Q&A: Bat Mitzvah
Bat Mitzvah
Question
Hello,
We have an 11-year-old daughter, and she’s approaching her bat mitzvah.
Around us, everyone celebrates it with all kinds of parties, which to us seem empty of content. The latest trend is women’s prayer services and volunteering, and that too somehow feels forced to us.
We don’t feel a need to do what everyone else does, but we also don’t want her to feel too different from her friends.
Our daughter loves learning, and in the meantime I’ve built her a syllabus for her bat mitzvah year, and we’re studying it together.
What I’m missing is a way to illustrate to her in a practical way (through the observance of certain commandments) that from this point on she is part of the community and obligated in the commandments. (With boys there’s the same issue around the party, but at least the fact that he has become bar mitzvah is expressed through clear permissions and obligations: counting toward a minyan, being called up to the Torah, putting on tefillin.)
What do you think? Can you think of an interesting way to keep her from feeling that this is a non-event?
Abraham
Answer
Hello Abraham.
First of all, more power to you for the thoughtfulness and for not being willing to accept things just because that’s what people do.
As for your question itself, I think that women’s prayer actually comes to address exactly this difficulty. Why are you ruling it out? It’s really not forced, unless you treat it as a feminist gimmick. If it’s genuine, then it is exactly the expression of her entering into obligation. In accepted Jewish law, a woman does not have a public role through which you can demonstrate to her the significance of the moment, and that is precisely what creates the difficulty you described. You could also learn Megillah reading or Torah reading and encourage her to pray in a women’s minyan. And of course, the learning and syllabus you’ve built—if it is done in a way that leads her to take on ongoing commitments for the rest of her life, some kind of regular study—that will have much more significance as a marker of maturation, and not merely be part of a ceremonial and temporary learning process.
If you want to initiate a kindness project that she will do, that’s also possible, but in my opinion that has more of a social flavor than a religious one, and it misses the point.