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| May 19, 2005 |
Bye, bye bar mitzvah?
 As a convert, I never became a bar mitzvah; I became a Jew instead. Not that I couldn't learn a Torah portion and read it out before a congregation, even have a little party for myself afterwards. I simply don't feel a particular need to do either of those things, partly out of my own acute shyness and partly because I engage with my Judaism in very public ways elsewhere in the synagogue and in my daily life.
After all, I've made a career out of writing about Judaism and the Jewish people.
But the lack of such ceremony, with its pomp and its circumstance, remains. Inevitably, after asking why I converted people ask if I "had a bar mitzvah" and if I plan on having one. Prior to my conversion, I knew what a bar mitzvah was. Afterwards, I came to understand how central it is to the American Jewish lifecycle -- or people's perception of it at any rate.
All of which is why Mark Oppenheimer's Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America looked so interesting when it landed in my mailbox.
For more than personal reasons, I've found the centrality of bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies fascinating. In my own synagogue, every Saturday morning is packed with them. Much of the life of the congregation rotates around their weekly presence. I wonder if anybody would ever go to services if somebody's kid wasn't squeaking through a chant.
Yes I am as aware as anybody to the seemingly vacuous quality of the whole affair -- most of the time. These kids study, their are forced into a Hebrew school classroom on Sunday mornings, they learn what they need to in order to survive the affair, and then they get one monster of a party. Most of these kids promptly stop going to Hebrew school, and show up at shul in order to wander the hallways during High Holiday services. I know. I've taught 7th graders. You can time their dropout from Sunday mornings to their big Saturday celebration.
Oppenheimer offers a more hopeful picture, and the best quality of his book is the acceptance of this sad reality alongside an equally powerful exposure to the good side of the rite of passage. He forces us to see the myriad reasons for such ceremonies, the ways in which it can prompt real spiritual exploration, evoke genuine faith, and generally improve the Jewish connection of its subjects. In the end, he's saying essentially, "What's all this kvetching for? So the bar mitzvah isn't perfect, so what? It's got its good, and why do away with that?"
Take this excerpt: "Whatever gives the bar mitzvah its slightly malodorous whiff, whatever makes it an embarrassment, a problem, even for proud Jews, is not the straightforward reality, but reality refracted through our imagination, or our lack of it. So that we take true stories of gala parties and imagine that no spiritual light could possibly have shone on them; we take young, inarticulate adolescents and suppose that they are incapable of profound religiosity, even though they will soon be teenagers, more capable of infatuation and heartbreak than their parents have been for twenty-five years. Or we simply allow our discomfort with being Jews, our fear that the Gentiles are watching and laughing, to focus our attention on the failed bar mitzvah, the one that truly is just an excuse for a party, and to blind us to the hard work of children who -- learning a dead language, reading from ancient texts, and being celebrated for it -- do inch closer to being Jewish men and women."
Obviously it helps that Oppenheimer can write like an artist. Nevertheless, the argument -- however rooted in truth and passion it may be -- rings hollow. I don't want to minimize the impact of such genuine fervor in the life of a child. I know of one of my former students who was a holy terror, but when he found somebody had written notes in their prayer book he immediately booked for the nearest eraser and insisted on cleaning up the book. But for every one of him, there's at least a dozen kids who couldn't care less and just want the party, or rather the presents.
And as this subject goes, we're not really talking about the kid who gets real meaning out of it. We're talking about the vast and growing majority who don't. Which is exactly the point Emily Bazelon's review of the book in Slate.
"As Oppenheimer points out, the paradox of the bar mitzvah is that it's flourishing as a coming-of-age ritual among Jews who generally don't take religious maturity seriously," she writes. She also points out, as Oppenheimer does, that the history of the bar mitzvah is quite recent and not exactly sacrosanct when it comes to modification.
So why not modify it? I don't mean in the way some are clamoring for. I'm a little miffed by those who say we should give every kid who wants one a bar mitzvah, regardless of whether or not he's a student in the Hebrew school or has made any commitment to being a member of the community. A party is not a bar mitzvah, and as much as inclusion and openness are important points, to make such an argument is missing the point entirely. You have to study to be a bar mitzvah. You have to know enough to take on full adult responsibilities in the community and the synagogue. It's not about a party, and just because some 13-year-old putz went to a friend of a friend of a sister's party and thought, "Gee I want one of those," doesn't mean they deserve one.
But I digress.
I'll actually second Bazelon's recommendation. "Why not do away with the age requirement? After all, as a recent American innovation, the bar mitzvah is surely ours to improve upon," she concludes. I also second a larger discussion on ways we can make this more meaningful, even if it means "fewer b'nai mitzvahs -- but they'd be more deeply felt. And that's probably a trade-off worth making."
That larger discussion can and should surely start with a thorough reading of Oppenheimer's book, so I'll go ahead and second that too.
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