Bar Mitzvah

Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah, in Judaism, a child who has reached the age of legal maturity and thereby has become obligated to observe all the commandments. The term bar mitzvah comes from the Aramaic word for 'son' and the Hebrew word for 'commandment' and thus can be understood as 'a male to whom the commandments pertain.' Bat mitzvah is the feminine form. The terms bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah are also used to refer to the ceremony that takes place when the occasion is celebrated.

In traditional Judaism, when a boy reaches the age of 13 he begins to participate in the religious life of the community as an adult. The occasion is marked by his donning phylacteries, or tefillin, religious symbols worn on the left arm and forehead, at weekday morning prayer for the first time; he is required to continue the practice on a regular basis thereafter. He is also called up in synagogue to read from the Torah (Five Books of Moses), and on the Sabbath, from the Prophets. A girl matures earlier and celebrates her bat mitzvah at the age of 12 (or in some synagogues, at the age of 13). In some synagogues she, too, reads from the Torah and the Prophets, although customs vary. In the United States, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs are important social occasions, marked by festivities and the giving of gifts. Talmudic literature (3rd century to 6th century) fixes the age of a child's legal maturation, but the custom of observing the bar mitzvah seems to date only from the 15th century. The bat mitzvah observance began in the 19th century.