I must admit a great deal of ambivalence as I planned my son’s Bar Mitzvah because, as a woman, I am once again relegated to obscurity despite my obvious importance in my child’s life. I could not see his face as he layned, could not touch or kiss him when he finished, and I have never had access to the ritual object, the Torah, which is central to the experience. My name was not allowed to be included in his aliyah, as it was not at his bris, and I had no role to play, nor bracha to say. And I am struck yet again at the failure of ancient rabbinic authority, as well as by contemporary rabbis, to include women in religious ritual.

But I needed to make this a religious and spiritually meaningful event for myself. So I turned to my books of tchinas, religious devotional literature written by and for women over the centuries to provide religious context and spiritual dimension.

And yet, interestingly, but not surprisingly, I could find only one tchina for a mother to say at her son’s Bar Mitzvah even though there are many for just about any experience you can imagine a woman having: lighting candles, mikvah, pregnancy, birth, nursing, weaning, finding a child’s first tooth, taking a child to school for the first time… Apparently, for our foremothers too, this was a non-event, one which they felt unconnected to physically, spiritually or emotionally.

Adding my own words to those of our foremothers, I wrote my own tchina, for my son who gives me so much joy and shows me so much kibud aim, and I would like to share it with you today.