Our formative years begins at birth, from infancy to an age when we are considered adults -- by law, by tradition or any definition you like. From the earliest moments, if the infant needs nourishment he has to make a distinction between those with or without breasts, so the concept of gender predates most everything. The completion of this process, “adulthood,” is a moving target, for instance the well known moment among Jews by tradition is the Bar Mitzvah which occurs on the boys 13th birthday. What about the Bat Mitzvah for girls, and why am I being so sexist as to not include women into this discussion?
That’s really the essence of this essay, which is to convey what it’s like to be from a foreign land, a different culture, that happened to be located in the heart of the United States of America, coincidentally its capital city, Washington. Whenever I write my first stop is usually Wikipeida, just to check if I’m making an egregious errors, and for a quick review as I just did for Bar and Bat Mitzvah Usually if I’m somewhat familiar with the subject, the article confirms what I know, more often it opens doors that I was only vaguely aware of, and if I follow their references it can lead to exploring an entire body of knowledge.
And rarely, the article is wrong, or distorted, and in the past I had challenged it. About a decade ago I made a major effort to begin to change to the subject “Fingerprinting” (here’s a list of the 20 edits starting in 2006) When I first read the article, the “forensic Experts” controlled the subject, with the absurd claim that they could determine without quantitative analysis the absolute identity between a partial print and the defendant. It took an effort, including enlisting a person who was coming the field from a statistical perspective, but it could be that among the thousand of jurists who may have read this article, a handful of innocent defendants were not falsely convicted.
Now back to the Bar/Bat Mitzvah article. Unlike the Fingerprint article where the damage was theoretically measured in false convictions, here the distortion is more subtle but actually says much about the transformation of our society over my own lifetime, which is roughly three quarters of a century. The article, which is about a rite of passage for a given religion, takes on more importance as Judaism, through the entertainment and general media, takes on a meaning greater than our 2% population. Who does not know something about this event, if only from some Seinfeld shows.
As an aside, the sexism that existed in women not having the rite of passage into adulthood still does in Israel and parts of Brooklyn, I happened to have vouched for my sister in law, for her to be married in Israel. Of course I didn’t know her as a child, but her own mother and sister did not have my standing due being “only” women. My being a man, meant my certifying her Jewishness, (a false statement) was accepted by the orthodox rabbi who sent his letter to the officials in Israel. This wasn’t in the dark ages, but about thirty years ago, and probably something that exists to this day.
One would have to the most careful of readers to glean from the Wikipedia article that when I had my own Bar Mitizvah, not only did my older Sister not have one, but neither did any of her girl friends, or probably only a minuscule number of Jews had even heard of this thing called a , “Bat Mtizvah.” After reading most of the Wikipedia article you will finally come to this:
Today many non-Orthodox Jews celebrate a girl's bat mitzvah in the same way as a boy's bar mitzvah. All Reform and Reconstructionist, and most Conservative synagogues have egalitarian participation, in which women read from the Torah and lead services. In Orthodox communities, a Bat Mitzvah is celebrated when a girl reaches the age of 12.
While the above is a true statement, what they don’t say it that it is a truncated version of a Bar Mitzvah as the girl is anything but equal to boy- now a man. Before the cultural changes of the 1960s, I would argue that in this country, and probably the rest of the world, the percentage of young Jewish women who had any ceremony close to that of a male (in the same family) was virtually non existent.
It’s not like the Bat Mitzvah was something new, as for many hundreds of centuries this had been a ceremony for those who were Jewish males. And for Wikipedia not make this point that only in the last half century have women been included is ignoring this one example of a cultural change that may be unknown to “millennials” but is known by every “senior citizen” who has an interest in such subjects.
Somehow the Wikipedia article should convey that while now denial to a girl of this rite of passage would be considered unacceptable gender discrimination, not that long ago, it was a norm. Understanding such changes in other spheres has value in maintaining a society that in a bid for equality does not tear itself apart.
Comments are encouraged!