Why the Bar Mitzvah is the Best of All Puberty Rituals
Few medieval fantasies can draw me in, but this year I was glued to Game of Thrones on HBO. Regardless of its fantastical setting, something about it seemed real. George RR Martin has a powerful capacity for invention, but I was not surprised to learn his novels are inspired by the history of the War of the Roses and other historical events. One friend of mine argues that the Dothraki horse warriors are the Mongols but I argue that they are more Hun-like. It’s not important, but the power of an allegory comes from presenting a real situation in the guise of something else.
I am fortunate enough to have a few readers who are guessing at the sources for my own allegory set in a distant future. One of them wrote to me and said he was “glad to read that the bar mitzvah will survive for another billion years.” Without tipping any plot points here, he was right about that. As a kid, I attended my best friend’s bar mitzvah and it is a day I have never forgotten. I came home, still wearing a canary yellow yarmulke, and told my parents we needed to convert to Judaism. I had witnessed something astounding.
My friend Josh hated Hebrew school, thought it was a waste of time, and he got through it by sneaking Corn Nuts. He had to share the class with a sworn enemy and at that time Josh was already a religious skeptic. “If there is a God,” he once said, “I think she’s this little girl whose favorite toy used to be the world but now she’s gotten bored with it.” That was a stunning thing to hear from someone so young, but I was more impressed with what Josh did on the day his rabbi said to him, “Today you are a man.”
Different societies have different puberty rituals . For some, a boy’s first drink of alcohol is what makes him a man. In others, he is a man after his penis is mutilated by an elder after he returns from a trek in the wilderness. Among some in my extended family of Southern Baptists, you are an adult after you have been dunked in a river by your preacher. The Jewish initiation ritual involves an achievement: you must read aloud from the Torah. Josh did so in Hebrew, an ancient language, which he read from right to left in a different alphabet. He was twelve at the time.
As in most synagogues, the sanctuary where we had gathered was plain, but the Sefer Torah, the handwritten scroll, had ornate silver handles. It was sheathed in cloth embroidered with gold thread and it was returned to an ornate curtained area when the ritual was concluding. I sensed then what I learned later, that the Jews had been obsessed with literacy for 3000 years. Reading was integral to their rituals and was holy and had a kind of magic.
Some of the Jewish guys in our town had received presents like pinball machines and electric guitars for their bar mitzvahs but most of what Josh received was money. When I asked him what he would spend it on, he told me his parents had already invested it. “I won’t be able to touch it until I graduate from college,” he said. “It’s for starting a business or to open an office if I become a doctor.”
Why weren’t we doing this in my family?
As a puberty ritual, something like the bar mitzvah should be adopted by other faiths and cultures, especially those that are struggling. We had a few books at our house, but Josh’s house had shelves of them. The Torah may have been the first book that traditional Jews read but it was the gateway to other books and a love of knowledge. Much has been made of the Jewish mystique, as to why the Jews, a tiny minority, are well represented in the arts, the professions, business, science and government. The answer is a fairly simple one – they have always done their reading.
During the Middle Ages when most Christians were prevented from reading, the Jews were making sure that all their men did. A Jewish scholar who had mastered his studies was seen as an alpha male, a man worthy of attracting a high status mate. Among Christians, the opposite was happening. If a boy was perceived as bright, he was channeled into religious life where he could read and write but couldn’t reproduce.
For the first few hundred years of Christianity, priests were allowed to marry and have children. But as Europe’s ruling classes adopted Christianity, they maintained their superior status by assuring that the masses that worked their lands and built their castles did so in ignorance. An illiterate and superstitious peasantry is far easier to exploit than an educated one with a sense of entitlement. If that sounds farfetched to you, let’s remember that in the antebellum American South it was illegal to teach a slave or “person of color” to read. The punishment could be 39 lashes or death for both teacher and pupil.
It took Martin Luther and the Protestant movement to extend literacy to the masses in Northern Europe. Once a printed Bible in their own language had been distributed and read by non-clerics, other books would follow -- books with practical knowledge. As industries boomed, technology developed and wealth increased in the North and the new country of the United States, many in Catholic Europe wondered if God was a Protestant. As Napoleon might have said, God is on the side of those with the most readers.
At this moment, God is on the side of the Chinese when it comes to global commerce.
China has a billion literate people and in a few years it will have the largest population of English speakers in the world. This is important to remember in our own nation when we are slouching towards ignorance, when a Presidential candidate like Ron Paul wants to encourage home schooling and eliminate the Department of Education. Dr.Paul has even said he is against public education (he later said he was misquoted). Paul is a conservative in the deepest sense in that he wants a return to a time in which an underclass should not be empowered by learning - should they not want to learn or expose their children to other mindsets.
At a time when the rest of the world is becoming more educated, we need to raise standards and insure that all American children have access to a quality education. That won’t happen if we leave funding and control of it to local governments with their disparities of wealth. We need to look at the educational systems of the nations whose students are outperforming our own. The encouragement of reading needs to be a part of every family’s dynamic as it has always been in Jewish families. A ceremony like the bar mitzvah does not have to involve the Torah, but I am sure that learning a Semitic language in another alphabet has to be a kind of cross training for the mind, like learning to paint or play an instrument. The foreign language American children need to be learning is Chinese which does not involve a Roman alphabet.
The education of girls in Jewish society was downplayed for centuries but many modern Jews arrange a bat mitzvah for their daughters, as they should. Very modern Humanist Jews have changed the reading of the Torah into a reading of Jewish history or other topic related to Jewish identity since rightly, they object to a book that says the sun revolves around the Earth. It’s the same text that has an opening story, as Bill Maher puts it, that has a talking snake.
Years ago I met a lesbian rabbi and asked her if she didn’t have to pick and choose from the Torah since passages of it would have allowed her father to sell her into slavery, and other parts commanded that a woman like her be stoned to death. The rabbi told me that she was a “cultural Jew” and a rabbi in the original sense of the word which means “teacher”. She said that the Torah was not the word of God, but was “like fiction, a starting point for interesting conversations.” And on that, I could not agree more.
- Clark Carlton, author of Prophets of the Ghost Ants
Amazon – Book and Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_...
Barnes and Noble - Nook
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/proph...
iTunes
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/pro...
Kirkus Review
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-rev...
Official Website
http://www.prophetsoftheghostants.com
I am fortunate enough to have a few readers who are guessing at the sources for my own allegory set in a distant future. One of them wrote to me and said he was “glad to read that the bar mitzvah will survive for another billion years.” Without tipping any plot points here, he was right about that. As a kid, I attended my best friend’s bar mitzvah and it is a day I have never forgotten. I came home, still wearing a canary yellow yarmulke, and told my parents we needed to convert to Judaism. I had witnessed something astounding.
My friend Josh hated Hebrew school, thought it was a waste of time, and he got through it by sneaking Corn Nuts. He had to share the class with a sworn enemy and at that time Josh was already a religious skeptic. “If there is a God,” he once said, “I think she’s this little girl whose favorite toy used to be the world but now she’s gotten bored with it.” That was a stunning thing to hear from someone so young, but I was more impressed with what Josh did on the day his rabbi said to him, “Today you are a man.”
Different societies have different puberty rituals . For some, a boy’s first drink of alcohol is what makes him a man. In others, he is a man after his penis is mutilated by an elder after he returns from a trek in the wilderness. Among some in my extended family of Southern Baptists, you are an adult after you have been dunked in a river by your preacher. The Jewish initiation ritual involves an achievement: you must read aloud from the Torah. Josh did so in Hebrew, an ancient language, which he read from right to left in a different alphabet. He was twelve at the time.
As in most synagogues, the sanctuary where we had gathered was plain, but the Sefer Torah, the handwritten scroll, had ornate silver handles. It was sheathed in cloth embroidered with gold thread and it was returned to an ornate curtained area when the ritual was concluding. I sensed then what I learned later, that the Jews had been obsessed with literacy for 3000 years. Reading was integral to their rituals and was holy and had a kind of magic.
Some of the Jewish guys in our town had received presents like pinball machines and electric guitars for their bar mitzvahs but most of what Josh received was money. When I asked him what he would spend it on, he told me his parents had already invested it. “I won’t be able to touch it until I graduate from college,” he said. “It’s for starting a business or to open an office if I become a doctor.”
Why weren’t we doing this in my family?
As a puberty ritual, something like the bar mitzvah should be adopted by other faiths and cultures, especially those that are struggling. We had a few books at our house, but Josh’s house had shelves of them. The Torah may have been the first book that traditional Jews read but it was the gateway to other books and a love of knowledge. Much has been made of the Jewish mystique, as to why the Jews, a tiny minority, are well represented in the arts, the professions, business, science and government. The answer is a fairly simple one – they have always done their reading.
During the Middle Ages when most Christians were prevented from reading, the Jews were making sure that all their men did. A Jewish scholar who had mastered his studies was seen as an alpha male, a man worthy of attracting a high status mate. Among Christians, the opposite was happening. If a boy was perceived as bright, he was channeled into religious life where he could read and write but couldn’t reproduce.
For the first few hundred years of Christianity, priests were allowed to marry and have children. But as Europe’s ruling classes adopted Christianity, they maintained their superior status by assuring that the masses that worked their lands and built their castles did so in ignorance. An illiterate and superstitious peasantry is far easier to exploit than an educated one with a sense of entitlement. If that sounds farfetched to you, let’s remember that in the antebellum American South it was illegal to teach a slave or “person of color” to read. The punishment could be 39 lashes or death for both teacher and pupil.
It took Martin Luther and the Protestant movement to extend literacy to the masses in Northern Europe. Once a printed Bible in their own language had been distributed and read by non-clerics, other books would follow -- books with practical knowledge. As industries boomed, technology developed and wealth increased in the North and the new country of the United States, many in Catholic Europe wondered if God was a Protestant. As Napoleon might have said, God is on the side of those with the most readers.
At this moment, God is on the side of the Chinese when it comes to global commerce.
China has a billion literate people and in a few years it will have the largest population of English speakers in the world. This is important to remember in our own nation when we are slouching towards ignorance, when a Presidential candidate like Ron Paul wants to encourage home schooling and eliminate the Department of Education. Dr.Paul has even said he is against public education (he later said he was misquoted). Paul is a conservative in the deepest sense in that he wants a return to a time in which an underclass should not be empowered by learning - should they not want to learn or expose their children to other mindsets.
At a time when the rest of the world is becoming more educated, we need to raise standards and insure that all American children have access to a quality education. That won’t happen if we leave funding and control of it to local governments with their disparities of wealth. We need to look at the educational systems of the nations whose students are outperforming our own. The encouragement of reading needs to be a part of every family’s dynamic as it has always been in Jewish families. A ceremony like the bar mitzvah does not have to involve the Torah, but I am sure that learning a Semitic language in another alphabet has to be a kind of cross training for the mind, like learning to paint or play an instrument. The foreign language American children need to be learning is Chinese which does not involve a Roman alphabet.
The education of girls in Jewish society was downplayed for centuries but many modern Jews arrange a bat mitzvah for their daughters, as they should. Very modern Humanist Jews have changed the reading of the Torah into a reading of Jewish history or other topic related to Jewish identity since rightly, they object to a book that says the sun revolves around the Earth. It’s the same text that has an opening story, as Bill Maher puts it, that has a talking snake.
Years ago I met a lesbian rabbi and asked her if she didn’t have to pick and choose from the Torah since passages of it would have allowed her father to sell her into slavery, and other parts commanded that a woman like her be stoned to death. The rabbi told me that she was a “cultural Jew” and a rabbi in the original sense of the word which means “teacher”. She said that the Torah was not the word of God, but was “like fiction, a starting point for interesting conversations.” And on that, I could not agree more.
- Clark Carlton, author of Prophets of the Ghost Ants
Amazon – Book and Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_...
Barnes and Noble - Nook
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/proph...
iTunes
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/pro...
Kirkus Review
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-rev...
Official Website
http://www.prophetsoftheghostants.com
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