45 Bar and Bat Mitzvah Messages

Write about the work, not the occasion

The Torah portion is called the parashah, and the one a kid gets is fixed by the week their birthday falls in. They have been living inside those verses since roughly the previous autumn. Many also give a d'var Torah, a short teaching on what the portion says and why it bothers them or moves them, and they wrote it themselves, badly at first, over several drafts, with an adult sitting across the table asking what they actually meant.

If your card names the portion, or quotes one sentence of the d'var back at them, you have written the best card on the table. Not because you write well. Because of the arithmetic: out of sixty cards, maybe two will prove the writer was listening, and a thirteen-year-old can sort them into those two piles in about four seconds.

Two things to stop writing. The first is 'today you are a man', which the kid will have heard eleven times before the soup and which misses what the day is for anyway. Becoming bar or bat mitzvah means being responsible for your own observance and being counted as an adult in the community. It is an obligation, not a growth spurt. Retire the line. The second is the generic future: bright things ahead, the world is yours, cannot wait to see what you do next. They cannot use any of that. They can use 'I watched you'. It is the same rule that makes congratulations on an achievement land or not land: name the thing, then name the part you saw.

And the party comes second. Always.

One more reason to slow down over the sentence. This card survives. A card written to somebody at thirteen goes in a drawer and is still in that drawer at thirty, which is not true of the card you will write them at twenty-two or forty. If you are choosing between a printed blessing and one true sentence in your own handwriting, that is not really a choice.

From a parent

• You have been up at six on Sundays since last September for this, and you never once made it my problem. I noticed every week.
• Watching from four rows back was the proudest and most useless I have ever felt. There was nothing left for me to do up there. You had it.
• Your parashah was [portion], and I will be thinking about the line you built your d'var around for the rest of my life, because you found something in it I have read straight past since I was your age.
• You were shaking beforehand. I saw. You went up anyway.
• I still have the practice recording your tutor sent in October, the one where you get the same word wrong six times and then laugh at yourself. It is not going anywhere.
• What you carry from here is yours to decide now, and that is what today actually handed you. I am not going to pretend that part is easy, or that I will be good at it.

From a grandparent

• I have sat in that room for your mother's and for your uncle's, and now for yours. Today was the best of the three, and at my age I am allowed to say so.
• Mazel tov. Your grandfather would have talked about this for a solid year.
• I could not follow all of it at your speed. I did not need to. I could hear that you had done the work.
• When I was twelve, nobody in our shul asked the girls to read anything at all. I sat there on Saturday watching you and had to take my glasses off for a minute.
• You read beautifully, you handled the part that went wrong better than I would have, and I am proud of you. That is the whole card.
• Keep this one somewhere. I am eighty-two and I still have the card my uncle wrote me for mine, and his handwriting is the only piece of him I have left.

From an aunt, uncle, or close family friend

I watched a kid called Eli lose his place about two thirds of the way through his portion, in a sanctuary in Dayton that holds maybe a hundred and forty people, and the room did the thing where everyone quietly decides to look at their shoes. The man standing beside him at the reading desk said the next word under his breath. Eli went back a phrase, took the whole sentence again, and finished. There is no applause for that part. In the card I wrote that he went back a phrase and kept going, and that I would think about it the next time I lost my place in front of people who were paying attention. He is twenty-six now. He brought it up at his sister's wedding.

• I am not going to pretend I understood every word. I understood that you did, and that nobody else in the room could have done it.
• You chose a hard portion and you did not take the easy way out of it in your d'var. That is an adult thing to do and I want it written down somewhere.
• Mazel tov to you, and to your parents, who I have watched drive you to Wednesday lessons in weather that should have cancelled them.
• The bit where you stopped, breathed, and started the sentence again. That is the part I will be telling people about.
• You have been correcting me at dinner since you were six. Today you got to do it in front of a congregation.

From a sibling

'I have been listening to that through a wall since March.' That is a real card, and it is better than anything a shop will sell you.

• I have listened to you practise through a wall since March and I only threw one thing. You were incredible. Mazel tov.
• You are still not getting my room.
• Everyone said you would be nervous, and you were, and you did it anyway, which is a much better story than not being nervous.
• I have to do this in two years and you have made the bar annoyingly high. Thanks a lot.

From a friend the same age

Everything above says the party comes second. For a thirteen-year-old writing to another thirteen-year-old, I do not think that is true. The reception is the part you actually shared with them, and a card about the dancing, from the friend who was on the floor next to them, is the card that ends up taped inside a wardrobe door. So the rule at the top of this page is wrong for exactly one group of people, and it happens to be the group who will write the most cards. I have not worked out what to do about that.

• Mazel tov. You were unreal up there and your party was better than mine, which I resent.
• I could not have done that in English.
• You practised at my house that time, got it wrong twice, got it right, and then we ate all the crisps. Look at you now.
• You have been my friend since second grade and today you were the most impressive person in a room full of adults.
• Sorry for laughing at the thing with the microphone. Seriously though, mazel tov.

From the teacher or tutor who prepared them

You are the only person writing who knows what the first week sounded like. Use it. A teacher's card is worth more when it names the distance travelled rather than the destination, which is the same instinct behind a good message from a teacher and behind naming the actual subject when you write to someone about passing an exam.

• In October you could not get through the first three verses without stopping. On Saturday you did the whole thing and fixed your own mistake in real time. I am one of the few people who knows how far that is.
• You asked me a question in week five that I did not have a good answer for. I still do not. Come back to me when you are thirty.
• You worked. Most do not, and I have taught enough of them to say so.
• What you wrote about [portion] in your d'var was yours and not mine, and that is exactly the point where my job ends.
• Mazel tov. You have set a standard that my next student is not going to enjoy hearing about.

If you are not Jewish and you are not sure what is appropriate

Mazel tov is the standard congratulation and you can write it. It is not a phrase you have to have earned, and nobody will find it odd coming from you. Beyond that you do not need any Hebrew at all. A card in your own English is better than a transliterated phrase you found on a website and could not pronounce if asked. Do not write anything that treats the day as an interesting custom you enjoyed observing, and do not draw a comparison to your own tradition unless you are close enough to the family that you already talk that way. Do not write 'today you are a man'.

If you were at the service and could not follow it, say so plainly and then say what you could tell anyway, because you could tell plenty. You could tell the kid was steady. You could tell the room was proud. You could see the parents' faces. Nobody expects a guest to have followed the Hebrew, and everybody notices a guest who paid attention to the person doing the reading.

If you were not there, do not write as though you were. 'I hear you have been working on this since last year and I am genuinely impressed' is honest and lands completely fine. The same instinct applies to any card you write for someone else's religious occasion, which is more or less the whole argument in our page on Eid wishes: warmth plus specificity, no borrowed liturgy.

• Mazel tov. I did not follow the Hebrew, but I could see how much of it you were carrying, and you carried it well.
• Your mum has been telling us about your practising for months. Now I understand why.
• It was a privilege to be there on Saturday. Thank you for having me.
• I have no idea how anyone memorises that much of anything at thirteen. I lose my car keys between the front door and the kitchen.
• Congratulations on today, and on the year of work behind it. Both of those, separately.
• I did not know quite what to expect, and I left still thinking about what you said about [portion]. Thank you for that.
• Mazel tov to the whole family. You have all very clearly earned lunch.

A workplace card for a colleague whose child is celebrating

• Mazel tov to Miriam and to all of you. I hope Saturday was everything you have been building towards.
• We have watched you leave at four on Tuesdays for a year without asking why. Now we know. Congratulations to her.
• Congratulations to your daughter and to you. Take Monday off, seriously.
• Mazel tov. Tell Ben that the finance team is impressed and slightly intimidated.

Short lines for a group card

On a shared card, the risk is forty variations of 'mazel tov!' in different handwriting. Ask the organiser to tell people to name one thing they saw, even if it is four words. If you are collecting signatures from relatives across three time zones, a group card with multiple signatures holds them all in one place, and you can start one and send the link round before the weekend.

• Mazel tov, and well done on the actual reading.
• You worked for this and it showed from the back row.
• Proud of you. Everyone at this end of the table is.

The envelope, the money, and whether to mention the party

Money is a normal gift here, and multiples of eighteen are the convention, because the Hebrew letters that spell chai, meaning life, add up to eighteen. So thirty-six, fifty-four, a hundred and eighty. Take whatever your budget and your closeness to the family would have suggested anyway and round it to a multiple of eighteen. Nobody is auditing this. It is simply a nice thing that gets noticed.

On the envelope, the kid's name, spelled right. Check the invitation rather than guessing, especially if they used a Hebrew name for the day that is not the name you call them at barbecues. Inside: mazel tov, then your sentences, then your own name in full, not just your first name. In eighteen years they will read this without the memory of who was sitting next to them.

Now the party. Mention it. Just second. The reception is the part they will replay with their friends for a month, and pretending it does not matter is its own kind of stiff. Two lines about what they did on the bimah, one line about the room going off later. That order, every time.

Write it before you get there, not at the table with a borrowed pen while the salad is going round. Nobody has ever written their best sentence standing next to a stack of place cards.