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After discussing the pre-history of the bar mitzvah ceremony, this chapter analyzes four basic components of the ceremony before the year 1800: the Barukh sheptarani blessing; the aliyah to the Torah; the se’udat mitzvah (festive meal); and the derashah (sermon given by the bar mitzvah boy). The bulk of the chapter is devoted to six major changes that transpired after the year 1800: from bar mitzvah to Confirmation and back to bar and bat mitzvah; the origin and development of the bat mitzvah ceremony; the transformation of the elaborate derashah prepared by a teacher or rabbi to a much simpler devar torah prepared by the bar or bat mitzvah boy or girl; the transformation of a simple se’udat mitzvah into an elaborate party; the adoption of the Ashkenazic bar mitzvah ceremony by Sephardic and Oriental Jews; and the secular bar or bat mitzvah ceremony or party.

Stuart Schoenfeld’s essay traces the rise of the bar and bat mitzvah in American Jewish life and consequently the growing significance of the age of thirteen in the lives of American Jews. He argues that in the twentieth century, especially, bar and bat mitzvah provide a place where American Jews perform their identity among family and friends. He begins his story with the Bible, demonstrating that both the age of thirteen and bar and bat mitzvah themselves are actually not to be found in the Bible. He then traces the emergence of the age of majority, and eventually thirteen itself, in the Mishnah and other legal and theological writings. Schoenfeld demonstrates the ways that the bar, and eventually bat, mitzvah began to be celebrated by ever greater numbers of people over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Americans increasingly debated the form and significance of these celebrations, especially when they seemed to serve little religious purpose. One of the consequences of the immense popularity of bar and bat mitzvah and its meaningfulness for American Jews is the growing disjuncture between thirteen as a significant life marker for Jews and its lack of significance in the wider world, where other ages are more important as indicators of a transition to adulthood.

This chapter explores Anglo-Jewish incidents and characters in Jack Rosenthal's television plays. The two plays, The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy, represent elements of Anglo-Jewish life using different techniques. While The Evacuees presents Jewishness and Englishness separately, Bar Mitzvah Boy derives its comedy from a British–Jewish synthesis, a difference that is partly due to dramatic imperatives. As its title suggests, The Evacuees is about urban Jewish life as it is forced into interaction with a more rural gentile world. The dialogic representation of Jewish life in Britain in Rosenthal's plays arises necessarily from the diasporic nature of the community. Voices are characterised by the accents of at least two cultures. In general, Rosenthal's Anglo-Jewish plays reverse the historian Colin Richmond's remark that Englishness is always equated with non-Jewishness. Instead, Rosenthal shows that Englishness may be expressed as Jewishness.

Various factors can make a person resort to cross-faith rituals, and even absorb values from it. This chapter appraises the contemporary frenzy among Christians in the US to have bar/bat mitzvahs, the Jewish rite of passage for thirteen-year-old children. This frenzy can be traced back to the desire to emulate the gaudy, expensive ritual ceremonies organized by the Jewries. The attraction for the glitz and glam informs the resolution to have a bar mitzvah in the first place. The obvious ignorance of the horizon beyond the objective practices of the ritual is present at this stage. While the ritual practices for the Jewry themselves are increasingly being characterized by their celebration rather than the intrinsic values that they are supposed to inculcate, those from different faiths which are voluntarily practicing it are eventually often ushering into the real meaning of the ritual its true objective reflection.

This chapter discusses the experience of Rabbi Jeffrey Stalkin and his experince with bar mitzvah. Salkin, a rabbi for more than two decades, didn't just skip his bar mitzvah. He later wrote a definitive book about reclaiming the spiritual meaning of a bar mitzvah, Putting God on the Guest List, a plea to parents and kids “to feel the spiritual promise of the event, the pull of the divine and the knowledge that they are participating in an event that has meaning both in the ancient past and in the very immediate present.” In his book, Salkin calls for Jews to be awake, to be engaged, to care about the entire bar and bat mitzvah process, start to finish: They are a glorious moment in the life of the family, the synagogue, and the Jewish people. And yet, bar and bat mitzvah have too often become a banal event, a confused event, a ridiculed event.”

Part I of this book places the act of reading Torah in a religious, historical and cultural context. Chanting is an inherent part of Jewish tradition. Special sections of Torah are read on various holidays. I describe the various rituals that frame the Torah service and examine the ways in which worshippers directly experience a connection to the Torah scroll and the other ritual objects that make up this ritual performance. Most Jews learn how to read Torah for their bar or bat mitzvah. I discuss the experiences of students who read Torah during this rite of passage and the power of this ritual as a performance of Jewish identity.

This chapter examines strategies where individual Jews employ digital technology to sustain and transmit musical traditions of Torah and haftarah trope, a core element of contemporary Jewish worship. While these examples focus more on personal agency than institutional sustainability, they underscore new approaches to integrating meaningful ritual into the lives of these liberal Jews. Even as certain contemporary Jews have moved away from traditional structures of learning and authority–synagogues, religious schools, rabbis, and cantors–they have developed and supported innovative means to transmit the music performance of biblical chant used in bar/bat mitzvah celebrations in a way that sustains traditional rituals while empowering their personal style of Jewish expression and identity.

This chapter discusses the experience of Ram Dass at his bar mitzvah. Ram Dass or Richard Alpert is the epicenter of America's spiritual searchings, a teacher, eloquent guide, and agile translator of Eastern thought into American practice. Since the 1960s, he has helped shape Americans' attitudes toward consciousness, faith, drugs, religion, and mysticism, giving them perspective and a distinctly Western relevance. Richard was destined for great things: earning a Ph.D. from Stanford, he became the youngest person to secure tenure at Harvard, where he taught in two departments before he was thirty. In 1967 he traveled to India, met his spiritual teacher, and became Baba Ram Dass. Returning to the United States, Richard wrote Be Here Now, a spiritual guide full of perky aphorisms promising that God was only a yoga posture away: “Here we are. Here and now.”

Frieden writes about his entry into heder in this chapter, in which all the usual elements are present: an introduction to the alphabet, the bestowing of sweets so that learning should be associated with sweetness, the critique of the melamed. Just as this chapter provides an account of education in heder, it also provides insights into some other essential aspects of shtetl life, including the bar mitzvah celebration. Frieden conveys a great deal of information about the way that important life-cycle even was marked for him personally. His observations regarding the nature of bar mitzcah speeches reveal some of his attitudes regarding education, maturations, and authenticity—namely, he evinces his appreciation for the difference between rote memorization and true understanding.

Despite the great importance Judaism places on children, childhood is a curiously overlooked topic in Jewish film and television studies. This chapter proposes to begin filling the gap by exploring how the universal theme of childhood has been represented in more specific ways, focusing on Jewish cinema specifically. By exploring a series of representations of children and childhood (sometimes Jewish, sometimes not) up to and including the age of 13, it examines films dealing with the child en route to adulthood through the key rite of passage of bar/bat mitzvah; the child as vulnerable and in need of protection, but whose childhood is brutally cut short during the Holocaust; and films in which childhood is not explicitly Jewish but can be read thus. Such representations consider the condition of children and childhood as a comment on the Jewish condition in contemporary society.

This chapter describes the experince of Elie Wiesel and his experience with bar mitzvah. Wiesel is a Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps, and is also the Advisory Board chairman of the Algemeiner Journal newspaper. While working as a journalist in Paris for an Israeli newspaper, Wiesel interviewed the French writer François Mauriac, who started talking about the suffering of Christ. He exploded: “Ten years ago, I knew hundreds of Jewish children who suffered more than Christ, and no one talks about it.” With that, Wiesel wept, and the decade-old dam inside him started crumbling. He began writing. Incessantly, first an 800-page memoir came. Wiesel winnowed that down to the 127 pages of Night, which contains the most widely quoted passage in Holocaust literature.

This chapter describes the notion of a secular Judaism, in which some of the religious practices such as bar mitzvah and circumcision were still maintained, and even occasional visits to the synagogue, but seen in terms of only emotional satisfaction. It analyzes the possibility of religion without belief in God. In ancient times Theravadic Buddhism taught that the God idea was irrelevant to its aim of overcoming human suffering. The chapter mentions Auguste Comte in the early nineteenth century who founded the religion of Positivism, the religion of humanity and the full harmony of life, with its Bible and sacraments and a religious calendar, but with mankind in the place of God. It also talks about Julian Huxley that propagated a “religion without revelation” in which man can express his sense of awe and wonder without invoking a personal God.

This chapter explores the concept of reciprocity through examples contained in the vision quest narrative in chapter 3. It explores and expands on community psychology’s definitions for community to include nature, ancestors, and Spirit in an “initiatory constellation,” which is central to adolescent identity formation. A working model for understanding and using the central elements in a psychological sense of community is introduced for guiding youth and community development through rites of passage design strategies. The chapter proposes three core questions to help frame our exploration into the intersection of rites of passage and community: What are youth being initiated into? By whom? and For what purpose? The answer to these key questions can guide the design of more viable and potent village-oriented rites of passage.