At Machar, we call our 7th Grade program leading to what is traditionally called a bar or bat mitzvah our B Mitzvah program. The program has two main components. One is regular classroom learning alongside seventh graders from our collaborating congregations in the Sunday school program. The other component is the student’s completion of a project that serves as a capstone learning experience helping students to synthesize their learning in our Sunday school program, while also preparing them to come into their own as more mature Jews, proceeding toward adulthood. We have seen that this program helps our graduates to develop into engaged, critical thinkers, more aware of who they are as people and as Humanistic Jews, and more prepared for deeper and more complicated learning experiences and engagement with the world with which they live.
To learn more, read on, and feel free to contact us for more information.
Humanistic Judaism is committed to principles of pluralism and inclusion. Hebrew, which has existed for more than 3000 years, recognizes only two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. Not everyone in the world is either masculine or feminine, but there are only two options in Hebrew as we’ve inherited it for referring to individuals going through the early-teen rite of passage: bar mitzvah (son of the commandment) and bat mitzvah (daughter of the commandment).
Continuing to use bar and bat mitzvah means continually excluding from the Machar community students and others who are not male or female. Many other congregations across the country have recognized the same problem. Rather than continuing to exclude, Machar has chosen to include by using the term “B Mitzvah.” Is this formally correct Hebrew? No. But it represents a way of making the old new and ensuring that we fully include all our students in our B Mitzvah program.
The classroom component of our program uses a curriculum developed in part through adaptation of a standardized, late-middle-school curriculum about Jewish American history, combined with a homegrown curriculum that teaches our students about the history of antisemitism from the ancient period to modern times. This includes but is far from limited to the events of the holocaust in Nazi Germany. By teaching these subjects, we expose our seventh graders to important knowledge about where Jews came from, how Jews came to be in the United States, and how to navigate a world that is not always friendly to Jews.
The second component of the B Mitzvah program – one that distinguishes Machar from many other congregations – is our students’ development of projects on topics of their own choosing, selected in collaboration with our rabbi and our B Mitzvah program coordinator. A student’s project requires them to engage in significant outside-the-classroom research and learning to develop skills for critical inquiry and self-understanding. Once complete, the student presents their project at their B Mitzvah ceremony. Unlike many congregations that simply assign a date for the student ceremony based upon their birthday, we offer considerable flexibility in choosing a date. We strongly encourage students to wait to have their ceremonies until very near the end of the school year. This helps them maximize their in-class learning, their opportunities for independent research and learning, and their access to assistance in developing their projects.
Students have developed projects on a range of topics, and in a range of formats. Some topic examples include:
Projects have taken numerous formats. Sometimes the project is a speech or other spoken presentation with slides and other supporting exhibits presentation. Some students have included dramatic performances in their projects. Others have performed musical pieces, sometimes singing, sometimes performing one or more musical pieces on an instrument, and sometimes playing in small ensembles. Students have researched recipes from around the Jewish world, prepared them, and then written cookbooks and presented about the experience of learning about and preparing the foods.
Because we view these projects as crucial to building a student’s identity, we work with the student to ensure that the topic they have chosen matters to them. We also work with the student to make sure that topic matters to them, that how they work on the project matters to them, and that they can articulate that from both Jewish and ethical perspective. Most projects find the student presenting in whatever form is appropriate for around 15 minutes
during their ceremony, and most students have never presented for that amount of time in front of a crowd. We therefore also provide support for the student in learning how to give a presentation of substantial length, including providing tips on public speaking and effective use of slides during a presentation, and we offer opportunities for practice and rehearsal with the bar mitzvah coordinator, our rabbi, or one or more members of the congregation who have expertise in public speaking and coaching public speakers.
At Machar, we view the Torah as foundational to Jewish history and Jewish culture. But that doesn’t mean that reading or chanting from a Torah scroll will grant our students the kind of capstone experience that is the goal of their B Mitzvah project. Accordingly, we don’t require our students to chant from the Torah.
Some choose to do so, and as with any B Mitzvah project, preparation for that occurs outside of the seventh-grade classroom. If a student wants to chant from the Torah, we are happy to include that as part of their ceremony, but we also want to understand why a student wants to do that and what it means to them to do so. As with everything in Humanistic Judaism, we are concerned with why we do what we do, and with ensuring that what we do reflects what we believe rather than just what has become common or traditional in Jewish life “just because.”
How do people respond when they’ve never seen a Humanistic B Mitzvah ceremony and attend one at Machar?
Overwhelmingly positively.
Many who attend the ceremonies and are unfamiliar with Humanistic Judaism report afterward that the experience was meaningful not only for the student, but for themselves as guests. Many people have no idea that there are alternatives to the traditional “now you’re going to learn how to read from the Torah because that’s just what we do” approach that has become so common in American Jewish life. Sometimes people even lament that this was not available to them when they came of age!
A B Mitzvah at Machar is an unorthodox B Mitzvah. But even those whose Jewish practice is much more traditional nevertheless see how meaningful an experience the B Mitzvah can be for both students and their families.
If you want to learn more, please reach out to our rabbi through the contact form on our website. The rabbi can connect you with other families who have had experience with the program, talk about the details of the program and how it is managed, and provide sample materials so you can get a sense for how our mitzvah program and our B Mitzvah ceremonies really work.