Relgious rituals and child worship

Having returned from my cousin’s daughter’s bat mitzvah, I want to reflect a bit on my reactions to the service and what that means about my faith. There is so much to admire: the Rabbi’s incredible high heels, the abilities of my young cousins to read Hebrew, the elderly woman beside me who drove their wheelchair bound 90 year old grandmother) to all the services and was following along with the prayers, her finger under the Hebrew letters, the ability of all these people to sit through both an hour and a half service on Friday night and a full two hours on Saturday, the touching moment when she lit the yhartzeit candle for the seven-year=old Holocaust victim she’d been assigned as her twin. And this is actually a key point, what makes this service, though it does delight in the young person, and the family and the passing on of tradition, different from the child worship of St. Jonah’s and so many other protestant churches. It is one thing for those at the top of the social order to cluck over their children. It is frankly a bit unseemly. They have picked it up from the ethnic groups—the bat mitzvahs of the Jews, the quinceanos of the Latinos, etc. St. Jonah’s people admitted it: when they went to a bat mitzvah they were envious. But when they try to translate such rituals into Episcopalianism, and create new quasi-confirmation celebrations, it becomes self-aggrandizement. You see, the difference is not in how deeply both groups hold their faith, or whether or not they really believe any of the things they profess. How many of the Jews holding their prayer books to the Torah and kissing them really believe this to be God’s word? Some. Many, perhaps. But not all. In both liberal traditions, people are welcome and accepted whatever they think, because, after all, how important are all our thoughts? Not very, in truth. But when a victimized group like the Jews delights that our children are here, are alive and understand their connection to the God of our Tradition, it is truly something to fill all hearts with thankfullness; it eases the pain of the terrible loss that mars us all. To look at a beautiful young person reading this ancient text, the very scroll that was rescued from a synogogue where none of the people survived, no matter who or what we believe in, we must be in awe, and thankful. I’m sorry: white middle class Protestants can never emulate this. Don’t try. Let your children sit and behave themselves, please.