Reply to Destination Bat Mitzvah

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Doesn't really go with the idea that your child can now stand up and be counted as part of the COMMUNITY.[/quote]

Well, if you want to be technical about it, the ceremony was designed only to celebrate the young man's presence as the part of a community of MALES called a minyan.  The bar mitzvah was to celebrate that the young man now counted as one of the ten male adults necessary to hold a minyan.  Without a minyan, you could not commence communal worship.  After the diaspora, Jews relied on pulling together a minyan of males wherever they could, so services could commence.  But it was part of the notion of a floating tabernacle -- The Synagogue or Shul was not what made the community; it was the gathering of the community wherever it could, whether that be under the shelter of a chuppah, in the shtetls of Poland, in the concentration camps.  What better way to celebrate a young woman's or man's mitzvah by going to the wailing wall?".  Bar and Bat Mitzvahs happen there daily . . . with just nine other males participating.  Sometimes total strangers who are, of course, also Jewish and have made the trek to pray and insert prayers into the chipped grout between the remaining blocks of the original Temple.  What a splendid way to emphasize the importance of finding faith in a religion ever on the move.  I can't think of a better way of symbolizing being counted as part of the COMMUNITY.  You see this powerful statement at the end of "Fiddler on the Roof" - ten men standing together in the mud at the crossroads of their COMMUNITY ; their wives and carts behind them; each going in an unknown direction trying to find safety from the Russian pogroms.  For the first time, the young married tailor is counted as part of the minyan.  They pray, break up and go their separate ways - to Israel, America, Italy, Spain, France, Latin America, most likely never to be seen again - but wherever they go, if they could find nine other males, they could have COMMUNITY prayer.[/quote]

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