Life lessons — Bat Mitzvah

Jewish tradition ordains that girls automatically reach religious maturity at the age of twelve. But historically a girl’s transition from child to adult was not marked communally, either in or outside a synagogue. Women had no part in the public reading of the Torah, except as listeners, segregated in the women’s gallery. Thus, when bat mitzvah emerged as a regularized rite in the Jewish lifecycle of a girl, the procedure varied from synagogue to synagogue and evolved over time. For American Jews, this process famously began in 1922 (two years after women were guaranteed the right to vote in the...