Susan Cain's grandfather

Below is an excerpt from "When Trials and Tribulations Accumulate… Sermon by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein Shabbat Va-yeshev, December 20, 2008." He forwarded the text to the Ramaz families. You can find the text of the entire speech here: http://lukeford.net/blog/?p=7660. The suggestion for placing standards on celebrations is not coming from the hallowed cities in Brooklyn but from upper Manhattan:

Approach Number Three: We might begin to rethink some of our priorities. Maybe it is time to take a hard look at our materialistic society and the extent to which we as Jews have been affected by it. Some say that this entire crisis which the world is going through has been visited upon us by God because of greed and materialism. I have no way of guessing about God’s manner of judging the world, but it wouldn’t hurt for us to draw some lessons from what has obviously created the bubble in which all of us have been living.
Something very interesting happened in our synagogue two days ago, on Thursday morning the 18th. A family in our community had a relatively simple Bar Mitzvah for their seventh-grade boy who did not want to have the big bash that his two older brothers had enjoyed for their Bar Mitzvah celebrations. He wanted something simple because that’s his nature. He is modest and humble even though he has reasons to be otherwise. Moreover, he didn’t want anyone to give him gifts. Instead, he asked the invited guests to make a contribution to SSEJ, the Struggle to Save Ethiopian Jews. It was a remarkable demonstration by a Bar Mitzvah boy of priorities, of goodness, of compassion, and of the finest values that the Jewish people can teach. The entire seventh grade was invited and, of course, missed two periods of school, about which they didn’t complain. But they didn’t really miss school; they got a lesson in Judaism and in menschlichkeit that was worth ten periods in the classroom! Mark Twain once said: "Never let school interfere with your education." Here was a perfect application of that rule.
I don’t want to suggest that we all begin having Bar and Bat Mitzvahs on Thursday mornings, but perhaps it is time to begin to consider developing communal standards for smachot. Maybe now is the precisely the time to set forth some guidelines for modesty and restraint. So many families will have difficulty in the coming months and years in making big smachot. How much easier it would be for them if a community like ours decided on what is acceptable and what is not, what is desirable and what is not. I can’t do this alone; it needs a communal consensus, but maybe now is the time to talk about developing such a consensus.