Among non-Orthodox Jews, a bar mitzvah often marks the last day a boy takes his Judaism seriously. It serves as a graduation rather than an initiation day. The parents of the boy evidently regard religion like they do a Disney movie – good for innocent children, not for serious adults.
The Torah disagrees. The earliest a Jew could offer a terumas Hashem was at age 20 (Exodus 30:14). Why? Because, writes Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, in “Jewish life, the Sanctuary is not to be given over to childhood and youth” with all one’s attention “given to the selfish career of getting one’s livelihood” after that point.
G-d did not share divine truth with man so that he would relegate it to children. “It is the grown-ups, the seriousness and the power of virile life and endeavors that [the Jewish Sanctuary] awaits. At the age in which a man, in common parlance, gets the call to think for himself and to work for himself, the Jewish Sanctuary calls him into service.”
These comments mirror Rav Hirsch’s explanation in Parsha Mishpatim for why the Torah specifically demands that healthy males appear at the Jewish Sanctuary for the shalosh regalim: “It is the elite of the nation, the vigorous and virile, the very backbone of the people…that the living God expects and awaits in the Sanctuary of his Torah.”
Judaism is not a fairy tale for naïve or feeble minds. It is divine truth, which uplifts every soul, but shines brightest when lived by the smart, the talented, and the robust.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) – head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of “The Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch Dictionary.”