PS' J
Vol. V.   No. 34
TORONTO, ONT., JUNE 20, 1924
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Confirmation Day with all its possibilities for an effective emphasis of Jewish teaching and for a display of supersentimen tali ties is with us again. In its coming the Reform synagogue is able to greet the one ceremony that it has added to the list of ceremonies of the synagogue of which it can justly be proud. Not that it has added no other ceremonies. It has. A religion, or for that matter anything called into action time and time again, cannot possibly fail to call into being a form, a reminder, a modus operandi, and they who can keep their perspective can watch the forms harden into custom and ceremony. How often have we been asked when is the right time for the pall-bearers at a funeral to throw the gloves that they have worn as part of the paraphernalia of their office into the open Krrave, or is that the thing to do with these self-samegloves? And we have often thought of a blase American Jewish community working out this form for itself and then expecting to find something in Jewish law, in the Shulchan Aruch let us say, as to the customs of the ancestors far removed, that might tell the blase younger generation what shall be done with the gloves. Then we have the customs good and bad that the "pastorized" American rabbi must follow in the fulfillment of his functions as rabbi of the congregation, unable any more to say a single word of prayer in its own behalf. But the Confirmation rite for boys and girls who have finished a course in the Sunday school has made a place for itself in the life of modern Jewry.
Year by year we have had opportunity to notice that the custom has taken a hold not only in the avowedly Reform synagogue but has established something of a vogue in the so-called Conservative synagogue as well, except that there it has been limited to the krirl graduates of the religious school, it being assumed that the boys have had their chance on Bar Mitzvah day. In this the Conservative synagogue is majcing up for the neglect on the part of the Orthodox synagogue. For certainly, the Bar Mitzvah service for boys, vrith its long drill in a chant fitted into words that the boy does not understand, has lost intellectual or religious vahie. And most assuredly a ceremony declaring to a boy of thirteen that he is a man, that he is responsible for himself, and allowing his father to say a Messing declaring that he is no longer� perhaps only religiously however�responsible fer tfce lad, can  have no meaning under
own immediately after the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. He has nothing changed in his life. His economic independence has not been established and in the complicated and specialized�for really the two go together, a specialized society meaning the ability of all the specializations to fit together�society, it will take quite some time before the responsibility will fall from the parents' shoulders. Really the origin of the Bar Mitzvah is involved in doubt. But the very peculiar name ought to give us an inkling into its real meaning. Rabbinic literature of course knows the word Mitzvah. It is a commandment, a deed whereby merit can be won. It is a detail in the system of duties that comprise the conception of Judaism as a religion of conduct. The whole system as a study and as a guide will be indicated by the word Torah or by Mitzvoth (in the plural) and he who would carry the burden of the system is said to have accepted the yoke of the commandments or the yoke of the Torah. Naturally if the thought had been in the beginning that the boy of thirteen was a member of the community, having accepted the burden of the commandments or of the law, the term should have been either Bar Torah or Bar Mitzvoth.
We have the thought that the custom grew out of an ancient condition of early marriages. Books on the life of the East emphasize that even in this day the early marriage is part of the life of the Orient. And it was in the circumstances of the East, and in the recognition that the lad of thirteen and the girl of twelve were not too young to establish a home and take their-proper place in the life and work of the community, that the lad who reached the age of thirteen was called a Bar Mitzvah, the particular Mitzvah of establishing a home. In that case the absurdity of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony in the conditions of the Occident, cultural and economic, is heightened. Girls were neglected in the ceremony; they should be happy for being neglected. The Conservative synagogue is however trying to make up for theneglectof the past. We prophesy that sooner or later�most probably sooner�the Conservative synagogue will confirm boys as well.
When Conservatism comes ft) that day, it will have to avoid some of the blunders that we in the Reform Synagogue have made, when for one thing we took over something of protestant Christianity into our form and asked the children to make profession of their faith. It was the early mistake of those who gave Reform something of its direction that they were anxious to see in the synagogue something like what the church was. As the Christian child accepted the church, the Jewish
not quite Jewish. The matter needs only to be stated to awaken the feeling that in Judaism it is not so at all. Judaism is not a church, it is an historic and people tradition. Children born in Jewish homes, by virtue of the birthplace and birth surroundings accept the responsibility of Judaism. They may of course later on set aside that responsibility, if they so desire, openly or sneeringly. At all events, a confirmation service in the synagogue is a confirmation service. It is intended to confirm the child in the possession of that which has been his from birth. And whenever we have anything else than this -and unfortunately we have it too often- it is due to a misunderstanding of Judaism.
The calendar connection between Confirmation and Shabuoth (though this was not always so; Samuel Hirsch, for example, had Confirmation services with the Chanukah festival) has prompted the thought that children might be pictured as pilgrims to the temple and bring their floral offerings. We have carried that far to excess. Our programmes are reminders of the old-fashioned flower books that lovers in spring carefully studied. Under this outburst of floral sentimentality we brought the good Lord pansies and forget-me-nots and roses and violets and acacia springs and amarinths and read him chapters from the lovers' anthology. Of course the rabbis changed them around a bit. The flowers had new meaning. They carried suggestions of the tree of knowledge, of the tree of sturdiness, of the flower of fidelity and finally worked into the tree of life. Very pretty, but as far away from the simple, dignified Jewish ceremony that ought to be as can be imagined.
But a confirmation service will really be effective when we shall have developed a genuine instruction in Jewish matters and continue the instruction to a time in the child's life when the lessons shall be fairly rich and complete. That means first of all more frequent sessions of our religious schools and it means in the second place a postponement of the age of Confirmation till sixteen. It cannot be made later but it should not be made earlier and pedagogues who happen also to be rabbis have agreed in this as a result of the experiences in their own schools.
To the con firm ants the land over we wish a very happy day, with the prayer that its lesson and its wealth of sentiment may abide for many a blessed day. The day when the rich legacy of a past becomes consciously the child's own should stand out as one of the great days of life. May the memory of it remain as a constant star in the heavens of life, which no storm can hide and which no
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