The Coming of Age in the Jewish Tradition

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The Coming of Age in the Jewish Tradition

Dear John,

My Bar Mitzvah will be taking place on my 13th Birthday, 27th of January 2002. I would like to invite you to the ceremony in my local Synagogue.

The ceremony is held on the first Shabbat after my birthday, this will be the 2nd of February. Shabbat starts on Friday evening at sunset and it finishes on Saturday night when the stars appear, we rest on Shabbat we devote ourselves to prayer at the Torah study, it is a family time.

Bar Mitzvah means son of the commandments. I will be exactly Bar Mitzvah on the 27th as soon as I wake up. From then on I will be an adult in the Jewish community, I will take responsibility for my own actions where my Father used to, and I make a commitment to my faith. I will enter a covenant relationship with God, both as an individual and as a part of the Jewish community.

When we are Bar Mitzvah we will be able to form a minyan, which is the required 10 men needed present in a Synagogue before prayers can be read.

In preparation for the ceremony I will have to:

Go to classes to learn to read and chant the Torah in Hebrew, what it says and why it is important. Hebrew is especially hard to learn because it is written from right to left and there are no spaces, punctuation or vowels!
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I will learn how to put on my tefillin and tallit. The tefillin are special boxes Jews wear when praying they contain pieces of parchment with prayers written on them. They are worn on the head and arm because the arm is close to the heart and the head is closer to my thoughts and feelings. And the tallit is a prayer robe worm during morning prayers. It is a four-cornered square of white cloth worn over the head and shoulders and has tassels called tizits, although they will not be worn at Bar Mitzvah as it is ...

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