language? And how am I different from this point on? So looking back, I can see life before my bar mitzvah. It was a more innocent and unreflective period. And then starting from the bar mitzvah, I really started thinking about who am I and how do I fit into the world.

J
OSH:
Is your consciousness changing from a psychological perspective because of your age or because of the catalyst of the actual bar mitzvah?

A
NDY:
I would say more because of the age. I don’t think the bar mitzvah was placed at thirteen arbitrarily. We had events when we were much younger that could have been seen as just as challenging from a performance perspective, where we would do Gilbert and Sullivan routines for guests that we didn’t know. And we’d run around and sing. We’d do
Pirates of Penzance.
It was the Josh and Andy Show every Friday, when we had guests over for Shabbat. And we never thought twice about it. And if you look at young children who sing and dance, they don’t think twice about it. They play in the bathtub. They’re not thinking, “Oh, I’m naked.” They play with their friends in the park, and they’re not thinking about how they appear, until they hit a certain age. And I think that it’s traditional, the young adult, twelve-, thirteen-year-old time period, where girls start to become very aware of how they’re perceived in their peer groups, boys start to act very differently. And I think that part of why the bar mitzvah is so resonant and important a symbol is because it happens at the right time period.

IF EITHER OF YOU COULD DO IT AGAIN AT EIGHTY-THREE, LIKE KIRK DOUGLAS, WOULD YOU HAVE ANOTHER BAR MITZVAH?

A
NDY:
We did it in part because everyone was doing it at that time. We just didn’t question it. When someone does it as an adult, it really marks a greater conscious commitment. You’re not going through it with a thirteen-year-old mind. You’re going through it with a mature mind. Our mother was bat mitzvahed, though, a few years ago. She was probably fifty-five. She did it on her own. She learned how to read the haftarah. I think she just took so much pride in our combined bar mitzvah ceremony and wished that she had had one. But for her to do it in her fifties is a testament to her and shows the importance of Judaism in her life. She lived vicariously through us when it was our turn. But it wasn’t enough; she wanted to have her own experience of what it meant to stand there. It was also at Park Avenue Synagogue, and she was on the same bimah as we were on. We were so proud.

J
OSH:
She’s the embodiment of Judaism in the Bernstein family. For her to have her sons bar mitzvahed was sort of nonnegotiable. And then for her to physically do it herself was a huge milestone. It was probably one of the greatest moments, one of the top three, in her life.

WHAT TYPE OF TRADITIONS WILL YOU HAVE WITH YOUR FAMILY WHEN AND IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN, AND WILL THE BAR AND BAT MITZVAH BE AS PRIMARY AS IT WAS IN YOUR OWN LIFE?

J
OSH:
You know, it’s funny. After the year of study in Israel, most of the people in my class went on to rabbinical school. And I decided to go do desert survival and get back involved with BOSS, which is now the company that I own and run. I think that for me, Judaism is all about family.

But I do believe there is spiritual importance that I won’t ignore in my life. I view Judaism as one path to the top of the mountain, and Christianity is another path, and Buddhism is another path. And there’s no one path that’s better than the others, because we’re all trying to get to the top. But Judaism is a very distinct and difficult path. It always has been.

DID YOU EVER THINK THAT YOU WANTED TO BE A RABBI?