Life Cycle: B'nei Mitzvah

Rabbi Waskow and Berman

All the major life-cycle ceremonies of classical rabbinical Judaism are keyed to bodily change: birth, choosing a sexual partner, death. For the Rabbis, ethical potential and sexual potency were connected. Responsibility for carrying out communal and Divine precepts came due upon reaching sexual adulthood... The individuals whose fragile, brand-new identities were celebrated around their birth times have now become powerful enough to make both joy and trouble... The rabbis treated all sexuality as fraught with danger. They evidently believed that the most difficult task of a grownup human being is controlling the sexual urge; so to insist that all the mitzvot were operative at puberty meant that the community was bracing itself to cover those urges.

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin

Most scholars interpret this blessing as meaning that the father is no longer responsible for his son’s sins.

But it is also a kind of cosmic sigh—an admission that even sincere, competent, highly committed parents are limited in what they can do with their children. The rest is up to the child himself or herself. When parents say Baruch she-peterani, they say, in effect, “Whatever this young person does now, he is legally and morally culpable. Thank God, it’s not my responsibility.” At that moment, the parent becomes like Isaac, who, on looking at his sons, Jacob, and Esau, realized that he had done all that he could for them. One son would worship God, the other would worship idols. There are limits to every parent’s hopes and dreams, limits to every parent’s ability to control and influence. The rest is up to faith, hope, and trust.

To the ancients, thirteen was the age of spiritual and moral choices. Some rabbinic sources say that only upon turning thirteen is a youth first able to make mature choices, because then the child becomes endowed with both the yester hatov (the good inclination) and the yester hara (the evil inclination), the dueling forces that Jewish theology perceives are within the human psyche.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman

The parents come up and speak their sense of pride, joy, nostalgic sorrow. They bless the one who was their child- still is, but changed. The traditional blessing is: “Baruh sheptarani mey-onsho shel zeh.” – “Blessed is the One Who releases me from the burden of this one.” This originally meant the burden of responsibility for whatever sins the child might commit, which until the moment of maturity rested on the parents, or more particularly the father. Today it might well mean” “Blessed is the One Who leaves no longer on my own shoulders the sole responsibility for teaching, guiding this youngster- but now gives me a community to share that task.” Some parents nowadays say instead, “Sheheheyanu”- “Blessed is the One Who has filled us with life, listed us up, and carried us to this moment.” Either explicitly or implicitly, these blessings are a public affirmation that the family, not only the child, has been transformed. It no longer has the old shape.

Waskow and Berman

The simplest and clearest shift in daily public behavior was that at thirteen, boys became obligated to put on tefillin. These are leather straps that Jewish men traditionally bind around the arm and head each morning except for Shabbat and festival days, each strap attached to a tiny leather box containing parchments bearing Torah passages affirming that God is One. So the first occasion of putting on t’fillin at a weekday morning service became a time of ceremonial focus, and often the boy-becoming-man would teach a drasha- an interpretation of Torah- on that occasion. The process of binding the t’fillin each morning follows a careful ceremonial path, and some have suggested that the daily binding symbolizes and acts out a commitment to restrain one’s arms and eyes from actions or observations that are unholy. Thus, at just the moment when the young man is taking on a new power to act in the world, he affirms that from now on he will need to focus that power in ways that will enhance Unity of life, not shatter it. And he enters into the lifelong process of reinterpreting Torah so as to find guidance on this path.

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin

Historically, bar mitzvah was a somewhat peripheral ceremony. But there were several exceptions even before modern times. The most poignant was the Marranos, the Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity under duress during the fifteenth century but secretly maintained certain Jewish practices and beliefs. Bar mitzvah became a crucial time for Marrano families: It was the moment when they informed the child that he was Jewish. If he had been informed of this earlier, his immaturity might have prevented him from keeping it as well-guarded a secret as it had to be. Yet, if he learned later that this, the Christian element of his identity would have "taken," making any kind of link to Judaism much more diffiicult.

Waskow and Berman

What has emerged is a major public event, usually on Shabbat morning, in which the thirteen-year-old reads the last passage, called Maftir, of the week’s Torah portion, and then reads the Haftara, the selection from the Prophets traditionally assigned for the week. (Maftir and Haftara both stem from the Hebrew for “completion” or “conclusion.”) Most boys also speak about the Torah portion or about some other aspect of their lives.

This is the core of the Bar Mitzvah event, the moment at the heart of the ritual when there is the deepest and closet encounter with God, or with the boy’s own wresting with his life. It crystalizes the lifepath that Jewish men have been ideally expected to walk: not only hearing God’s Voice through the words of Torah and the Prophets, but also engaging with these words- wresting with them- so as to bring into the world their own new Torah.

Only in this way could they become full adult members of the people “Yisra-el.” For the very name of the people echoes the night of terror and transformation in which Jacob turned his lifelong struggle with his brother into a Wrestle with the nameless One, and was himself renamed Yisra-el, “Godwrestler.” So the encounter with God is intended to feel like an earthquake, shaking the new thirteen-year-old loose from his old attachments and assumptions. His response, his own d’var Torah, is intended to bespeak his adulthood- his ability to do what for centuries Jewish men have done, teach their own Torah.

B'nei Mitzvah as a Rite of Passage

Rabbis Deborah Waxman and Joshua Lesser

Understanding the B'nei Mitzvah experience as a rite of passage requires that we have some insight into the reasons why such rites of passage are necessary. In many cultures, rites of passage help with major life transitions that are psychological, biological and social in nature. These changes often spark emotional and spiritual challenges that are eased by a ritualized way of marking life transitions. Rites of passage not only enable the individuals involved to see themselves in a new perspective, but also help their friends, family and community members. Many such rituals are designed to reinforce values that are part of the culture or religion of the community.

Rabbi Jacob Staub

My family's experience for all three of our children was that the B Mitzvah service has surprising and extraordinary power. In each case, our child was transformed by the events of the B Mitzvah weekend. Standing in front of hundreds of adults as well as their own friends, leading the service, chanting from the Torah scroll, and composing and delivering their d'var Torah changed the way the community saw our children and thus changed their own self-image.

Rabbis Waxman and Lesser

In the modern era, the autonomous Jewish communities that had long existed began to disperse, and Jews began to live among non-Jews and to become more like them. A bar mitzvah ceremony became an opportunity to educate the child about how to relate to the Jewish community, a process that had previously been enacted unconsciously.

The abundance of America has resulted in a shift in b mitzvah from a change of status not needing any action or ritual to primarily a life cycle ritual. The development of the ritual has been traced (by Jenna Weissman Joselit) to the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe. She notes that the bar mitzvah ceremony is one of the few rituals that were more widely and expansively celebrated in America than in Eastern Europe because in America it was strengthened by ample material comfort, a child-centered culture, and creative new ways to express Jewish identity.

In the years following WWII, when many Jews moved to the suburbs, the synagogue became the primary site of Jewish education. Away from ethnic neighborhoods where they lived side by side, most Jews joined synagogues with the stated goal of educating their children Jewishly, at least through seventh grade. The bar mitzvah ritual became the culmination of this trajectory of childhood education, with a de-emphasis on the change in status or halakhic obligations and increased attention on the party. Many children received no further Jewish education following bar mitzvah, and some families dropped their synagogue membership following the bar/bat mitzvah of their youngest child.

Rabbis Waxman and Lesser

The first Bat Mitzvah ceremony, celebrated in 1922 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a Reconstructionist synagogue established by the followers of Mordecai M. Kaplan, had its roots in American democratic practices. It took hold because of girls' desire for religious equality and because of the desire of some men in leadership positions to facilitate this equality.