Word: batted
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...Torah to chant from the sixth chapter of the Book of Numbers, her rite of passage into full Jewish adulthood. One is tempted to say, "Today Elaine Weiss is a woman," except that she has been one a while: she is 62. Nearby sit five other Temple Israel Bat Mitzvah girls (and a Bar Mitzvah boy), ranging from their 30s to their 70s. Today they are...happy...
...high summer of the adult Bat Mitzvah. The ritual retrofitting is becoming standard in Judaism's Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist branches. In the Reform movement alone, 600 of some 900 congregations offer the necessary 18-or 24-month adult preparatory courses in Hebrew, ritual and Scripture. Both Reform and Conservative movements offer guides to facilitate the adult rite. Such ceremonies, says Jack Wertheimer, provost at the Conservative arm's Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, have not only "generated the spark of transformation within individuals [but] transformed congregational life...
...category of Bar Mitzvah ("son of the commandments") dates to the 2nd century; its formal celebration by Jewish boys goes back 500 years. Bat ("daughter") Mitzvahs, however, arose in the early 1900s and saturated liberal Judaism only in the 1970s. Inevitably, there was a generation of Jewish women who had fought for women's equal ritual participation but had themselves missed out on Bat Mitzvah training. "They got all these rights," says Lisa Grant, a professor of Jewish education at Hebrew Union College in Manhattan, "and realized that [ritually] they couldn't do anything. They felt like frauds...
...Late Bat Mitzvahs were the remedy. At first they took place outside the normal congregational context. "It was, talk to a rabbi, rent a hall, have your own experience," says Grant. But gradually, congregational rabbis realized that adult Bat Mitzvah classes drew spiritually curious baby boomers and--as it turned out--were a kind of synagogue superglue. They increased morale, turned a cadre of highly motivated women into fully equipped leaders and eventually attracted men who had somehow forgone Bar Mitzvah in their youth...
...public recommitment to the use of Hebrew in its services: "You've learned how to pray in Hebrew," says Rabbi Sue Ann Wasserman of Reform's Union of American Hebrew Congregations. "Why shouldn't you use it?" The women's group Hadassah periodically celebrates the ascendant rite with mass Bat Mitzvahs of as many as 122 women...