My after-dinner speech for Jordan’s Bar Mitzvah

I’ve always wondered why the Bar Mitzvah was set at age 13.  It seems arbitrary, doesn’t it?  In our modern world, for example, getting a driver’s license is not allowed until age 16, or voting is only possible after age 18.

But why age 13 for a Bar Mitzvah?  Aside from being capable of mastering video games, what qualities does a 13 year old boy have that would make you consider him to be capable of adult responsibility?

Well – over the past year with Jordan, I’ve watched the answer to this question unfold right before my eyes.  It started back in September – the first week of grade 7, when we attended a parent meeting to review the curriculum for the upcoming year.  In the Waldorf system of education, the curriculum is designed to match the current stage of development of the child, and to support the intellectual and emotional stages that the child is naturally passing through. 

So, the grade 7 curriculum is built on the historical period in Europe of the Renaissance – the time of  tremendous upheaval in the arts, sciences, culture, and politics, which is most famously represented by the life of Leonardo da Vinci.  It is easiest to see in terms of the artists of the time, how “perspective” became a new aspect of representational art.

“Perspective”, is also what suddenly burst onto the scene with Jordan during the first week of school.  He came home one day, and told us that he’d suddenly been thinking about a lot of things that he had never thought about ever before.

·        What does my future hold for me?Where will I go to High School? Will I go to University or College? What will I study? What kind of career will I have?

·        What will I do with my life? Will I have a family? How will I know how to make all these decisions?

This may not seem like a big deal, unless you consider the fact that if you had asked him about these kinds of things only a couple of months earlier, that he would have refused to discuss anything about these subjects, and said “how am I supposed to know? I’m just a kid.”

And since then, over the past year, this new tone of maturity and perspective has become a permanent fixture in Jordan’s character. (But Don’t worry – he still plays video games every chance he gets.)

Another significant fact about the Grade 7 curriculum in Waldorf, is that the amount of homework increases exponentially, as the students are now at a stage when they can handle it.  Watching Jordan learn how to manage himself with this new workload, AT THE SAME TIME as taking on the intensive study for his Bar Mitzvah, makes me think that Leonardo da Vinci may have been thinking of Jordan when he wrote these words:

“The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.”

I want to thank you, Jordan, for teaching me this year that picking age 13 as the point of “coming of age” was not arbitrary.

MAZEL TOV, jordan