My favorite moment at our Shir Shalom Bnei Mitzvah celebrations is the one when the child comes up for his or her own blessing before and after the Torah. This is the one that fully cements them as a Jewish adult and where they will be called up for the very first time by their Jewish name.
To add a little pomp and circumstance, we instruct the congregation to rise and for everyone to put their hand into a ball and on my signal to shout out the Hebrew word for strength, “Chazak” for a boy, and “Chizki” for a girl. Then their tutor and teacher Harvey Horowitz calls them up officially to the Torah and we, collectively, thrust our fists as we recite the magic word.
Strength, it seems, is something that can be passed on from one person to the next like a baton in a relay race. But, unlike with a baton, we do not lose any of our own strength when we hand it off, but, in fact, grow stronger ourselves. Strength, like laughter, is contagious. This is something the rabbis understood well and built it into many of the actions we take in synagogue services. Yasher Koah, “may your strength be enlarged,” we say to anyone who has come up for an honor, and, Chazak, Chazak, V’Nitchazeki, “strong, stronger, may we be strengthened,” we say at the conclusion of any book of the Torah, like when we conclude Leviticus this week.
For evidence of this, look no further than this week’s Bar Mitzvah, Charlie Levin, who was diagnosed with a rare heart condition called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome when he was just a few months old. At that time, it was unclear whether he would even make it. The collective strength of his amazing family, his parents Meredith and Ken, siblings Parker and Archie, and the community that surrounded him, not to mention the amazing medical team at Strong Memorial, helped Charlie not only survive, but thrive.
On Shabbat morning, he will stand in front of the Torah with the encouragement of his family and community and bless and read from our ancient text. In the process, we will all be given strength for our own journeys. May he and all of us go from strength to strength to strength.