The Marcus-Schwartz family celebrated Shalhevet’s Bat Mitzvah this past winter. Here, Shalhevet, a 7th grade student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, her mother, Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus, clinical director of the Medical Center for Female Sexuality in New York and a founding member of JOFA, and Yishai, her older brother, a SAR graduate and student at Yale University, reflect on the occasion and its significance.
Shalhevet:My Bat Mitzvah celebration was almost identical to my brothers’ B’nei Mitzvah and very similar to the Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations of many of my friends. The fact that I was a girl didn’t make any kind of significant difference. It was only after the Bat Mitzvah when I really felt the difference between my religious observance and that of the boys I know.
I know that, in recent years, the gap between the ritual participation of men and women has become much smaller. At this point, the only place where I feel the distinction is in tefillah, where there is a huge difference between the public roles men and women can take. When my brothers go to shul during the week, they are often asked to leyn or daven, and even when they aren’t, people always notice and appreciate the fact that they’re there. On the other hand, I’m stuck in a box in the corner, either by myself or with a handful of other women. My role in shul hasn’t changed at all since my Bat Mitzvah, except maybe that I’m there more often now.
But I think that can change and is changing already. Every few Shabbatot there’s a partnership minyan in my neighborhood where I can take a more active role in tefillah, and I know that’s something that women in my mother’s generation couldn’t have done after their Bat Mitzvah. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still much further to go.
Yishai: My kid sister, Shalhevet, with whom I have always been close, was 10 years old when I left to study in yeshiva in Israel. When I returned, I was stunned by just how much she had matured in the span of only a year. She was suddenly grown up and in the midst of completing her study of Seder Nezikin and learning to leyn her Torah portion in preparation for her Bat Mitzvah.
Observing her preparations caused me to reminisce about my own feelings at the time of my Bar Mitzvah. In the first few months after turning 13, I took pride in my legal eligibility and liturgical preparedness. I looked forward to vacations and days off from school when I could attend the latest weekday minyan, primarily attended by elderly retired men, and could count on being called on to leyn or to lead the davening. The youthful pride has since worn off, but proper intent often follows from repeated performance, and I now have a profound sense of comfort in performing roles of active and genuine service to the community and worship of God.
During my last few years in high school, Shalhevet used to wake me up and drag me out to Sunday and vacation morning minyanim. But one hol hamo’ed morning as we walked home from shul, she turned to me and said plainly, “That was you who leyned this morning, right? I won’t ever be able to do that.” Of course, she was right. We live in a community where a partnership minyan meets often, and I’m sure that her flawless keri’at haTorah will be a frequent blessing to that tzibbur. But I don’t think there is an Orthodox community anywhere that could support a late weekday morning minyan where, when a girl age 12 and two weeks walks in, the congregation can look up relieved that there is someone who knows the leyning. We have trained individual women who can truly maximize their gifts in the service of God, but we have not yet developed the communal framework to make these women feel ritually needed.
Most of us barely experience the formal status change that occurs the moment we become a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Before the age of mitzvot, we are obligated to keep them for educational purposes. Afterward, although the source of obligation changes, our practice really does not. For me, becoming a Bar Mitzvah meant the ability to be the minyan go-to guy, responsible not only for myself but for others as well. Both Shalhevet and I know that, for her, this public ritual responsibility will occur far less frequently. But we can hope for a generation when young women will feel both the call of communal responsibility and the thrill of answering that call because, ultimately, commitment to God and community comes from both.