CCAR RESPONSA COMMITTEE
5774.2
Bar/Bat Mitzvah Observance Prior to Age Thirteen
Sh’elah.
Our congregation’s policy is to conduct Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies only for students who are thirteen years of age or older. Recently, many families have asked to schedule their children’s ceremonies prior to the student’s thirteenth birthday. Often, families request the earlier dates for reasons of convenience – vacation schedules, travel plans, etc. Some who ask for dates just a few days before their children turn thirteen argue that, as a Reform congregation, our policy should be flexible enough to allow for a little leeway in the age-requirements. Other families, citing traditional Jewish practice, argue that we should allow Bat Mitzvah ceremonies to occur as early as age twelve. In one family, the parents of the student grew up Orthodox, and argued that the congregation should honor their families’ practice of celebrating their daughters’ Bat Mitzvah ceremonies when girls turn twelve. Some congregants have argued on behalf of earlier Bat Mitzvah ceremonies on the grounds that girls tend to mature at an earlier age than boys – physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
Under what circumstances, if any, should Reform congregations celebrate Bar or Bat Mitzvah ceremonies for students who have not yet reached the age of thirteen? (Rabbi Mark Glickman, Woodlinville, Washington)
T’shuvah.
In their most basic sense, “Bar Mitzvah” and “Bat Mitzvah” are terms of status: they indicate that the person in question is a Jewish adult, responsible for fulfilling the obligations (mitzvot) that define the covenant between God and the Jewish people. One becomes Bar- or Bat Mitzvah simply upon reaching the age of Jewish majority, understood traditionally as thirteen for boys and twelve for girls. In Reform Judaism, our commitment to the principle of religious egalitarianism has led us to fix the point of Bar/Bat Mitzvah at age thirteen for girls as well as for boys. In today’s Jewish life, the term “Bar/Bat Mitzvah” usually denotes the celebration, the combination of religious services and social events, with which it is customary to mark a child’s transition to Jewish adulthood.[1] Our task is to consider whether and under what circumstances it is permissible to schedule this celebration prior to the child’s thirteenth birthday, that is, before he or she has become an “adult” according to Jewish tradition.
The Age of Jewish Adulthood. Let us examine, first of all, that tradition itself: is it in fact a hard and fast rule that a child becomes a Jewish adult at a definite chronological age? Some sources indicate that the answer is “yes.” We read in Mishnah Avot (5:21): ben sh’losh esrei lamitzvot, “at the age of thirteen a boy becomes obligated to fulfill the mitzvot,”[2] while girls, as we learn elsewhere, [3] attain adulthood at the age of twelve. Another mishnah, however, sets legal adulthood according to physical criteria: “a child who shows the signs of puberty is obligated to fulfill all the mitzvot of the Torah.”[4] While the commentators do their best to harmonize these conflicting standards,[5] the very existence of the conflict suggests that the rule “boys at thirteen, girls at twelve” is not so hard and fast.[6] And, indeed, Tanaitic (early Rabbinic) sources establish varying ages of “obligation” depending upon the nature of the particular mitzvah: when a child is able to walk while holding his father’s hand (on the requirement of pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem);[7] when a child is emotionally able to be separated from his mother (on the requirement to “dwell in the sukkah”);[8] when he is sufficiently responsible to care for his t’filin;[9] and when he knows how to wave the lulav and how to don tzitzit.[10] The age of majority in matters of personal status – for example, eligibility to contract marriage –was originally determined according to signs of puberty.[11]
In his comprehensive study of the topic, Professor Yitzchak Gilat demonstrates that this wide variation in ages was the original state of Jewish law, which did not recognize thirteen or twelve as the points at which Jewish adulthood automatically begins.[12] It was only later, during the Amoraic (Talmudic) period, that the halakhah underwent a process of standardization, precisely because the existence of varying ages for adulthood required a specific decision regarding the maturity of each and every individual, a situation that places a heavy burden on any functioning legal system. The Sages, seeking to bring clarity and unity to the law, gradually came to accept the ages of twelve and thirteen as a chronological standard, the time when girls and boys became obligated to fulfill the mitzvot.[13]
Since that time, this rule has been a universal Jewish practice: Jewish ritual majority has been determined by a person’s chronological age and not by his or her physical maturity or intellectual acuity. It is also, we stress, the standard in Reform Judaism. When we say that young people in our congregations become Bar/Bat Mitzvah at age thirteen, we identify our practice with the standard that our people have observed for fifteen centuries and more. In our communities, of course, girls as well as boys become b’nei mitzvah at that age. This is due to our commitment to gender equality and to the separate (though related) fact that girls and boys learn together in our religious schools and therefore satisfy our educational requirements for Bar/Bat Mitzvah at the same time. Like all religious standards, this one reflects our history as a people, as well as the religious commitments we affirm as Jews in general and as Reform Jews in particular. Like all other rules, especially rules that have complex histories of development, it may admit of exceptions. But because we take our standards seriously, those exceptions should be weighty, substantive, and rare.
2. Exceptions to the Rule? The reasons given by the “many families” cited in our sh’elah do not meet this test.
Some ask that the age requirement for Bar/Bat Mitzvah be waived “for reasons of convenience.” That request is contradictory on its face. A standard of practice, by definition, is not a “standard” at all if it can be set aside whenever we find it inconvenient. On the contrary, a standard of practice is an expectation imposed upon us by factors that lie outside the realm of our own personal or family desires. It embodies an ideal, a goal, or a purpose toward which we are asked to strive even when it is inconvenient for us to do so. The definition of Bar/Bat Mitzvah as something that takes place at age thirteen is such a standard. It is not too much to ask families to plan their vacation schedules accordingly.
The second reason is likewise self-contradictory: that some of our congregants “grew up Orthodox” does not require that we modify standards of Reform practice in accordance with their family traditions. This is especially true when the standard involves one of the most fundamental commitments of Reform Judaism, that of gender equality. Bat Mitzvah, in our Reform context, means exactly what Bar Mitzvah means: our young women, who have received exactly the same religious education as our young men, become full and equal participants along with them in Jewish ritual life. That equality, obviously, is denied to them in Orthodox communities. This particular Orthodox standard is therefore out of place in our synagogues, where the standards of religious practice reflect our own values and affirmations.[14]
3. Situations of Urgency. There is, however, one reason that does justify an exception to the rule: the principle known as sha’at hadachak, “situations of urgency” under which it is permitted to set aside a particular rule or standard of practice in favor of a more lenient viewpoint.[15] Although the precise extent of this principle is the subject of a long controversy in the sources,[16] our long-standing policy has been to permit the scheduling of a Bar/Bat Mitzvah observance prior to age thirteen “in cases of serious emergency.”[17] The tradition, to be sure, does not define this category with precision; it gives us no laundry list of situations that qualify as sha’at hadachak. The decision is left to the considered judgment of the rabbi. A Reform rabbi will undoubtedly exercise this judgment with the “flexibility” that our sho’el’s congregants seek. But he or she should not agree to waive the age requirement for Bar/Bat Mitzvah – a firm standard of Reform Jewish practice – for the reasons cited in this sh’elah.
NOTES
1. On the history of the Bar/Bat Mitzvah observance see “Bar/Bat Mitzvah on a Festival,” Reform Responsa for the Twenty-First Century (New York: CCAR, 2010), volume 2, no. 5762.6, pp. 39ff, http://ccarnet.org/responsa/nyp-no-5762-6/, at notes 1-4.
2. On the age of thirteen as an indication of adulthood, see Bereshit Rabah, parasha 80: Genesis 34:25 describes both Shimeon and Levi as ish (“a man”), and R. Shimeon ben Elazar declares that Levi was thirteen at the time (and see Machzor Vitry and Bartenura to M. Avot 5:21).
3. A baraita in B. Kiddushin 63b-64a.
4. M. Nidah 6:11; Tosefta Chagigah 1:3.
5. See Rambam and Bartenura to M. Nidah 6:11: the signs of puberty determine the onset of adulthood only when the girl has reached the age of twelve or the boy has reached the age of thirteen.
6. See, for example, M. Nidah 5:6 and B. Nidah 45b: while R. Yehudah Hanasi sets thirteen (for boys) and twelve (for girls) as the age at which one is culpable for one’s vows, R. Shimeon ben Elazar reverses the numbers: boys become adults at twelve and girls at thirteen.
7. M. Chagigah 1:1.
8. M. Sukkah 2:8. On the phrase katan she’eino tzarich l’imo, see B. Sukkah 28b.
9. Mechilta d’R. Yishma’el, Bo, parashah 17 (ed. Horowitz-Rabin, p. 68).
10. Tosefta Chagigah 1:2.
11. M. Yevamot 10:8; M. Nidah 6:1 and 6:12; Tosefta Nidah 6:2; and elsewhere.
12. Y. D. Gilat, P’rakim b’hishtalsh’lut hahalachah (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1992), pp. 19-31. Gilat suggests (at pp. 19-20) that the famous declaration in M. Avot 5:21 is the creation of a later time. He points out that the declaration is missing from the earliest textual witnesses to the tractate. See, for example, the variants in an early parallel of the Avot text in B. Ketubot 50a.
13. Ibid., at 28-31.
14. We might also point out that allowing girls to observe Bat Mitzvah a full year ahead of boys would have severe consequences for our educational curriculum, which is also based upon our commitment to egalitarianism.
15. See B. B’rachot 9a: k’dai hu Rabbi Shimeon lismoch alav b’sha’at hadachak, “Rabbi Shimeon is of sufficient stature for us to follow his opinion in an urgent situation.” That is, we are entitled to follow the minority (and lenient) viewpoint against that of the majority in the halachah when “the hour requires it” (Tosefta Eduyot 1:5; Rabad on M. Eduyot 1:5, as cited by R. Sh’lomo Edani (d. 1624), M’lekhet Sh’lomo to M. Eduyot 1:5).
16. According to a statement in B. Nidah 6b, the sh’at hadachak principle applies only in cases where the halakhic rule in question has not been firmly set (la itamar hilkh’ta); when that rule has been established, then presumably it is not set aside even in “urgent situations.” But just what it means for the halachah to be “established” and for minority opinions to be firmly rejected is a controversy all its own. In general, our Reform approach to the halachah tends to preserve the plurality of voices and interpretations found within the sources and to avoid declaring that halakhic decision is “fixed” for all time. And in our case, “minority” views do exist: the fact that the original halachah does not recognize age thirteen as the absolute standard for adulthood, as well as the fact that to this day a congregation is permitted to call a minor to the Torah (B. Megilah 23a; Shulchan Aruch Orach Chayim 282:3).
17. Rabbi’s Manual (New York: CCAR, 1988), p. 229.