Question: bar/bat/? mitzvah in modern times

[cellio]

I'm asking about words, not observances or concepts.

When a Jewish boy comes of age, he becomes obligated in the commandments, bar mitzvah. Usually the occasion is marked in the synagogue, which is also called a bar mitzvah. When a Jewish girl comes of age, she becomes obligated in the commandments, bat mitzvah, and she might have a bat mitzvah in the synagogue.

These terms are from the talmud. The word bar literally means "son of" (in Aramaic). The word bat literally means "daughter of". One might also see the term b'nei mitzvah, which is plural, when more than one person is marking the occasion in the same service. The word b'nei is unambiguously plural in Hebrew, unlike the sometimes-numerically-ambiguous "they" in English.

Hebrew is a gendered language; there is no neuter term like "child" in English.

What term are people using for nonbinary or genderfluid people? This is going to come up in my synagogue, and it must have already come up in others, but I don't know what they did. I have some readers who might know: what are people using instead of bar or bat?

While the talmud recognizes four genders, I don't think its conclusions about the other two are going to satisfy most modern people.

Comments

[metahacker]

Drat. Someone posted about this at work and had an answer (or at least something worth discussion) but the thread has slipped away. Will see if I can figure out who and where it was.

[hlinspjalda]

We have found this group, Keshet, very valuable for nonstandard ritual strategies. We've also started to use mi'beit instead of bat or ben.

[lomedet]

for Hebrew names, 'mibeit' seems to be the best alternative to ben/bat for nb folks.

for arriving at Jewish adulthood, I have seen both 'b mitzvah' and 'brit mitzvah'

[rhialto]

For me, not knowing anything to this topic at all, and rather being a computer nerd, foo comes to mind (from the sequence of metasyntactic variables foo bar baz).

[thnidu]

My synagogue, Kol Tzedek of West Philadelphia, routinely uses "b'nei mitzvah" as a gender-neutral singular. I see it as analogous to singular "they". It's especially useful to us bc we welcome anyone regardless of gender preference, etc. In fact, our lead rabbi is a trans man, and one of our other rabbis I'm 99% sure is lesbian.

This one's easy!

[(Anonymous)]

My synagogue and many others simply say B'nai Mitzvah. My shul also says B Mitzvah.

-Cyndi (still can't figure out how to not be anonymous here without creating an account for a blog, which I don't want)

Re: This one's easy!

[cellio]

Hi Cyndi! Sorry about the posting hassles. Fortunately, I get email about new comments, so I know to come unscreen them when needed. (If you have an account anywhere that uses OpenID, I believe you can log in to Dreamwidth with that. I think.)

Thanks for the information! I knew there must be prior experience somewhere out there.