After a couple of years in Eretz Yisrael, we moved back to the US, where we joined a large, established community. Shortly after we arrived, I gave birth to our first child, Binyamin. His bris was on a Sunday morning, when most people weren’t working, and, to my delight, the bris was a large, well-attended simchah. While we didn’t have many relatives there, we did have lots of friends, and I was thrilled that even Yehoshua’s friends’ wives — many of whom I had never met — made the effort to attend.

Living in that city, I formed many close friendships. When my friends had babies, or weren’t feeling well, I watched their kids and sent over meals, and they did the same for me. For the first time, I had neighbors to socialize with.

After we had been living in that city for close to a decade, the company Yehoshua was working for started to flounder. At exactly that time, a recruiter from a small city in a different state contacted Yehoshua and offered him a job there. We had no interest in moving to that out-of-the-way town, whose frum community was minuscule, but Yehoshua decided to apply anyway. “This way I’ll have something in my back pocket, just in case,” he said.

Shortly after he applied for the job, his company went bankrupt. Suddenly, Yehoshua found himself unemployed — but with an attractive job offer from the recruiter. Having no other prospects, we made the difficult decision to move to that city, where neither of us knew a soul.

Yehoshua settled nicely into his job, and our kids quickly acclimated to the community schools. Once again, I found myself feeling socially isolated, so I tried hard to keep up with my friends through regular text messages and WhatsApp posts, plus the occasional phone call.

Through WhatsApp, my friends and I exchanged pictures of our kids, swapped recipes, and shared updates about our lives. When a friend posted that she was looking for a good babysitter, I was able to direct her to someone I had used. When I expressed frustration that we were having yet another snow day, my friends all wrote back to commiserate. The group chats weren’t the same as being surrounded by friends and neighbors, but they were a decent substitute.

About a year after we moved, we started making plans for the bar mitzvah of our first and only son, Binyamin, who had since been joined by three younger sisters. Fondly remembering Binyamin’s bris, I looked forward to celebrating another simchah enveloped by the people close to me.

Since all of our relatives and friends lived out of state, most of them a three- to six-hour drive away, Yehoshua and I decided to make a Shabbos bar mitzvah and invite all these people to stay with us over Shabbos. We’d arrange accommodations for them, and they’d join us for the Shabbos meals. For the community, we’d make a kiddush on Shabbos morning, and for Binyamin’s friends, we’d hold a small bo bayom celebration in school.

In our community, there are two simchah halls: dumpy and dumpier. We booked the dumpy one.

Yehoshua and I compiled an invitation list that included about 180 people, half from our new community, and the rest from out-of-town (or in-town, as the case may be). In about 50 of the invitations we sent to people in other cities, we inserted a card inviting them to spend Shabbos with us. We included response cards with stamped envelopes, and asked that people RSVP by January 12, which was two weeks before the date of the simchah. This way, we’d know how many portions to order from the caterer.

We expected that about 25 of our invitees would actually join us for Shabbos. The week of our bar mitzvah was a legal holiday weekend, which we thought would make it easier for people to make the trip — especially those in the Tristate area, who were only a three-hour drive away.

Then came a big blow. Shortly after we sent out the invitations, my father suffered a heart attack. He couldn’t travel, and my mother couldn’t leave him. My only brother’s wife was due to give birth the week of our bar mitzvah, so we already knew far in advance that he and his family would be unable to join. That meant that I would not have any relatives from my side of the family at the bar mitzvah.

My friends will have to take their place, I thought sadly.

To our surprise, only three people sent back response cards saying they were planning to come: two of Yehoshua’s friends, and Yehoshua’s nonreligious Partner in Torah.

About 15 people sent back response cards with mazel tov wishes and apologies that they couldn’t make it: “Thank you so much for thinking of us, we’re so sorry that we’re not able to participate.” Those responses warmed my heart.

But then there were the other responses — or lack thereof. One close friend of mine sent this text message: “Mzl tv sry cnt mk it.” That stung. I had invited her to my son’s bar mitzvah, and all I got in response was a shorthand communiqué?

Another friend of mine sent a message through her sister that she wouldn’t be coming. “Devora says it’s not worth the trip,” her sister reported bluntly. That was painful, too.

Then there was the friend who called with a whole story of why she couldn’t make it. “My son’s fifth birthday party is on Sunday and I really can’t reschedule it, I already invited his whole class, and if we drive back home on Motzaei Shabbos we’ll be so tired, I just don’t see how we can do it.”

“It’s totally okay,” I assured her. “I completely understand.”

“But I feel so bad, I would have wanted to be there with you, if I could make it I would, it’s just this birthday party, my son has been looking forward to it for so long….”

“Don’t feel bad,” I soothed her. “Of course your son’s birthday comes first.”

I hung up the phone with a vague sense of guilt, as though I was doing something wrong by making a bar mitzvah the day before her son’s birthday party.

While I didn’t expect all of our invitees to travel to our city for Shabbos, I did find these excuses, and several others, quite hurtful.

“It’s fine if people can’t come,” I told Yehoshua. “But all these excuses, and the way they’re delivered — it feels as though they’re trivializing our simchah.”

Most painful of all was that the majority of the people we invited did not acknowledge our invitation at all: no response card, no phone call, not even a text. And many of these were people we felt very close to. Still, I was confident that we’d be joined for Shabbos by more than the three people who had actually responded. Maybe they were planning to surprise us?

Less than a week before the Shabbos of the bar mitzvah, I found myself on the phone with the caterer trying to calculate how many portions we’d need. When I had originally booked the hall months earlier, I had given him a rough estimate of 60 people per meal, but told him I’d update him after we received the response cards. “I still don’t know how many people we’re going to have,” I told him apologetically. “I guess we’ll order for 20 people per meal.”

That week, we celebrated Binyamin’s bo bayom in his school. It was a beautiful occasion, complete with spirited singing by his classmates and uplifting divrei Torah by his rebbeim.

Friday afternoon, our three expected guests arrived, as did Yehoshua’s mother. My modest estimate of a guest count had been greatly overblown, so at the last minute, we invited ten of Binyamin’s classmates to join us for the Shabbos meals, just so that the room wouldn’t look empty and we wouldn’t be left with too many uneaten portions.

As if our meager guest turnout wasn’t embarrassing enough, the manager of the hall forgot to turn on the heat before Shabbos. The weather was frigid, and everyone in the hall sat in coats, shivering. Binyamin’s eighth-grade classmates behaved, well, like eighth-grade boys, lending a rowdy atmosphere to the occasion. Watching Yehoshua’s Partner in Torah shiver at our Friday night seudah, I couldn’t help but cringe at the thought that this was the first frum simchah he had ever attended. And probably the last, I told myself gloomily.

After the meal Friday night I returned home in a rotten mood. What a pathetic simchah this had turned out to be. Dumpy hall. A measly four guests, all of whom had come for Yehoshua, not me. Not a single relative other than my mother-in-law. No heat, on one of the coldest days of the year. A bunch of obnoxious adolescent boys for company.

As I sat there drowning in self-pity, I remembered a LifeLines story I had once read entitled “Overwhelming Simchah,” about a woman who felt beleaguered after making three weddings in short succession. Well, our bar mitzvah is the opposite bookend to that, I thought bitterly. An underwhelming simchah, indeed.

And then I remembered another LifeLines story, about a young woman whose parents had insisted on making her an extravagant wedding, against her wishes. “This might be your wedding,” the father had told his daughter, “but it’s our simchah.”

This might be my son’s bar mitzvah, I echoed to myself, but it’s Hashem’s simchah.

What were we celebrating, anyway, if not one of Hashem’s children reaching the age of responsibility for His mitzvos? Another Jew was joining the ranks of Hashem’s faithful, committing to putting His Will before his own. I had the zechus to participate in Hashem’s celebration, and the fact that so many of our invitees did not have this zechus didn’t minimize the magnitude of the simchah in the slightest. On the contrary, the dearth of human participants made Hashem’s role in this simchah all the more pronounced.

While pondering this novel idea, I drifted off to sleep, feeling comforted and at peace.

At the bar mitzvah kiddush the next morning, the entire community was present: about 80 adults and a few dozen kids. Suddenly, I no longer cared about the dumpiness of the hall, the conspicuous absence of our relatives and out-of-town friends, or even the lack of heat. I felt honored to be playing a starring role in Hashem’s simchah, and truly overjoyed to be the mother of this young man who was now a bar mitzvah. My heart no longer had any space for resentment.

To ensure that I harbored no resentment, I made a point of sending a fruit platter to a friend of mine in a different city when she made a kiddush for a baby girl a couple of months later, even though she had not acknowledged my bar mitzvah invitation. (She didn’t acknowledge the fruit platter, either. I guess she’s not so good at communication. Or maybe she’s just overwhelmed.)

Another thing I did do was take myself off all my friends’ WhatsApp groups. These groups, I realized, had been a poor substitute for real friendship, and the updates and photos I had regularly posted to the chat had done nothing to preserve my relationships with the group members. Digital communication, apparently, was nothing more than an illusion of connection, and could not replace the experience of hearing another person’s voice. From now on, I resolved, I’d be keeping up with my friends by phone only.

These days, when I receive an invitation, I think of the people who made the effort to request my participation, and I remind myself that Hashem is celebrating a simchah. While I can’t attend most of these simchahs because I live far away, I can still honor the occasion by giving the baalei simchah a good feeling, whether by calling to express my mazel tov wishes — not my excuses — or by sending a response card or RSVP e-mail in a timely fashion.

Recently, a divorced friend who lives in a different city got engaged and sent me an invitation to her wedding. I’m sure she didn’t expect me to come, but I knew that in all likelihood the wedding would be sparsely attended. Prior to my son’s bar mitzvah, I wouldn’t have felt any need to attend — I wasn’t very close to her — but after that experience, I understood what my presence would mean to her. So I drove the four hours to dance at her wedding, after sending a response card to let her know I’d be delighted to join her simchah.

Not only did Binyamin’s bar mitzvah change my attitude toward simchahs and toward friendship in general, it also gave me a new perspective on coping with loneliness. Until the bar mitzvah, I had spent my whole life feeling lonely and wishing I could have more relatives, friends, and neighbors than I actually did. After the bar mitzvah, I started realizing more and more that the cure to this feeling of loneliness was not having more people in my life, but bringing Hashem more into my life.

Turns out, my simchah was not so underwhelming, after all.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 712)