Jewish Traditions and Rituals

Contemporary discussions of religious identity in modern times have focused on cultural hybridity, synthetic, and constructed formations of identity. However, the question of Jewish identity within Jewish communal institutions and across religious communities has remained within the context of halakhah, or religious law. This definition states that a Jew is anyone born of a Jewish mother. Thus the son or daughter of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father is a Jew, while the son or daughter of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not a Jew. (Samet 107-139)

Importance Of Circumcision

Jewish practice of male circumcision is termed as a “berit milah”, or a “bris”. On the 8th day after the baby is born, a physician (mohe)l comes to perform the circumcision. Throughout history different cultures have used genital alteration of males and females to express religious identity, inscribe social values, and enforce social norms of marriage, sexuality, and appropriate gender behavior. Societies differ greatly on whether they practice genital alteration on males and females, both, or neither, and on the stage of life at which procedures are done. Male circumcision, for example, is done on the eighth day of life by observant Jews, at around four or five years of age by Muslims in Turkey, and at puberty in some sub-Saharan African cultures. (Forster 47)

For Jews, circumcision is the symbol of joining the promise, it does not bestow Jewishness. Uncircumcised males can still be considered Jewish; Judaism does not practice female circumcision, but females are not thereby excluded from the covenant. In order for the religious obligation of circumcision to be fulfilled, the surgery must be set in the proper context, which includes the blessings, the suitable mindset, the accurate process, and the dutifully ordered day of performance. Some Jewish feminists have expressed criticism of berit milah because it surrounds the birth of a boy with more importance than that of a girl (although naming ceremonies for baby girls are becoming more common), and because it seems to imply a necessary connection between the male body and membership in the Jewish covenant.

Significance Of Bar Mitzvah And Bah Mitzvah

The term for the religious rite by which a Jewish boy is formally initiated into the religious community and assumes the duties and responsibilities of a Jew. The words bar mitzvah (late Hebrew bar mi?wâ) literally mean, "son of precept." Though the expression is found in the Talmud (Baba Me?i'a 96a), it appears to have been used there simply to mean every adult Jew. The use of the word in the modern sense does not go back much beyond the 14th century. It was first so employed in the works of a German Jew, Mordecai ben Hillel. (Hyman 133-146)

Leopold Löw has established the fact that bar mitzvah was a fixed custom in Germany in the 14th century. Löw was of the opinion that the practice of bar mitzvah could not be traced beyond this point in time. There is, however, some probability that in a rudimentary form at ...