Rabbi Steinsatz said:
Our young people are looking to things spiritual, to things meaningful.
Some of them, sometimes, almost by mistake, look toward Judaism.
I think that most of them don’t know that among those gates to inner life and to religion there is also a Jewish gate.
For so many of our people, this gate, I suppose from the bar mitzvah on, is closed, because they think that the bar mitzvah is the occasion on which a person formally announces that he is no longer interested in being Jewish.
Therefore, they make it into such a big happening.
For many children this is a sign that Judaism is not interesting, that Judaism doesn’t have anything to offer.
Luckily, there are some who find their way to Judaism.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz