Most life transitions happen rather abruptly, though they may be building up for some time. Probably a tipping-point phenomenon, where small quantitative changes suddenly add up to something qualitatively different. The first such transition comes about the age of three months. This is when babies start to smile, but smiling is really just one aspect of a much wider phenomenon. It is at this stage that babies begin to interact with their environment (other than the reflexive nursing instinct) - it's at this point that parenting starts being fun. (My wife disagrees with me on this point, but agrees that there's an order-of-magnitude change at three months.) It's no coincidence that Yokheved waited three months before sending her son Moses into Pharaoh's daughter's arms.
וַתַּהַר הָאִשָּׁה וַתֵּלֶד בֵּן
וַתֵּרֶא אֹתוֹ כִּי טוֹב הוּא וַתִּצְפְּנֵהוּ שְׁלשָׁה יְרָחִים:
וְלֹא יָכְלָה עוֹד הַצְּפִינוֹ וַתִּקַּח לוֹ תֵּבַת גֹּמֶא
וַתַּחְמְרָה בַחֵמָר וּבַזָּפֶת וַתָּשֶׂם בָּהּ אֶת הַיֶּלֶד
וַתָּשֶׂם בַּסּוּף עַל שְׂפַת הַיְאֹר:
Vatahar ha'isha vateled ben
Vatere' oto ki tov hu vatisp'nehu shlosha y'rahim
V'lo' yakhla `od haspino vatiqah lo tevat gome'
Vatahm'ra vahemar uvazafet vatasem bah et hayeled
Vatasem basuf `al sfat hay'or
And the woman conceived and gave birth to a son
And she saw that he was good and she hid him for three months
And when she couldn't hide him any longer she took for him a box of rushes
And she daubed it with clay and tar and put the child in it
And put it in the reeds at the edge of the river
Exodus 2:2-3
The next transition occurs at about one year, when the child begins walking and talking. Suddenly he begins not only interacting with the environment, but doing that most human of all activities: communicating. The third transition occurs at about three years, when the child begins to understand the passage of time, and not unrelated: begins to be able to reason. And that, in the Jewish way of thinking, means it's time to start to formal learning.
There is a tradition followed by many Jews not to cut the hair of their sons until they are three years old. Some time on or shortly after their third birthday they get their first haircut. Israelis and Sephardic Jews call this a halaqa (חלקה), from the word halaq (חלק) - smooth, unadorned. Ashkenazi Jews often use the Yiddish word: upsherin - cognate/translation: shear off.
My son's halaqa was last night. It wasn't that big a deal, we mostly invited neighbors, with only a very few friends and relatives coming from outside a 5-minute-walk radius. Nevertheless they filled the house. The men took turns giving my son a brakha (ברכה) - blessing, and snipping off a lock of his hair. We intended to finish off the job then and there, but our designated barber wasn't feeling well and the boy of honor was falling asleep (serving of the cake woke him up pretty fast), so we put it off until this morning.
Today they made a birthday party for my son in school, and admired his haircut. At 12 o'clock I went in and the school rabbi (not his usual teacher) came down and gave him is first "official" lesson. The rabbi showed my son a plaque of the Hebrew alphabet on which the letters had been traced over in honey. One by one he introduced each of the letters and had my son pronounce it. As he introduced them, he pointed out their distinguishing features ("see, the gimel has legs and she's walking", "the lamed holds her head high up", "the mem has a sister mem-sofit"). Then he let him lick off the honey.
I think that my son really connected with this rite of passage. There's a way in which the formative experience of a boy is dramatically different from that of a girl. Babies are born to identify with their mothers. The feeling of "I am my mother and my mother is me" is our first feeling of identification: it is from this point that our tribal identity expands outward. In a girl this process, under normal circumstances, proceeds smoothly from birth throughout her life. But a boy switches his most fundamental sense of identification from his mother to his father. My observation is that it's a gradual process beginning at about the age of one, and finishing by the age of three. From here may it expand outward!
Posted by David Boxenhorn at January 10, 2005 09:55 PM