Lifestyle & Culture

Ancient Jewish Rite-of-Passage Gets Overhaul

A rabbi and bar mitzvah candidate read the Torah.

Clerics and scholars at two major Jewish institutions are testing a project aimed at reshaping the bar mitzvah so that is marks more of a beginning than an ending of personal interest in and study of Judaism.

Being a graduation “is not what a bar mitzvah was designed to do,” Anna Marx, of the Manhattan-based Jewish Education Project, said via telephone from her office in New Orleans.

Continuing to explain The B’nai Mitzvah Revolution, a two-year pilot project announced last May and officially launching in November, she said, “In its observance, the bar mitzvah was not supposed to be an endpoint, it was a beginning of a person’s adult journey.”

B’nai Mitzvah Revolution is a joint endeavor of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a seminary with campuses in Cincinnati,Jerusalem, Los Angeles and New York City’s East Village, and the Union for Reform Judaism, in Midtown Manhattan.

Those who created the project are trying to keep the tradition, which traces back to the Middle Ages, from being just a few months of intensively studying Hebrew traditions and language but, afterward, being uninvolved in the Jewish faith.

“The idea is to think about ways to make sure more and more young people stay involved in Jewish life after their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. The bar mitzvah experience itself is leading people out of the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Bradley Solmsen, co-director of the project and newly appointed director of youth engagement for the Union

To help inspire Jews to stay devoted to Judaism, the Mitzvah Revolution begins with workshops in November with participants from synagogues across the country brainstorming on ways to revise bar and bat mitzvahs. As one example of how to reshape things, leaders said 13-year-olds preparing for the ritual might also volunteer with a service organization while learning Jewish scriptures and chants they recite during the ceremony. That sense of charity, leaders hope, will remain with the teens long after the ritual is over.

Narrowly focusing on only the Torah does a disservice for those preparing for the bar or bat mitzvah, Marx said, and diminishes the purpose of the rite itself. “Synagogues started requiring a number of prayers the children had to know,” she added, rather than focusing on how to become a concrete part of the Jewish community.

“We’re looking for synagogues [that] are committed to significant change, and that have had experience with change processes in the past,” Rabbi Solmsen said. “Each synagogue needs to figure out what solutions will work for them. This will not be a national model where everyone is going to do the same thing.”

On Twitter @AlexRozier1.