Higher Learning

My friend Norma came up to me at the celebration following my daughter’s bat mitzvah and said, “Do you know how special this is?”

“Yeah,” I beamed, “she was incredible.”

“Noa was great,” Norma said, “But I don’t mean her. I mean a bat mitzvah.”

Norma, who isn’t Jewish, must have noticed I was at a loss. I had spent a week worrying about whether the synagogue air conditioning would conk out, two days back and forth with Union Ice deciding how many hundreds of pounds we needed to keep heat stroke at bay, and hundreds more hours with my wife enlisting the help of selfless friends and family members to pull off the ceremony and the festivities. As Hillary Clinton once said, it takes a shtetl.

But Norma was trying to get me to get past all that.

“My Jewish friends just can’t see it,” she said. “They get caught up in the details. They’re too close to it. But there’s nothing like this, nothing.”

I was too caught up in the details that moment — was 300 pounds of ice enough??? — to let her words sink in. But afterward, I got it: This bar and bat mitzvah experience is so valuable a path to personal and social transformation, it’s time we Jews start figuring out how to share it beyond our shuls and social halls.

Every culture has its adolescent rites of passage, from Aboriginal walkabouts to Latino quinceañeras. Contemporary American society really doesn’t have rites: it has milestones. Your driver’s license. Homecoming and prom night. Maybe a Sweet 16 party. These make for good movie scenes, but they are hardly the stuff of personal growth and transformation.

Meanwhile, we Jews do nothing but whine about and mock the bar mitzvah. The self-righteous among us wave our fingers at those families who lay out Nero-like sums — spending into seven figures to have Mariah Carrey sing for your kid on a mahogany dance floor suspended over a glacier … you get the idea. The self-denigrating among us just pray we’ll get through the whole thing without torturing our kid, boring our guests or busting our 401(K)s. For many of us, a bar mitzvah is a punch line to a joke that began with the bris.

But all this misses the point. However we choose to treat this rite of passage, we have to be in awe of its power.

Think about it. Imagine that less than a year ago someone gave you three pages written in Sanskrit and said, “In a few months you’ll need to learn to read this and understand it. You’ll then have to learn a melody that goes along with each syllable. And you’ll have to be able to sing it. And then discuss it. And, by the way, you need to do that in front of all your family and friends.”

It’s a daunting task to thrust on a 13-year-old, an age when our society asks nothing of them but to go to school, go through puberty and stay out of our way. But long ago rabbis asked the question: at what age does a child count as part of a minyan, a prayer quorum? And the answer, developed over time and crystallized around the Middle Ages, was the bar mitzvah, a ceremony marking the first time a boy is called to the Torah. (Italian Jewry was an early adopter, by the way, likely because they were looking for another reason to eat.)

While Jews have developed and refined this rite of passage, our society at large has abandoned whatever ones it had. For the great majority of 13-year-olds, adolescence, with all its changes and expectations, its separations and explorations, comes as an ambush. One day you’re a kid, the next, bam, everybody’s up in your face, expecting stuff.

But the bar mitzvah comes as fair warning. It is in itself transformational. I saw it in my son and, more recently, in my daughter. The hours spent studying ancient texts, mining them for meaning and relevance, learning to recite them in a way that connects them to a melody sung hundreds of years ago and that will be sung hundreds of years from now — then stepping up to the bimah like a batter alone at home plate, all eyes on you, the congregation listening to your every word — this is no small thing. When it is over, you are gifted not just with a kiddish cup and tree in Israel, but knowledge, accomplishment and experience. You may not be a man or woman, but you are no longer a child; you are on your way.

It can be done wrong. I’ve been to ceremonies where the kid recited some passage by rote, the rabbi sped through the moment like he left his car running, and the congregation sat clueless and inert, the non-Jews among them thinking they had been lured into the worst dinner theater ever.

But those rabbis, educators, parents and b’nai mitzvah alums who know how to do it right, they would do society at large a service by thinking about how this ritual could translate into society at large. It’s not outlandish — a few years ago a small trend started in the black community after kids who attended their Jewish friends’ b’nai mitzvah wanted something similar for themselves. They called it a “bro’ mitzvah.”

Why not post and refine all these ideas online and see if something the Jews have been keeping to themselves for ages can’t help transform the world?

I’ll bring the ice.