A Fitting Bar Mitzvah

Sammy is nearly 13 and travels downtown to Grand Street with his Uncle Sol and Aunt Rivka to buy a suit for his coming Bar Mitzvah celebration. There he finds in Mr. Levy's shop a pin-striped suit he loves. Sammy can't wait to get back home, where his friends are playing baseball, but Uncle Sol delays the return. They stop to visit the sofer, or scribe, who is painstakingly copying Hebrew on tiny parchment scrolls that will go into Sammy's tefillin, prayer phylacteries. Inside the little wooden boxes he will bind to his head and arm will be scrolls containing portions of Jewish sacred texts that Sammy would wear to pray. Sammy can't believe how small and perfect the Hebrew lettering is, or the quill pen, taken from a kosher bird, the sofer used to write. The scribe counts the words in the Torah, to pass to each new generation, Uncle Sol explains. When Sammy wears his tefillin on his Bar Mitzvah, it suddenly all makes sense. They bind him together in prayer with all the generations that came before, making him feel that his Torah study will count, too. This book gives a fun introduction to ideas surround ing Jewish coming of age.