Nifty 50: Never Too Old for Bar Mitzvah

On March 28, Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Shabbat before Passover, Ryan Posner celebrated his bar mitzvah at Ahavath Achim Synagogue. He was 50 years old, with his calendar birthday falling the following morning.

Senior Rabbi Laurence Rosenthal noted, “Ryan became bar mitzvah at 13 like every Jewish young man does. The status is automatic.”

But what Ryan never had was the ceremony, the preparation, the standing at the bimah, the community gathered around him. Posner stated, “This weekend was about doing what I had missed doing and finally becoming the main character in my own Jewish story rather than a guest in someone else’s.”

Posner’s weekend began Thursday with his Torah reading.

By way of motivation, Ryan’s late father, Harvey Posner, resigned from Ahavath Achim in the late 1970s. When he left, Ryan’s Hebrew school journey ended before it started. For decades, he carried that distance. Near the end of his life, Harvey told his son that he wanted him to be more involved in Judaism. He died before Ryan figured out how to honor that request.

The spark came in February 2022 at his nephew, Reid’s, bar mitzvah, where Ryan’s sister, Haley, mentioned in her speech that neither of them had ever had a bar or bat mitzvah. A rabbi in the room said simply: “It’s never too late.”

During COVID, Ryan had been researching his rich family history and discovered that they were pioneering members of Ahavath Achim, where Harvey exited.

Posner recalled, “That changed everything. I returned, joined the board of directors, became a gabbai, helped build a technology system called SAGE (Screen Assisted Guided Experience) to make services more accessible to people like me who did not know the Hebrew or the prayers, and spent four years studying to get here.”

On the morning of his bar mitzvah, he led portions of the Shacharit service, chanted Torah, co-chanted the Haftarah with his friend, Mark Papier, and delivered a D’var Torah called, “The Eternal Flame,” connecting Parshat Tzav’s commandment to keep the altar fire burning to his own story of return. The congregation gave him a standing ovation. He closed by announcing that his father’s name, Harvey Posner, was being added to the memorial board at the back of the sanctuary, restoring a generation that had been missing from his family’s line in this congregation.

The Saturday night celebration was themed, “Back to the Mitzvah,” a play on the movie, “Back to the Future,” which resonated with the idea of returning to the past to reclaim something and carry it forward. The theme was developed with a screen-accurate DeLorean time machine displayed under gold stanchions and red velvet ropes outside the synagogue’s side entrance; an “Out of Time” license plate on the DeLorean was replaced with one signed by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, a hand-painted “Enchantment Under the Sea” stage banner, and a flux capacitor guest sign-in box – all nods to the popular 1980s film.

Posner entered as comedian Don Rickles. After rousing dances with an oldies band, the final two songs were “Earth Angel” and “Johnny B. Goode,” from the Enchantment Under the Sea dance from the movie. Ryan, who has a reputation for eschewing eating anything “green or healthy,” had an Italian pizza-themed kiddish, while the Saturday night party had a chocolate fountain and various snack foods.

To preserve these memories, Ryan composed a journal. He noted, “The bar mitzvah weekend of March 27–29 was planned in meticulous detail over four years, but what actually happened was richer, messier, funnier, and more profound than any spreadsheet could capture.”

Some of the most vivid memories were: the Torah scroll that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, the feeling of hearing his Hebrew name called out in a sanctuary full of loving people, and the moment “when he knew exactly who he was and why he was there.”

Posner labeled the weekend: Leviticus 6:6 “A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar; it shall not go out.”