Bill Cosby's "Bar Mitzvah" in Cleveland

I didn't need to go to Cleveland, Bill Cosby told me on the phone. He was going there to speak at a conference for parents put on by the local school district to deal with the high school dropout crisis. As I have done over the past several years, I helped put together the logistics for the event on his behalf.

The phone conversation was wrapping up. I thanked Mr. Cosby. As a personal aside, I told him I was grateful not to go to Cleveland because the date coincided with the Bar Mitzvah of my best friend's son. Instead of ending with "That's fine, glad it worked out," Mr. Cosby said something rather unexpected.

"That's quite fitting that you'll be doing that at the same time as I'm speaking," he told me with a heartfelt intensity. "Because I'm going to Cleveland for the very same purpose."

Earlier in the conversation, he asked me to fact check a few things in preparation for the conference. He wanted to know, among other questions, whether African American youth were being seriously taught the history of their ancestors in school. A few days later, I called him back and told him what I learned. The answer I got back was "not much." The schools were bound to the state-approved curriculum. African American History was offered as an elective. There were some extra-curricular enrichment events from time to time, the administrator told me.

As I had done on many previous occasions, I read off the local statistics the school district and city had provided. Crime rates remained high and steady from last year to this. What stood out, too, was the markedly pronounced rate of sexually transmitted disease among the youth. "Where is the accountability?" Mr. Cosby wanted to know. He said he would be very interested to hear the answers to that question from city officials, school leadership, and the parents and young people themselves.

There are probably no simple solutions to this question or any of the other problems that face young people today of all racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. But at this Bar Mitzvah, the first one I had ever attended despite my Jewish ancestry, I suddenly saw Mr. Cosby's dots connecting more profoundly than after our phone conversation. As I watched and heard my friend give blessings to his son, I got it loud and clear what Mr. Cosby meant. I knew that the message in the temple was one and the same as what the parents and children heard in Cleveland.

With his hand on his son's shoulder, my friend Alan Schwartz told thirteen-year-old Adam, "Wherever you journey, may your steps be firm, and may you walk in just paths and not be afraid. May your hands build and your heart preserve what is good and beautiful in our world. May the voices of the generations of our people move through you. May you know there is a rich heritage to which you belong and from that sacred place you are connected to all who dwell upon the earth. What I wish for you, my son, I wish for all the children."