Bar and bat mitzvah בר מצווה ובת מצווה

"At thirteen, to the commandments," says the Mishnah in its list of the ages of man. Until that day the father answers for the child and teaches him; from that day he answers for himself, and his oath is an oath, his testimony testimony, and he counts in the quorum. For a girl the same change comes a year earlier, at twelve.

There is no ceremony in the Talmud. No call to the Torah, no speech, no meal—the sages describe none of it, because there is nothing to describe: the age comes of itself. The ceremony appears late, in the Ashkenazi communities of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries: the boy is called to the Torah on the next Sabbath, the father says the blessing "blessed is He who has freed me from the punishment due for this one"—taken from a midrash—and a meal is made. The Rema records in the Shulchan Aruch that this meal is a meal of a commandment, as at a wedding.

Why this must be understood rightly. Custom here is not the younger brother of law: it is the way a community marks what the law only names. But the two must not be confused. A boy becomes bound by the commandments on his birthday, not on the Sabbath he is called up, and not when the guests assemble. The bat mitzvah as a celebration is younger still—it spreads only in the last century and a half.