Belatedly embracing an adolescent rite of passage.

Looking out from the bima, or pulpit, of Oakland’s Temple Sinai, Ilana DeBare is face-to-face with 120 family members, friends, and temple regulars. It is Saturday, Feb. 26, 2011—the day of her bat mitzvah—and the people seated in front of her wait eagerly for her to speak.

Just after 10:30 a.m., DeBare leads the congregation in prayers, then accepts her very own tallit, a fringed prayer shawl. Next, she carries the Torah scroll around the temple hall while her guests reach out with their prayer books and tallitot.

Then she begins the traditional readings: first from the Torah, followed by a melodic passage of haftarah (a prophetic reading), and then her sermon, known as the d’var Torah.

Toward the end of the service, her rabbi, Steven Chester, leans in to give her a private message of blessing. And with that, she joins the ranks of countless 13-year-olds in a tradition that has spanned 15 centuries.

Except DeBare is not 13 years old. She is 53.

Her 15 months of preparation with Chester didn’t follow sixth grade, but a buyout from the San Francisco Chronicle that left DeBare jobless after years as a staff writer at the struggling paper.

When the rabbi leans in to whisper his blessing, he isn’t giving her the winning lottery numbers for the week (as she later jokes); he is telling her that if she were 10 years younger, he’d be encouraging her to enter rabbinical school.

There won’t be a big party with a DJ, chocolate fountain, gifts carefully selected from a bat mitzvah registry (yes, they do exist) and hunky prepubescent boys (it’s less certain if they exist) waiting in the wings. Instead, there will be a luncheon at the temple following the service, and an intimate family dinner that evening.

And—in what would surely be a horror to any 13-year-old girl’s ears—that pretty brown dress she’s wearing isn’t new; she previously wore it to her own daughter’s bat mitzvah back in 2007.

“I ‘became a woman’ four years after my daughter did,” says DeBare, who chronicled her experience on the aptly titled blog, Midlife Bat Mitzvah.

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DeBare is part of a growing group of men and women who are becoming b’nai mitzvah decades after their 13th birthdays. While there are no census numbers tracking if and when Jews are becoming b’nai mitzvah (questions about religion are prohibited on the census), a look at synagogues throughout the East Bay suggests an interesting trend.

Temple Beth Abraham in Oakland, for example, offers formal adult b’nai mitzvah courses every three years; between 10 and 20 adults enroll each session. Rabbis like Steven Chester at Temple Sinai and Menachem Creditor at Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley offer small-group and one-on-one tutoring to meet adult congregants’ needs.

Why did men and women such as DeBare fail to become b’nai mitzvah at a more traditional age?

Fifty-four-year-old Oakland resident Jane Simon, for one, grew up with a strong Jewish cultural identity but received no religious education.

Karen Tanner, 59, of Berkeley, was supposed to do a double bat mitzvah with a friend as a teenager; when her friend bailed, Tanner was too nervous to follow through on her own.

Sydney Firestone, 61, of Oakland, was raised in a devout household but turned 13 at a time before girls could be b’not mitzvah.

Josh Kornbluth, 52, of Berkeley, could not reconcile his atheist, socialist upbringing with the “myth” of a Jewish God.

Esther Rogers, 46, of Piedmont, was pulled out of Hebrew school as a child.

And, for DeBare, a secular upbringing that involved lighting a menorah at Chanukah, decorating a tree and devouring a turkey at Christmas, and not belonging to a synagogue simply meant that a bat mitzvah wasn’t even discussed—let alone longed for by her teenage self.

Others have been inspired after marrying into a more religious family or converting to Judaism—but the common thread of these stories is that wanting a midlife mitzvah is more than just another expression of the classic American midlife crisis.

“B’nai mitzvah have been misunderstood for a very long time as a pediatric experience, something fun for the kids,” says Netivot Shalom’s Creditor, who has guided 20 adult b’nai mitzvah in the past 10 years. “But the big difference is that you’re deciding as an adult to affirm your identity. It may be considered a strange step, but it’s your step to take.”

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For those who aren’t familiar, let’s define a few key terms. The bar mitzvah is a Jewish boy’s rite of passage, something akin to confirmation for a Christian. The female equivalent is the bat mitzvah. The plural form for boys (or a group that includes both boys and girls) is b’nai mitzvah—but if you’re referring specifically to multiple “bat mitzvahs” (girls), the correct plural is b’not mitzvah.

Technically, while b’nai mitzvah (that’s the plural) serve a similar purpose to confirmations—signaling religious initiation and maturity—what we see today are thoroughly modern, mostly American inventions, according to Mark Oppenheimer, author of the 2005 book, Thirteen and a Day.

The Torah, or Jewish holy book, doesn’t mention bar mitzvah or any other special ceremony marking religious adulthood. The Talmud, a text that dictates Jewish law and ethics, mentions “bar mitzvah” only in reference to a father’s blessing to God.

According to Oppenheimer, it isn’t until the Middle Ages that European Jews began to recognize this rite of religious responsibility; the first written description of a “bar mitzvah feast” was recorded in the mid-1500s in reference to a German custom.

In the centuries that followed, b’nai mitzvah took hold among the Jewish orthodoxy in Europe, who in turn brought it over to America. But, in classic “assimilation story” form, b’nai mitzvah began to die out as Reform congregations adopted new traditions “like holding Sabbath services on Sun-day (instead of Saturday), calling rabbis ‘Reverend’ and ignoring kosher law,” writes Oppenheimer.

Yet the bar mitzvah not only survived in the United States, thanks to the wave of Orthodox Jews who emigrated from Europe after World War II, but made a major comeback in the late 1960s and ’70s.

Oppenheimer sees the ceremony’s resurgence as connected to the challenges of modern Jewish experience. “This is not the Protestant idea of religion, which exalts the individual’s relationship to Scripture and God,” he writes. “The bar and bat mitzvah are successful Jewish rituals because they are communal and public. They have an audience. And for Jews—battered by genocide, lax observance, intermarriage, and low birthrates—visible affirmations of their mere existence as a people are especially appealing.”

Technically, a boy becomes a bar mitzvah and a girl becomes a bat mitzvah, translated as a son or a daughter, respectively, “of the commandment.” But “Americans speak of ‘having’ a bar mitzvah, the way one ‘has’ a wedding,” writes Oppenheimer.

Today, the bar mitzvah looks less like a Holy Communion and more like a Super Sweet 16. Or, as New York Magazine once put it, b’nai mitzvah are “bash mitzvahs,” extravaganzas costing tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In a 2005 Slate article, Emily Bazelon proposes a way to win back the sense of piety and religious responsibility apparently lost in favor of ball gowns and fireworks: “Why not do away with the age requirement?” she asks.

“If the bar mitzvah weren’t set in stone at age 13,” writes Bazelon, who once tutored b’nai mitzvah students in Berkeley, “teenagers and adults could choose to read from the Torah for the first time when they were moved to—and they would get a real (rather than symbolic) taste of adulthood. So what if it takes some Jews decades to come around? . . . Doing away with the set age will lead to fewer b’nai mitzvahs [sic]—but they’d be more deeply felt.”

Bazelon seems to have been on to something.

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Adult b’nai mitzvah ceremonies—originally known as “belated” b’nai mitzvah—began to pop up in the early 1970s in response to the boom in popularity among children, which left some adults feeling like they’d “missed out” on a key developmental experience, Creditor says.

In the 30 years or so since those belated b’nai mitzvah, the trend has caught on, even making a mark on pop culture—in the 2003 episode of The Simpsons, “Today I Am a Clown,” Krusty the Klown becomes an adult bar mitzvah.

But for most adults, participating in a trend is not the main draw when choosing this path.

Josh Kornbluth, a comic monologist, shares a list of what he calls “suspicions,” reasons behind his choice to become a bar mitzvah at the age of 52.

One: “I’ve become really good friends with [Rabbi Creditor]. I like hanging out with him and I thought it would be really cool to study with him,” Kornbluth says in an interview preceding his bar mitzvah this summer.

Two: “I tell autobiographical stories for a living, and having this experience as part of my life as a story is intriguing.”

Three: “I’m tickled by the idea of becoming a grown-up eventually. I’m deteriorating enough to be a grown-up, but in other ways I’m just a kid. I’m doing other grown-up things this year, too, like getting my driver’s license.”

It may sound like the start of some late-night monologue, but Kornbluth, who lives in Berkeley with his wife and son, doesn’t mean to be flip. “I’m not doing this just to be cute,” he says. “There are clichés in being Jewish, a man, a husband, a father, but there are also complexities in each of these things. For me, if being a neurotic Jewish shlemiel is part of my identity, I want to understand it. I’m all for jokes about foreskin, but if that’s the end of [what it means to be a Jew], all that history and all that time suffering, it just doesn’t seem moral to me to call myself a Jew.”

Kornbluth’s parents were Jewish Communists who never went to temple. His father celebrated Christmas because it was the “birthday of a really great revolutionary Jew,” and insisted that his son would some day lead the Communist revolution in the United States.

A bar mitzvah, needless to say, “wasn’t even talked about,” says Kornbluth. Hearing of his cousins’ b’not mitzvah in the ’70s, he remembers thinking, “Oh, how quaint,” as if the tradition would die out in just a few years.

Kornbluth began studying with Creditor in 2008. He didn’t seek out the rabbi for instruction; they met while Kornbluth was researching a commissioned show, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?

Kornbluth was—and to a certain degree still is—“squeamish about his own inclusion among the Chosen People,” as one theater reviewer noted. (In Andy Warhol, Kornbluth paraphrased a quip by British humorist Jonathan Miller: “I’m not a Jew. I’m Jew-ish.”)

But the pair hit it off—and not just because the rabbi was “really cool.” For Kornbluth, a lifelong atheist, Creditor finally offered an “in” to Judaism. “For this rabbi, who is very pious, his God is not a ‘being’—not a bearded guy in the sky,” says Kornbluth. “That this is acceptable, that a rabbi could have this idea, it opened an option for me. It opened up this whole story, the Jewish story.”

Kornbluth began attending temple in 2009 and was surprised, he says, that he didn’t feel out of place. He likens his experience to that of a fan of ’80s rock hearing the blues for the first time. “It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s where that came from.’ This coming together as a community to find meaning in your life, to find your purpose, something that pushes humanity forward—it reminded me a lot of how I was raised.”

Kornbluth became a bar mitzvah on July 18 on a kibbutz in Israel’s Negev desert. He was accompanied by about 20 people, including his wife and son, the rabbi and his family, and other congregants who wanted to show their support.

“For me, it’s very appropriate that it’s happening now, at 52—a multiple of 13, I’d like to note,” says Kornbluth. “I don’t know what it would have been like at 13, but now I’m choosing it, studying it, I’m joyously immersed in it. I’ve always seen myself as my father’s son. I’ve always identified myself as a child of Commies. In this way now, with a bar mitzvah, I am choosing to say who I am, myself.”

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Some 88 years before Ilana DeBare stood before a crowd of supporting, loving family and friends at Temple Sinai, 12-year-old Judith Kaplan stepped up to the bima of another synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City, and shocked an entire congregation. Kaplan, daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, is recorded as the first American bat mitzvah.

According to the American Jewish Historical Society, people were slow to follow in Kaplan’s footsteps—in the 1950s, 20 years later, just one-third of Conservative and Reform synagogues were celebrating b’not mitzvah—but today, the practice is near universal. Even some modern Orthodox congregations have adopted it, according to the historical society, as a means of marking “the passage from Jewish girlhood to Jewish womanhood.”

Following that logic, Ilana DeBare “became a woman” this past February. Her sister-in-law, Esther Rogers, became a woman three months later. The members of DeBare’s Temple Sinai study group—Sydney Firestone, Jane Simon, and Karen Tanner—became women in their 50s and 60s.

And all five women, if you ask them, will tell you the exact same thing: Becoming a bat mitzvah has nothing to do with being a woman and everything to do with being part of a community.

“It wasn’t so much a change in my female identity,” says Simon, a 14-year Oakland resident who grew up in a secular household in Westchester, N.Y. “It was more about being a part of a community and a tradition.”

When Simon’s son, Nate, was in sixth grade, she and her husband decided they should join a temple so he could become a bar mitzvah. “I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I felt it was important,” says Simon, a preschool teacher and early childhood educator at Mills College. In the process of preparing her son, she figured she “may as well walk the walk,” began attending services—and on Dec. 10, 2010, became a bat mitzvah.

“The whole family has gone from a general idea of being Jewish to realizing more fully our ties to the community and ties to the past,” she says. “It felt like something was uncovered—I got really into Israeli folk dance for a while, and I joined the chorus. I was like, these are the dances and songs of my people! It was like, ‘Okay, I’m in.’”

Rogers, unlike Simon, did attend Hebrew school as a child, but stopped before she became a bat mitzvah at 13. At the time, she didn’t think it was a big deal. “As a child, I didn’t enjoy [Hebrew school] and I didn’t think it was a loss when my parents pulled me out of classes,” she says. “But as I got older, I saw that it was.”

Rogers continued to be involved in the community and maintained what traditions she could when she married and gave birth to two sons, who are now 10 and 12 years old. “My family was going regularly to Saturday morning service, but I felt I didn’t really understand it,” she says. “I wanted to understand and follow along.”

Rogers says the idea of becoming an adult bat mitzvah was always in the back of her mind, but it wasn’t until her eldest son approached bar mitzvah age that she gave it serious thought. “I wanted to be able to read the Torah at his bar mitzvah,” she says. “Every three years, the rabbi [at Temple Beth Abraham] offers a class for adults. I realized it was my last chance to enroll before my son turned 13.”

The class, which ran from September 2009 to May 2010, started off with about 20 people, ranging in age from their 30s to their late 60s. Committing to the process, they all attempted to put a fear of public speaking—in Hebrew—out of their minds in pursuit of what Rogers calls “a shared past.”

In May 2010, 12 of the original class members (only two of them men) completed their studies. And over Memorial Day weekend, Rogers became a bat mitzvah.

“It was a beautiful, sunny day,” she remembers. “I walked the mile and a half to the synagogue on my own. I felt very grateful and excited and proud that I stuck with it.”

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Tanner had a similar “now or never” moment when she made the decision to become a bat mitzvah. Raised Reform by Orthodox parents in Erie, Penn., she was the youngest of three children. Her older brother had a bar mitzvah and her sister a bat mitzvah. But when her turn came, she says, “I was so nervous. I was going to do it with a friend. Then she bombed out and I was too scared and too shy to do it by myself. My parents didn’t push me, though I kind of wished they had.”

Forty-five years later, Tanner found herself faced with a decision.

“Quite candidly, my friends and family were dying. My parents died,” she says, her voice breaking as she stifles tears, “and they didn’t get to see me do this. Some close friends of mine got cancer. This bat mitzvah was on my bucket list, and I just didn’t want to put it off any longer.”

After six months of “fast-track” studying, Tanner became a bat mitzvah.

“As adults we don’t have that many occasions to make statements about ourselves to the world,” says Tanner. “We have careers”—Tanner works for the Children’s Hospital & Research Center, Oakland, coordinating programs for infants and toddlers with special needs—“and children and spouses. Not to sound selfish, but this was about me. A chance to say, ‘This is who I am’ and to show my gratitude, to say thank you to everyone for being there for me . . . For me this was about taking a leap of faith. That I can do this and it will be better than all right—it will be fabulous.”

Whereas Tanner chose not to become a bat mitzvah at age 13, her older study group buddy, Firestone, never had the option. “I was really connected to Judaism, but I was 13 at a time that predated when girls could become bat mitzvahs,” says Firestone, now 61. “My father grew up Orthodox and we were raised Conservative. My brother had a bar mitzvah. But it didn’t occur to anyone to have a bat mitzvah for me, and it didn’t occur to me to ask for one.”

After Firestone started a family of her own, she and her husband—who, conversely, came from a secular Jewish family but had become a bar mitzvah at 13—decided to give their daughters a Jewish education that involved Hebrew school and, yes, b’not mitzvah.

“The person in my family who grew up with more of a religious background was me—but the only person in the family who didn’t have that celebration was me!” she exclaims. “The idea of having one was percolating for a while.”

But, as so often happens, life got in the way of her dream. Firestone’s husband passed away in 2001, leaving her a widowed single mother of two girls. She returned to work as a forensic industry consultant to support them. Pursuing a bat mitzvah wasn’t high on the priority list at that point.

However, after her daughters grew up and went off to college, Firestone approached Temple Sinai’s Rabbi Chester and signed up for private tutorials with him, DeBare, Tanner, and Simon. “I was the oldest of the group,” she says. But her age didn’t stand in her way. “A bar or bat mitzvah may have a different meaning when you’re 13, 60, or 80”—Firestone’s uncle was, in fact, 80 when he became a bar mitzvah, 20 years ago—“but what’s important is it does have meaning,” says Firestone, now retired.

“I don’t see this as a female identity thing. And I don’t feel ‘more Jewish,’ though I do have a better understanding of what it means to be a Jew . . . It’s not so much a rite of passage; it’s more like, now I’m in the club.”

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In her d’var Torah sermon, DeBare spoke, in part, about the role that her blog, Midlife Bat Mitzvah, played in deepening her understanding of Judaism and opening online conversations with readers about “issues like God, Torah, and my incredibly cute cat.”

Afterward, she said that even though the service was over, she planned to keep going with her blog, “even after we’ve all gone home today and the caterers have cleaned up the last bit of cream cheese. You don’t stop being a bat mitzvah after the ceremony and you don’t stop being ‘midlife’ until . . . um, when, I don’t know . . .”

DeBare has stuck to her word: She continues to blog on a regular basis and this October will chant at the congregation’s Yom Kippur service in front of 3,000 people. DeBare’s sister-in-law, Esther Rogers, likewise has plans to put her new Hebrew skills to use at her son’s bar mitzvah in 2012.

“A bar or bat mitzvah is not a one-time-now-it’s-over event,” DeBare says. “These are lifelong skills, and a lifelong obligation.”

Kornbluth is less certain about the role his bar mitzvah preparation will continue to play in his life. “In a lot of ways, I’m a serial dilettante,” he admits. His work projects have forced him to delve head-on into a variety of complicated topics, to become an expert on everything from Andy Warhol and Benjamin Franklin (he is a self-proclaimed Franklin lookalike) to federal tax law—and now, as he puts it, “Jewish stuff.”

“The big question for me is: 10 years from now, will this be the time I learned about Jewish stuff and then something else? Or will this be ‘where it began’? I hope it’s the latter, but I don’t know.”

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Maggie Fazeli Fard is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She previously worked as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey, has contributed reporting to The New York Times, and now writes for The Washington Post. (You can see her work at PostLocal.com.) This is her fourth story for The Monthly.