REFLECTIONS ON A BANOT MITZVAH I

I had the pleasure this weekend to attend an unusual Banot Mitzvah (plural of Bat Mizvah) of twin girls who are the granddaughters of a friend of mine (yeah, I’m old). I served as a kind of Jewish resource for my friend, and I wanted to see what eventuated.  I’m going to write two blogs on this.  The first will be an appreciation of the event itself.  The second will be a reflection on tribalism and Jews.

What should the role of a bar/bat mitzvah be?  We tell our kids that they are a rite of passage into Jewish adulthood, but our kids know that they aren’t becoming adults; they will sleep in their same beds that night, have the same (lack of) responsibilities and won’t be treated any differently by their parents. The fact that they can now be counted in a minyan as a Jewish adult just isn’t meaningful to I’d guess 99% plus of all kids.

We should rather tell our kids that this marks a transition from middle childhood to early adolescence. Bill Plotkin says that the twin major tasks of early adolescence are to develop a social identity that works with some peer group and a personal identity that feels solid enough.  And it really helps if the personal identity and social identity are at least somewhat congruent with each other. For Plotkin, early adolescence is the developmental phase where the vast majority of us get stuck because we can’t figure out who we authentically are and have that validated by a peer group.

To the great credit of my friend and his wife’s guidance, the kids were very focused on exploring and expressing an authentic individual identity.  They did this in three different contexts, as far as I understand the process.  One was through the Jewish heroines they studied.  A second was through the Buddhist lens that my friend embraces—he is a BuJew with more emphasis on the Buddhism than the Judaism. The third was a more developmental psychological orientation and included what the girls called a vision fast.

The girls each gave two drashes, one on a particular heroine they chose (one chose Esther and one chose Miriam) and the other on what they learned in the process of meeting with their grandparents and exploring these key questions of identity. The talks they gave were real, sweet and relatable.  They obviously learned something about themselves, about Judaism and about Buddhism.

That what they had to say was real, sweet and relatable isn’t something you can say about many other Bar or Bat Mitzvah speeches, at least in my experience. Usually, the bar or bat mitzvah has to talk about some part of Torah that doesn’t really grab them and find some way to say something personally meaningful.  It’s a hard enough task for the just became an early adolescent to express something meaningful; asking them to tie it to a given obscure text makes it that much harder.  

It's different when I go to my orthodox relatives.  These kids are very knowledgeable, but my experience has been there’s a bunch of name dropping of Rabbis and the lessons they think you should learn from a given bit of Torah—but not much internalization of it.  I don’t blame them—without the space to explore who they are, even if it isn’t acceptable to their parents, it’s really hard for them to internalize anything other than to behave in socially acceptable ways.

So this was a sweet, meaningful and relatable experience.  Yasher Koach to everyone involved.