At the second JOFA conference I gave the closing speech. It began with “Six weeks ago I a gave birth to a daughter. She came into a world so very different from the one I came into.” And she did. A few weeks ago, that daughter celebrated her bat mitzvah. The bat mitzvah she celebrated was so very different from the one I did, 36 years ago. She leined the parsha and the haftorah at a partnership minyan. I had an aliya. She wore a tallit. She completed seder nezikim and made a siyyum.   My “bat mitzvah” was a picnic lunch with three friends.

Actually, her bat mitzvah looked an awful lot like my brothers’ bar mitzvahs.

What a different world we inhabit today. And how lucky she is – to make her way in this “whole new world” of incredible opportunity for girls and women.   Of course, she and her peers will still have their own challenges ahead of them.  I often wonder how she will react when she hits her own  “brick walls,” but something tells me that she will be okay. We’ve given these girls the strength and confidence and learning they need. We’ve given them the tools to make their own way through the complicated labyrinth we call Orthodox Judaism. They’ll create their own pathways… and then perhaps we’ll be the ones to follow.