CHAPTER THREE - Adolescent Issues and Coming-of-Age Ceremonies

A: BACKGROUND

13. PROPOSING SOLUTIONS: A CEREMONY IN SEARCH OF A MEANING

What can be done? There are only two answers to this question: either the Bat and Bar Mitzvah ceremony should be made more meaningful for larger parts of our contemporary generation, or the ceremony could be changed and moved to a different stage of life, for those who want it.

The former response is a tough path to take, but one which offers hope.
After all, large numbers of young Jewish boys and girls do find meaning in their ceremony, beyond the question of presents and material gain.

• It is clear that education has to be deeper and more engaging for the individuals.
• It also has to be made more relevant, perhaps, by refocusing the educational process that leads to the Bar or Bat Mitzvah, so that the ceremony is represented as the beginning of a process of assumption of responsibility, which would re-confer relevance on the ceremony for large numbers of youngsters.

The beginning of an engagement with real ideas, with moral problems, with the meaning of responsibility and maturity – these are strong and heady ideas if presented in the right way.

This period in life is – or can be – a time when the individual starts to be conscious of the wider world. This was well-defined by Martin Buber, the great Jewish thinker, who addressed the German-Jewish youth of the 1930’s.

The child, discovering his I [identity], comes to know that he is limited in space: the adult, that he is unlimited in time. As man discovers his I, his desire for eternity guides his range of vision beyond the span of his own life. Stirred by the awesomeness of eternity, this young person feels within himself the existence of something enduring. He experiences it still more keenly at the hour when he discovers the succession of generations, when he envisions the line of fathers and mothers that led up to him… The people are now for him a community of men who were, who are and who will be – a community of the dead, the living and the yet unborn – who together constitute a unity… The past of his people is his personal memory, the future of his people his personal task.
Martin Buber, Essays on Judaism

Educators and parents need to learn to emphasise the “why” of ritual as well as the “what”:

In an unexplained state, the rituals and ceremonies can be distant and meaningless for those who have not naturally grown with the tradition as an organic part of their lives up to this point in time. This is especially true in regard to the understanding of the symbolic meaning within the details of the ritual. Far too often, young adolescents are presented with the details of the ceremony of which they are to fill the central role, but without any explanation of why these items or acts are considered important.

If the young person can be engaged and challenged while they are indeed beginning a process of opening up to a wider world than previously, there is hope for a meaningful Bat or Bar Mitzvah.

Explanation, however, is not necessarily sufficient for the many who feel unable to connect to the large parts of the underlying meaning and values. Even if the ceremony is made more comprehensible, logical and “user-friendly”, this openness to revelation and access to meaning can only be part of a deeper, more demanding personal process - possibly, with a more radical approach.

Part of this process might be connected to a redefinition of the framework of obligation, as represented by the Bar Mitzvah:

In the traditional theological framework, the Bar Mitzvah represents a concept of obligation to the collective, the Jewish People - through service to G-d and the Commandments, as interpreted by the Jewish tradition.

However, the situation at the moment is that many continue to pay lip service to a theological concept with which they cannot identify - and therefore the whole ceremony becomes largely meaningless.

In a world where the traditional theology speaks less than previously to many young people and their families, it can be argued that this concept of service to G-d needs to be addressed.

The need for re-evaluation of the Jewish tradition, for those to whom the traditional ideas were no longer speaking, was well defined many years ago in 1909 by a great Jewish socialist thinker, Chaim Zhitlowsky.

Every religion has created factors that evoke the emotions of holiness in the soul of the believer. It has holy persons, partly supernatural – like its gods and angels, partly invented human ones – like its legendary heroes, partly historical figures who actually lived, who through their lives and deaths expressed the truths of their faith. It has holy places – temples, mountains and valleys, holy springs and trees – so that the believer begins to have entirely different feelings when he steps into their proximity. It has holy objects – tallit and Tefillin, scrolls of the Torah, icons, crosses etc. It has holy periods – holidays, fasts – and also holy actions – praying, bringing sacrifices, confessions and the like.

All these sanctities – persons, places, objects, periods and actions – act like a magnetic force on the soul of the truly religious person and transfer it into an emotional atmosphere which is impossible to express in words. The question now is; can all these sanctities evoke the same atmosphere in our feelings when we stop believing in their supernatural significance? Must modern man create entirely new sanctities in order that the emotion of holiness should shine forth in his breast?

Chaim Zhitlowsky,
“The National Poetic Rebirth of the Jewish Religion”, 1909

The challenge that Zhitlowsky raises is enormous and the problem he raises is central; it is very well expressed in relation to the Bar and Bat Mitzvah and could be restated as follows for this purpose:

What meaning can such a ceremony offer to the non-believing, or even, non-practising Jew?

An interesting attempt to answer this problem was made by parts of the secular kibbutz movement in Israel. Many kibbutzim reinterpreted the Bar and Bat Mitzvah to incorporate a number of traditional elements (a synagogue service, including the calling up to the Torah of the Bnei Mitzvah), but within a framework which emphasised the values of peoplehood, community and collective responsibility - in which G-d was barely mentioned.

In this framework, the group of Bnei Mitzvah fulfilled a series of tasks collectively, and individually. Several of the tasks were associated with some sort of service to the wider community (work in the kibbutz, welfare, or environmental projects outside the kibbutz).

For many of the young people who pursued this process and contended with the assignments before them, there was unquestionably a feeling of meaningful involvement in a larger framework of responsibility, with an attendant sense of achievement at the challenge to their skills and abilities. At the end of the process, which culminates in a big, kibbutz-wide celebration for the group (equivalent to the Se’udat Mitzvah), many young people felt that they had earned their new status and the communal appreciation.

This could perhaps serve as a significant model for many young Jews throughout the world.

The location of the ceremony is another aspect of the same kind of process - the attempt to place the Bar or Bat Mitzvah within a significant framework of wider national meaning, by either augmenting or replacing the traditional theological framework of meaning.

A number of venues which superimpose national and collective meaning have become popular over the years.

• In Israel, both the Kotel (the Western Wall of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem) and Massada (the old Zealot stronghold near the Dead Sea) became major “Bar Mitzvah venues”.
• In recent years, in New York, the refurbished immigrant centre of Ellis Island has played a similar role.

This idea of adding layers of meaning by locating the event in a significant historical site can be very meaningful for the individual, provided that the venues are studied as part of an educational programme - but this trend is unquestionably interesting and often educationally productive.

All the above ideas are examples of how to make the ceremony meaningful to those, for whom most traces of original meaning have been lost. If successful, they can revitalise and make Bat and Bar Mitzvah relevant to many young people.