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Showing posts from August, 2014

Recovering the Manhood Ritual

Lake Schmidell, Desolation Wilderness After attending the bar mitzvah of a friend of Caleb's earlier this year, I got excited about doing some kind of manhood ritual for him.  It was my first bar mitzvah and I was deeply moved by the experience. I identified two aspects of the Jewish coming of age ceremony where the adolescent male invests in the process. First, he must sing a large section of the Old Testament in Hebrew from memory. Second, he must perform a community service project and present a report during the ceremony. There was incredible symbolism throughout the worship service. Everything is sung in Hebrew and the rabbi did a great job explaining the meaning behind the objects. The Torah is held up and people touch it as it passes to demonstrate reverence and obedience. This ceremony represented the confluence of four distinct identities: spiritual, ethnic, family, and gender. The closet Protestant equivalent is baptism, if baptism were also ethnic and gender-orient