Moishe Holleb requests the pleasure of your company at his bar mitsve

Formerly scheduled for:
9:30am 18 April 2026 / 1 Iyar 5786
Brooklyn, NY

Due to a series of difficult circumstances, I'm cancelling my bar mitsve.

In the last two months, I have suffered the death of a close friend who died much too young, a loss of income, health problems, and unexpected precarity with my housing. These stresses have made planning and preparation difficult, but more importantly I do not wish to celebrate—I'm bitter. I don't feel like studying Torah or doing mitsves or going to shul. I'm not davening or keeping shabos. In my despair, I haven't turned toward Yiddishkeyt but away from it. My current attitude—an aversion to religious participation, publicly and privately—makes me unfit to lead any aspect of community ritual.

It would be inappropriate to ask you to celebrate my commitment to my Jewish obligations while that commitment is faltering. I do not know if I will attempt to reschedule. I apologize sincerely for any inconvenience caused by the change of plans.

The bar mitsve

The purpose of a bar/bat/b'nei mitsve celebration is to welcome someone into the religious-cultural Jewish community, with all the privileges and ritual obligations of adulthood. The b' mitsve spends years studying Torah—developing learned opinions on the text, learning to leyen, and preparing themselves to accept the responsibilities of community participation.

As a young person I didn't have a bar mitsve. It's been my pleasure and burden to only start studying Torah in adulthood: I've learned to daven, to hold by orthodox standards of halakha, to reject orthodox standards of halakha, to leyen, to host shabos dinners, to lead services, and to write Torah commentary. With the help of other trans teachers, I feel that I've reached a level of Jewish competency comparable to a teenager and I want to celebrate this lifecycle event with you.

I'm turning 37, not 13, but this is my bar mitsve: hard-won, a little overdue, and presented with a lot of simkha (joy/party).