What is a Bar Mitzvah? 

The author of this site is not Jewish and relied on online sources for this information.  Doing this bit of research was a fascinating learning experience which greatly enhanced the actual experience of  witnessing this important rite of passage.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Jews and Christians look at many things differently. We have a different theology, a different liturgy, a different holiday cycle, and a different life cycle. 

But Jews and Christians share certain things, and that sharing is no less profound than the differences. As philosopher Martin Buber once said, "Jews and Christians share the first five books of the Bible. We both believe in a God that can be approached through prayer and worship. We believe in a God who loves and who is revealed through Scripture and holy interventions in history. 

Jews and Christians also share a belief in the power of ritual. Rituals make a group distinctive and transmit identity from generation to generation. They dramatize a religious group's beliefs about the world and about how God interacts with it. 

Bar and bat mitzvah means that a thirteen-year-old Jewish child is old enough to perform mitzvot (the commandments of Jewish life) and become a Son or Daughter of the Commandment. It is one of the most venerable and most potent of Jewish symbols and rituals. When a Jewish child becomes bar or bat mitzvah, he or she publicly reads a section from the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. 

Each week, every congregation in the Jewish world reads the identical passage. In this way, the youth is linked to the entire Jewish people, regardless of where the thirteen-year-old happens to live. The youth also reads a haftarah, which is a selection from the weekly section of the prophetic writings--from Isaiah, Amos, Hosea,etc., or from historical books like Joshua, Judges, Samuel, or Kings. 

The bar and bat mitzvah ceremony occurs during the Sabbath worship service. The first part of the service ends with the congregation singing Mi Chamocha ("Who is like You among the gods?"). It echoes the songs that Moses and the Israelites sang at the shores of the Red Sea when the Israelites had been saved from the Egyptians. The second part of the service ends with a prayer for peace for the Jewish people and for the whole world. During the third section of the service, the Torah is read. The haftarah, by tradition, must end on a note of nechemta (comfort). This portion of the service ends with the implicit hope that all humanity will embrace God's words. 

The entire service concludes with two prayers: Aleinu, a triumphant plea that the world will ultimately recognize that there is only one God, and Kaddish, a plaintive mourners' prayer which proclaims that God's rule, the fulfillment of God's hopes for the world, will come someday, Kaddish's form and function are closely related to the Lord's Prayer. 

The ultimate message of the service is the triumph of hope: hope for freedom, hope for peace, hope that all our words will end on joyful notes, hope for universal redemption."