ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.
I’m turning 22 a day after this episode’s release, but I never really had a coming-of-age. Sure, we have milestones and markers for the general United States population, like getting your driver’s license. But I’m still a child at heart, and the best I got was the government slapping me with the ability to pay taxes and go to war when I turned 18. So I wanted to unwrap what it means to come of age in other cultures across the globe.
Rabbi Yitzi Steiner, who works with the University of Minnesota chapter of Chabad, sat down with me to talk about the Jewish traditions of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.
YITZI STEINER: A Bar Mitzvah is generally when a boy, a male, turns 13, and a Bat Mitzvah is when a girl turns 12. The general definition is when they, when a boy turns 13 and a girl turns 12, at that point they become what’s called obligated in mitzvot. What is a mitzvah? A mitzvah is a commandment that God has given to the Jewish people, there are generally 613 of them.
In other words, up until they turn 13 or 12, and it’s more of an education. They’re learning the practice. But they only become responsible, like, using the term obligated, but it’s responsible for it when they turn 12 or 13. So, to a certain degree, you know, we say that that’s when they become a man and that’s when they become a woman.
LASSITER: Once a boy becomes a Bar Mitzvah (son of commandment), or a girl becomes a Bat Mitzvah (daughter of commandment), they are able to partake in upholding these commandments, like prayer for men or, for women, lighting candles to usher in Shabbat — which is the period from Friday to Saturday evening. The preparation for becoming Bar/Bat Mitzvah is a lot. You start a year in advance memorizing from the Torah, the Jewish holy book.
STEINER: It’s very complicated to read from the Torah because in the Torah itself, meaning in the actual scroll, it just has the letters, meaning there are no vowels. And there’s an actual tune. Every word has its own tune, but in the Torah itself, you don’t have the vowels and you don’t have the tunes.
So you need to take a book that has the vowels and has the tunes, and then you kind of, match it up with the Torah. So it can take a very, very long time. Now couple that with a child that never went to Hebrew school; doesn’t know how to read Hebrew. So they got to start with just learning the Hebrew alphabet, starting to learn how to read it, then learn the tune and so on.
LASSITER: After the preparation is finished, the young man or woman suddenly has a lot more responsibility. Much like a Bat Mitzvah, a Quinceañera sees a young woman beginning to make her transition to adulthood. Karen Mary Davalos, an anthropology specialist with the University’s Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, spent the former chunk of her career studying the tradition.
KAREN MARY DAVALOS: A Quinceañera is the coming of age celebration, usually among Mexican or other Latina/Latino cultures. And this coming of age typically involves, you know, a public presentation of a young person and a party, you know, a celebration of people coming together.
That’s how you make things public. And some families continue to see it as a, almost like a sacrament, a Catholic sacrament, and they’ll attend or ask for a mass at a church. Some people want to liken it to other coming-of-age.
LASSITER: Originally, Quinceañeras were only celebrated by la clase alta, or the upper class, due to how expensive the celebration after the mass was to put on. Immigrating from Mexico to the United States made the celebration more accessible for some families.
DAVALOS: So, the upper class were predominantly the ones who could afford and celebrate, but people would migrate to the United States and notice that they could either because of new economic means or because you know, no one around them could claim, “Well, you don’t belong to that class of people.” So they would use it to assert their class status in the United States. Like it takes a village to raise a person. It takes a village to pay for a Quinceañera.
LASSITER: Both the Bar/Bat Mitzvah and Quinceañera are ways of taking the next step in one’s faith and journey to adulthood. It doesn’t automatically mean that they’ve fully grown up, like, “Hello, I am in my young teens. Look at my own-able real estate and my taxable income. Goodbye forever, Mom and Dad.” No, it just signifies that they are ready for more responsibility — to move forward into growing into that role.
STEINER: Judaism is is very much, very, very detail oriented — very, very specific. Everything is within Jewish law. There are hundreds of laws and customs in how Judaism evolved.
Every single week in synagogue, part of a portion of the Torah is read. And in order for someone to read it, they need to be Bar Mitzvah. They need to be 13 years old to read it. So it’s generally celebrated or prepared for where the Bar Mitzvah boy would read the Torah in the synagogue. It’s not a must, it’s just more of a tradition that has evolved over the years.
DAVALOS: Not like, “Oh, all of a sudden at age 15. From quince años, 15 years, you’re all of a sudden now a woman.” No, it was becoming a young person who’s on her path to womanhood. There’s not like one day you’re all of a sudden an adult.
But that pressure is so great in this society, in our culture, that maybe without a distinct ritual, I’m just thinking as an anthropologist, we mess up young people and make them think that it’s supposed to happen in one day. And then they feel like failures for not having achieved that.
LASSITER: Though both ceremonies, in recent years, have developed a bigger focus on the party aspect, which Steiner says is especially prevalent in American culture, the tradition itself is more important than whatever the culture tacks onto it. The tradition is what gives it meaning.
STEINER: I think the only myth that I would like to dispel is the idea that a Bar/Bat Mitzvah is a party. That is a byproduct of what a Bar/Bat Mitzvah is.
In the big picture of things, it’s such a small — it’s a minuscule part of what the actual celebration is. Because at its core, it’s celebrating the fact that the boy or girl is now become responsible for mitzvot.
DAVALOS: That kind of community formation, I think, is really significant in the face of the pressure to assimilate, the pressure to forget your culture, to leave behind your culture or the myth that if you forget your culture, if you adopt this so-called generic way of being an American, then you’ll have success.
And I think a Quinceañera, a celebration, then shows, well, that’s not necessarily the case. Because people joining together and helping each other out in raising a young girl, and in celebrating her passage into womanhood is another successful way to be in a community.
LASSITER: Of course, Steiner and Davalos were both once kids themselves. Kids who would one day also have to come of age.
DAVALOS: I didn’t have a Quinceañera myself. I come from a family of three girls and one boy. And my father was like, “There’s no way I was going to do that for you. Yeah, like, we can’t afford one. So why, if I can’t afford one, how are we going to do three?”
LASSITER: But despite not having had a Quinceañera herself, Davalos has been to her fair share and has seen firsthand the traditions that come with it.
DAVALOS: Usually, the Quinceañera and her family usually approach the altar and the priest will give a special blessing and he might, the priest might bless some of the items that are bestowed upon the Quinceañera. A rosary or a medallion with Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Or a medallion that’s a crucifix, or a Bible, or some other object that the family wants the Quinceañera to have to commemorate the event. And then she might present a rose to, if there’s a shrine for Our Lady of Guadalupe, she might present a rose to her, you know, kind of like a woman guiding another woman — a holy sacred woman guiding another young person.
LASSITER: Steiner, on the other hand, did have his own Bar Mitzvah when he turned 13.
STEINER: So my Bar Mitzvah, I studied, prepared a year before to practice to read from the Torah. I went to a Hebrew school where I learned. I knew how to read fluent Hebrew, but still took many months to be able to prepare and practice for my Bar Mitzvah. So my own personal Bar Mitzvah was, so it started a year before with practicing.
And then Saturday night was a large celebration in the hall of that hotel for the entire community that my parents were a part of. And people, guests came from out of town and all of my friends were there and parents came and there was a nice celebration.
LASSITER: Traditions like Bar/Bat Mitzvahs and Quinceañeras have great standing in their home countries and in the United States, but some cultures celebrate the coming-of-age in a much different way.
One such example is the “bullet ant initiation” of the Sateré-Mawé people in the Brazilian Amazon. It’s such a niche tradition that none of the faculty members in the Portuguese Studies department even knew about it when I asked. So, I had to do a bit of my own research.
The tradition goes like this — once a boy from the tribe turns 13, he searches the jungle and collects bullet ants, a particularly sting-y kind of ant, to be sedated and sewn into the inside of a glove. When they wake up, the ants are angrier than ever, and I think you can see where I’m going with this. Over the course of several months, each boy will have to wear the glove over 20 times, for around 10 minutes at a time to prove he is ready for manhood by the amount of pain he can endure.
There’s also land diving, a tradition among the men of Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. Once a boy turns seven or eight, he’s allowed to join the adults in jumping from a nearly 100-foot tower with a vine tied around his ankles — like bungee jumping. When a boy makes his first jump, his mother holds onto an item from his childhood, and throws it away after he’s finished — representing his transition from boy to man.
DAVALOS: You know, as an anthropologist, I would say every society has coming of age celebrations, rituals that mark a time in people’s life and a movement from one stage of life to the next.
We have fewer of those because most cultures around the world are patriarchal, meaning they favor the patriarchal side. Masculine men experiences over women, female, feminine experiences. And because of that, there are more cultures and more celebrations for men.
There’s nothing wrong with people coming together and having a celebration and especially celebrating womanhood in a patriarchal context. I always thought that was so magnificent, you know, like to put so much attention on being a young girl in a society that doesn’t value womanhood.
LASSITER: It’s a process, growing up. One day you just look back and recognize the person you are now is not the same as you were a day ago, a week ago — a year, a decade. But you never really do stop growing. I know a few fellow adults who might benefit from sticking their hand into a glove full of ants to help ground them in the pain of adulthood. I also know a few people who had to grow up way too young and take that proverbial leap of faith off their own personal land diving tower and become an adult before their time.
Having one day when that switch gets flipped is a bit of a blessing— it gives you a definite calendar marker that, “Today is the day I became a man.” Not only that, it gives you the drive to start making choices and taking on responsibilities that will follow you for the rest of your life. Even if it is something as simple as getting your driver’s license, it might include a little bit of pain, a little faith and a lot of patience, but it can help you realize that a part of growing up is actually getting to grow.
This episode was written by Alex Lassiter and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we appreciate you listening in. This was our final episode of the season, so feel free to send a message to our email inbox at [email protected] with any questions, comments, concerns or ideas for episodes you’d like to see us produce next year. I’m Alex, and this has been In The Know. Take care, y’all.
