Spirit and Story Archive

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Bat Mitzvah Bonanza

By Steve Greenberg

Several weeks ago I had the great fortune to attend a bat mitzvah in Tozeur, Tunisia. More than a hundred family members and friends, from the US, France and Israel converged upon this unlikely destination for a double bat mitzvah. Tozeur is a dusty little town six hours south of Tunis on the edge of the desert. About an hour’s drive from the center of Tozeur is the Palatial Hotel, facing the rising mountains on one side and a flat expanse of the desert on the other. In the valley below the hotel are the ruins of a twelfth century village. The hotel itself is magical and mysterious, a luxury fortress in the midst of an arid wasteland.

This event was not just a bat mitzvah. It was also a travel experience, a boisterous family reunion, a kosher catered feast and an extravaganza (for example, after havdalah in the ruined village, Arabian horsemen rode up into the valley with torches and swords).

Now extravagance is hardly a new phenomenon when it comes to bat and bar mitzvahs. The competition between affluent families for the most outrageous theme party bar and bat mitzvahs still rages from Los Angeles to Great Neck. However, there were important differences between the Jurassic Park Bar Mitzvah and this event that led me not only to attend, but to help plan the event and to serve as the family’s rabbi for the event.

As I see it, the bat/bar mitzvah in America has become a graduation from -- as opposed to a graduation to -- ceremony. After a few years of mostly uninspiring afternoon Hebrew school -- timed to interfere with just about every high school sports program -- we provide our early teens with a grand finale. Having suffered through the extra effort of bar/bat mitzvah training, they are now to be freed from the exhausting and not necessarily meaningful burden of Jewish education. Only a select few will choose to continue their Jewish education beyond this point, attending either Hebrew High or Confirmation classes until they are sixteen.

Of course there was a time when the bar or bat mitzvah signified not the end of something, as it generally does today, but the beginning of something. It was a formal induction ceremony into the adult Jewish community with all its duties, obligations and privileges. Today, however, for most teens, the event marks a liberation from the realm of Jewish obligation.

In an important sense, though, the bat/bar mitzvah remains what it always has been, namely, a celebration of the moment when one attains the status of Jewish adulthood. What has changed, then, is not so much the function of the bar/bat mitzvah as the meaning of Jewish adulthood. Where Jewish adulthood was once properly equated with an obligation to engage in ongoing Torah learning and to observe the halakhah (or code of Jewish law), the Jewish adult of today is expected to do little more than exhibit Jewish pride and (perhaps) a preference for a Jewish spouse.

That the meaning and significance of the bat/bar mitzvah is in flux and clearly not what it used to be is bemoaned by many. For me, however, this state of affairs seems to present us with a moment of creative opportunity. For this reason, I have taken recently to "doing" bat and bar mitzvahs. Indeed, by this summer's end I will have "done" three bat mitzvah’s in just the past few months. Though I am an Orthodox rabbi by training and orientation, in each of these instances I have worked (or am working) with families which are not affiliated with synagogues and with youths who have never attended Hebrew school. In each situation, the impetus to have the bat mitzvah has come from the teens themselves. Having attended their friends' bat and bar mitzvahs -- and the wonderful bnai mitzvah parties -- they too want to be bat mitzvahed. My involvement has come at the parents request. Unsure of how to proceed in unfamiliar territory, they have sought me out for guidance.

What I have suggested in each case is that the family hire a young and talented tutor to work with their child for the entire year preceding the bat mitzvah event. While the precise focus of the training varied from child to child in accordance with their unique interests, each learned to read Hebrew and became familiar with the basic contours of Jewish life.

Much attention was also paid to crafting a bat mitzvah ceremony that harmonized with the prospective bnai mitzvah's unique capacities and interests. In one case, the young woman read from a Torah scroll on the top of Masada. At the bat mitzvah event in Tozeur, the girls orchestrated the family shabbat, focusing upon its beginning and end, upon erev shabbat and havdalah, rather than upon mastering a once-in-a-lifetime Torah recitation. The result was a shabbat of great power and beauty. At the bat mitzvah event, which is to take place later this summer in Vienna, the daughter will be called up to the Torah, will recite the blessings before and after the Torah reading, and will give a drash (a commentary on the Torah portion), which she has been working on for months, to assembled family and guests.

Of even greater importance, however, than the attention paid to crafting an individualized ceremony is the time that I spend with each prospective bnai mitzvah and with their families in an open-ended conversation about the real significance of this upcoming lifecycle event. Since for me the essence of the bat/bar mitzvah event lies in the bnai mitzvah's committing him- or herself to a personal Jewish future, I have focused the conversation upon the question of what kind of personal Jewish future the bnai mitzvah intends to pledge themselves to by the act of becoming a bat or bar mitzvah. To this end, I work with the prospective bnai mitzvah, and sometimes with their families as well, to develop a list of possible ways in which they might choose to enact their Jewishness after they have become bnai mitzvah. In each case, the list of mitzvot we jointly develop includes some forms of tzedakah or gamilut hasadim, perhaps a commitment to spend a summer in Israel during high school or the promise to attend a university with an active Jewish life as well. As we also inevitably speak of what it might mean to choose a career that might serve the end of tikkun olam, the choice of such a career might also appear upon the list of options. Ultimately, however, at the end of this process of conversation and reflection, there comes the moment of decision when the prospective bnai mitzvah is asked to choose from among the set of mitzvot options they have developed. What the long range import of these conversations, and of the teenage commitments that emerge from them, will prove to be is impossible to foresee. And yet, it seems to me that the odds are strong that in ways yet unknown this process will prove to be of good effect. If I am right about this, it will be due in part to the fact that the whole endeavor has been designed to be pleasant, meaningful and memorable. But even more, it will be due to the bnai mitzvah's having come to understand that ultimately one can only be a bnai mitzvah if one intentionally chooses and wills a Jewish future -- in whatever way one comes to understand what this means for oneself -- and commits oneself to the actions and behaviors that can translate this commitment into a lived and personal reality.

This trend to buck the synagogues and arrange self-styled bar and bat mitzvah events is still in its infancy. That the three bat mitzvahs discussed here happened to take place in exotic locations is less important than the inner work and creative freedom they each reflect. One does not need to be so affluent as to be able to afford to bring one's entire extended family to Morocco in order to appreciate and appropriate the freedom and creativity of this "renegade" approach to life-cycle events.

In closing, let me add a few more words about the ceremony in Tozeur, a ceremony that was so much more affecting and compelling, despite the rather surreal setting, than the typical "Good-bye Columbus" affair. The sephardic (and orginally Tunisian) roots of the family were visible. After kiddush, Papa Penot, the girls grandfather, blessed them on the balcony that overlooked the desert, and for a full minute did not open his eyes while he opened a channel to the heavens for the blessing of his dear children. The assembled crowd fell silent and was moved. While the family is hardly shabbat observant, their 88 year old grandmother -- the graceful and beautiful Maman -- after spending shabbat afternoon on a pre-arranged jeep tour and hike, asked me to let her know when shabbat would be over so that she could have a smoke.

A few days after the celebration in Tozeur I found myself in Paris having dinner at one of the kosher restaurants in the Marais. A man sitting in the table opposite was eating a dish that looked interesting. I asked him what he had ordered. He motioned to me to come to him, dipped his fork in his dish and raised it to me, offering me a taste. This directness was surprising and pleasant. After taking a taste, I said to him that he must be North African, his offering to share food with strangers being a common Moroccan and Tunisian custom. He said that he was from Tunisia and so I shared with him my recent experience in Tozeur. His son overheard us and came running to the table. In French, almost too fast for me to understand, he implored his father: "This is where I want to have the wedding," he cried, "in Tozeur at the palace in the desert!"

His father then turns to me and asks: "So, tell me, do you do weddings?"

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