My first Shabbat celebration and Bat Mitzvah

Leon's family came to pick me up to join their Shabbath service in the morning. The congregation members are mostly from Russia so the service was bilingual - Hebrew and Russian. 

Sing in whatever language you can read!

Jewish worship includes joyful dance of young and old - all are welcome. 

Today was a special service because one of the girls in the congregation had Bat Mitzvah (see this for more info). We see the traditional event of Bar Mitzvah happening in Jesus's life (Luke 2:42). The modern Judaism included girls in the tradition, so this is now called Bar or Bat Mitzvah, which means Sons or Daughters of Commandments. This is a ceremony of coming of an age: to be responsible directly before God for their understanding of Torah, the law and the commandments. In some protestant traditions like Presbyterian or Lutheran church, it is like 'confirmation' children, who received infant baptism, do to confirm their own faith before God at the age of 13 or 14.

It was a great opportunity for me to learn about the faith tradition of Messianic congregations. Today's sermon was on the life and death of Sarah, the mother of faith, in Genesis 23, from which the girl was reading in Hebrew.

The girl is reading the Torah before the Rabbi and an elder.

Explaining what she read in Hebrew (the Rabbi translating to Russian for the older members of the congregation)

At the end of the presentation of her understanding of the Bible, she included her own thoughts quoting from 1 John (a passage from the New Testament!). What a powerful moment to witness to the faith of the NT-beliving and Messiah-following Jews!  

Elder holding the Torah after the reading.

Mother's testimony of reading a poem about the birth of the girl 12 years ago. 

Giving thanks to the teachers of Shabbath School (like a sunday school).

The whole congregation watching a powerpoint presentation
of the girl's memory of special moments in the 12 years of her life.

Whenever I am in the cultures that care less about 'clock-time' but go with the flow of life events, I find people enjoy themselves in the long hours of worship and fellowship as a congregational life. I feel some mystical sense of rest and relief that I don't have to look at the clock. The cultures where I am from (Korea and Canada) have long lost this culture but we live by the cruel punctuality of counting seconds, minutes, and hours. What is sad to me is that often people's values and identities are determined by the amount of money they can make in these terms! 

With my cultural glasses on I counted the time on what I saw today: we spent nearly an hour, close to one half of the whole worship time to celebrate a girl who was coming of an age and to confirm her faith before God as an independent believer in the presence of the whole congregation. This does not happen where I come from. We say with our mouths that children are special, but we do not live that out in our time commitment. 

Here today I witnessed how Jewish tradition values children and their education without a word being told about it. An ancient wisdom from Africa or some distant land I heard before rang true today for me: It takes the whole village to raise a child.

Russian Jewish celebration never ends without feast! 

My first Shabbath in Israel ended as the Sun went down a little before 5 o'clock in the evening. As we were driving home the road was still quiet and empty. Leon told me that Sunday is very different, much heavier traffic everywhere as people go back to their work on the first work day of the week. I am eager to see people working in the city known for its labourers and industrious people!