what is a rite of passage essay

25 Rite of Passage Examples

A rite of passage is a ritual or ceremony signifying an event in a person’s life indicating a new and different status, usually in reference to adolescence. It is a concept emergent from the academic field of anthropology (Tzanelli, 2007).

Rite of passage rituals are prevalent across different cultures and societies, marking significant moments such as birth, reaching puberty, marriage, or even death.

A rite of passage typically involves three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation (Van Gennep, 1977).

• Separation: The first step involves leaving behind a familiar and comfortable phase or condition (in the Jewish tradition, for instance, a Bar Mitzvah marks the separation from childhood into adulthood for boys at the age of 13).
• Liminality : Here, the individual experiences their lives from a broad perspective, detached from the specifics of their previous state (for example, in many university settings, the freshman orientation week serves as the liminality stage).
• Incorporation: The individual now assumes a new role in their society (for instance, after the convocation ceremony, a graduate is deemed ready to enter the professional sphere).

While as outsiders we may not fully comprehend the underlying importance of rites of passage within foreign cultures, for participants, these rites usher them into their new roles, forging their identities and facilitating societal harmony.

Rite of Passage Examples

1. bar and bat mitzvah.

Culture: Jewish

The Bar Mitzvah (for boys) and Bat Mitzvah (for girls) are significant rites of passage in Jewish culture marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. Upon reaching 13 years old for boys and 12 for girls, they are expected to observe the commandments of the Torah, participate fully in religious services, and assume moral and ethical responsibility for their actions. This rite of passage is celebrated with a synagogue ceremony, where the young person leads a religious service and reads from the Torah, followed by a celebratory meal with family and friends.

2. Quinceañera

Culture: Hispanic

The Quinceañera is a significant event in the Hispanic culture, marking a girl’s transition from childhood to womanhood at age 15. It’s a lavish celebration that serves to reaffirm religious faith, family, and community ties. The ceremony involves attending a mass where the girl receives blessings from the priest, followed by a grand party with music, dancing, and a feast.

3. Maasai Circumcision

Culture: Maasai (East Africa)

The Maasai people in East Africa have a rite of passage for boys transitioning into manhood known as Enkipaata, which involves circumcision. Performed without anesthetic, it tests the initiate’s courage and endurance, qualities deemed vital for a warrior. Following the ritual, the boys live in isolation for a few months, learning responsibilities and expectations related to adulthood.

4. Satere-Mawe Bullet Ant Initiation

Culture: Satere-Mawe (Brazil)

The Satere-Mawe tribe in Brazil has one of the most painful rites of passage to manhood. Boys as young as 12 must wear gloves filled with bullet ants (known for their extremely painful stings) for more than 10 minutes. This initiation symbolizes the young boys’ endurance, bravery, and readiness for adult tasks like hunting.

5. Seijin-no-Hi

Culture: Japanese

Seijin-no-Hi, also known as Coming of Age Day, is an annual ceremony in Japan celebrating all individuals who have turned 20 in the past year, marking their entry into adulthood. It’s a national holiday where newly recognized adults attend local city halls for speeches, receive gifts, and often visit shrines. The women wear a traditional outfit called furisode, while the men don a formal suit or traditional dress.

6. Sweet Sixteen

Culture: Western, predominantly United States.

A Sweet Sixteen party is a coming-of-age celebration for a teenager’s sixteenth birthday, marking a step closer to adulthood. In modern western culture, especially in the United States, these parties can range from small and intimate gatherings to large-scale events. The birthday girl is often fêted with gifts, and the event may include music, dancing, and a formal meal or buffet.

7. Walkabout

Culture: Indigenous Australian

In the Australian Aboriginal culture, adolescent boys undergo a ritual called Walkabout. This rite of passage requires the boy to live in the wilderness for up to six months, testing his survival skills and transiting him into manhood. It represents both a spiritual journey and a self-sufficient survival experience, marking the transition from boyhood to adulthood.

8. Confirmation

Culture: Christianity

Confirmation is a rite of initiation in many Christian churches, typically taking place in adolescence. The confirmed individuals affirm their faith and accept adult responsibilities within the church community. In Catholicism, the ceremony involves the bishop laying his hands on the confirmants, praying for the Holy Spirit’s outpouring, and anointing them with chrism.

9. Vision Quest

Culture: Native American

Traditional among Native American cultures, a Vision Quest is a rite of passage marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. This spiritual journey into the wilderness serves as a period of introspection and connection to ancestral spirits. The participants are expected to fast, pray, and form a relationship with the natural world.

10. Weddings

Culture: Global

Among the most universal rites of passage, a wedding is a ceremony marking the union of individuals in marriage. This event—varying significantly in customs, traditions, and symbols across cultures—represents the formal acceptance of the couple as a unit within their community. It’s marked by the exchange of vows, presentation of a gift (often rings), and a public pronouncement of marriage.

11. Baptisms

In Christian culture, baptism is a sacrament signalling initiation into the Christian Church. Infants or adults are either sprinkled with or immersed in holy water, symbolizing purification and admission to the Christian community. Depending on the denomination, baptism can represent the washing away of sin, rebirth, or confirmation of faith.

Culture: Predominantly United States

Prom is a semi-formal high school dance held towards the end of the last two years of high school, marking adolescent students’ transition towards adulthood. It has become a significant event in youths’ social lives where they get to dress up formally, experience a formal dinner, dance, and in some cases, vote for a Prom King and Queen. It is often seen as a rehearsal of sorts for future social occasions and engagements.

13. Genpuku

Culture: Japan

Genpuku was a historical rite of passage in feudal Japan for samurai aristocracy boy transitioning into adulthood. The boys, typically aged between 10 and 20, would receive adult clothes, a hairstyle, and a new adult name in a ceremony. The Genpuku signified that they were legally and socially independent and could marry, own property, and participate in warfare.

14. Sunrise Dance

Culture: Apache (North America)

The Sunrise Dance is a four-day ceremony marking an Apache girl’s transition into womanhood following her first menstruation. The girl performs an elaborate dance and enacts a series of tasks reflecting the story of the Changing Woman, an important deity in Apache lore.

15. Hamar Cow-Jumping

Culture: Hamar (Ethiopia)

The Hamar people in Ethiopia conduct a complex rite of passage for boys transitioning to manhood, involving bull-jumping. The boy must successfully run across the backs of several bulls without falling, witnessed by friends and family. On completion, he attains full membership in the adult Hamar community.

16. Upanayana

Culture: Hinduism (India)

In Hindu cultures, Upanayana marks a boy’s entrance into a spiritual life. Typically performed between ages 8 and 16, the ceremony involves the boy receiving a sacred thread, representing spiritual rebirth. After Upanayana, the boy is expected to regularly recite and meditate on Gayatri Mantra, a vital Sanskrit verse.

17. Rumspringa

Culture: Amish

Rumspringa, a term meaning ‘running around’ in Pennsylvania Dutch, is the Amish rite of passage for teenagers. During this period, adolescents are allowed to explore the outside world and make their decision whether to be baptized into the Amish church, or leave the community for a more modern lifestyle . It’s an essential process in the journey towards informed adult commitment in the Amish faith.

Culture: Krobo (Ghana)

The Dipo is a traditional Ghanaian ceremony held by the Krobo ethnic group marking a girl’s transition into womanhood. The rite involves various stages like seclusion, education about womanhood, and physical adornments, culminating in a public parade where the girls showcase their elegance and readiness for marriage.

19. Breeching

Culture: Western European

Historically in Western Europe, breeching was a significant rite of passage for boys aged between 4 and 8 years. This custom signified that boys were ready to don trousers or breeches rather than the gowns or dresses worn by both sexes in infancy. This change of clothing symbolized the boys’ progression towards adulthood and their readiness for more masculine responsibilities.

20. Arangetram

Culture: Indian Classical Dance

Arangetram, meaning ‘ascending the stage,’ is a notable event in the lives of Indian classical dancers. After several years of rigorous training, a dancer performs their first solo stage performance, showcasing their skill and dedication to the art form . While not a religious or biological rite of passage, it is a cultural ritual demarcating mastery over a crafting skill.

Culture: Bantu Africa (Gabon, the Republic of Congo)

In various Bantu cultures, the Okuyi mask ceremony is performed to honor deceased relatives, helping their spirits transition after death. It also symbolizes passage into a new existence after death. The dancer wearing the mask represents the spirit of the deceased, playing a significant role in easing the spiritual transition from living to ancestorhood.

22. Potlatch

Culture: Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast (America)

The Potlatch, a ceremonial feast well known among native peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, serves different functions, including the transmission of property and rights, marking important events like marriage, birth, and death. The socio-economic phenomenon of giving away or even destroying resources is meant to display a family’s wealth and status symbol.

23. Rumsasara

Culture: Buddhist (Sri Lanka)

In Sri Lanka, Rumsasara is a coming-of-age ceremony for girls reaching puberty, steeped in Buddhist traditions. The event encapsulates a range of processes, from seclusion and traditional medicinal practices to the significant ritual of bathing in clean water, signifying the girl’s passage to womanhood.

24. Graduation Ceremonies

Culture: Predominantly Western

A graduation ceremony occurs when students complete a phase of their education. It’s a public recognition of their academic achievement and transition into the next stage of their life, whether that’s further education or entry into the professional world. With the donning of a cap and gown, the graduate receives a diploma, often followed by celebrations with family and friends.

25. Retirement Parties

Retirement parties celebrate a person’s transition from their active working life to retirement. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the retiree’s career, acknowledge their contributions, and express wishes for a happy and fulfilling retired life. Often, these are filled with speeches, gifts, and festivities.

26. Citizenship Ceremonies

Citizenship ceremonies are solemn events marking the final step in the journey of becoming a citizen of a new country. The new citizen swears a pledge of allegiance, signifying their commitment to their new country and its values. The event often involve an official welcome by a government representative, and distribution of citizenship certificates.

The Importance of Rites of Passage

Rights of passage hold significant importance in society due to their role in marking important milestones and transitioning individuals into new phases of life (Forth, 2018).

They possess great cultural significance, often steeped in history and tradition . For instance, the Quinceañera in Mexico celebrating a girl’s 15th birthday and marking her passage into womanhood (Hill & Becker, 2008).

Rites of passage may also hold religious importance , such as Christening and First Communion in Christianity represent spiritual growth and acceptance into the religious community (Fogelin & Schiffer, 2015).

These rituals can serve as a physical and tangible representation of personal growth . The rite of passage provides a structured developmental process, guiding an individual forward (like a graduation ceremony indicates the completion of formal education and prompts the entry into the workforce).

In terms of psychological development , rites of passage could play an essential role by providing a framework to manage or cope with change. For example, the retirement party helps individuals transition from the working phase to leisure and limits possible feelings of sudden change.

Rites of passage also foster a communal bond . The shared experience during the ceremony can strengthen the sense of belonging and promote unity among members of the community (take the example of a wedding ceremony. Friends, family, and community members come together to celebrate and support the couple’s new phase of life).

Rites of passage are fundamental elements of our societal fabric, enhancing our personal and communal life by providing structure during times of change and growth. They connect the past with the present, the young with the old, and the individual with the community, fostering a harmonious co-existence. They act as a transition system that helps us navigate our growth and change within our respective societies. It’s an integral part of human culture – testifying our progress and growth, as well as our membership of a distinct cultural group.

Fogelin, L., & Schiffer, M. B. (2015). Rites of passage and other rituals in the life histories of objects.  Cambridge Archaeological Journal ,  25 (4), 815-827.

Forth, G. (2018). Rites of passage.  The international encyclopedia of anthropology , 1-7.

Hill, J., & Becker, P. D. (2008).  Life events and rites of passage . Omnigraphics.

Tzanelli, R. (2007). Rite of passage.  The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology .

Van Gennep, A. (1977). The Rites of Passage. Routledge Library Editions Anthropology and Ethnography . Translated by Vizedom, Monika B; Caffee, Gabrielle L (Paperback Reprint ed.). Hove, East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-7100-8744-7.

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13.4 Rituals of Transition and Conformity

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the characteristics of ritual.
• Describe how ritual reinforces social solidarity.
• Distinguish between the different types of ritual.
• Explain the social forces of liminality and communitas.
• Identify the stages of rites of passage.

The Varieties of Ritual Experience in Religion

Rituals , also called rites , are performative acts by which we carry out our religious beliefs, public and private. As sociologist Émile Durkheim noted, they follow a formal order or sequence, called a liturgical order ; are performed in a place that is set apart and sacred during the time of the performance; and are inherently social. Unlike idiosyncratic behaviors that an individual may practice on their own, rituals are learned and shared. They foster social solidarity and identity within a community of believers (this a focus of Durkheim’s). Even when performing a religious ritual alone, such as walking a labyrinth during meditation, the ritual itself, because it is learned as part of a larger body of religious practices, connects the individual to the larger community.

Rituals tend to have a common structure even though ritual and ritual performance can be quite variable. In his work Ritual (1993), West African writer and ritual scholar Malidoma Somé ([1993] 1997, 68) outlines the major stages of most ritual acts:

• Opening: “setting the stage” by designating the purpose of the ritual and gathering the human participants
• Invocation: calling upon the spirit world to join the group
• Dialogue: establishing an open connection/communication between participants and the spirit world
• Repetition: fixed sequences, prayers, and/or acts that are required to legitimize the ritual’s purpose
• Closure: a blessing or other form of official dismissal for both human and spirit participants

Even when rituals are scripted and parts are carefully read and followed, individual participation and collaboration will subtly change a ritual each time it is enacted or performed. Rituals are never exactly duplicated, and not all rituals serve the same purpose. Some are primarily performed to affirm, strengthen, and maintain solidarity within the group; some are social markers of life transformations for individuals, families, or groups; and others address healing and the need for renewal. There are many categories of ritual: commemoration feasts or rituals (e.g., Christmas or Hannukah), which are usually held over a calendrical cycle, usually a year; divinatory rites to find the causes of illness, ask for healing, or prophesy about the future, which usually occur on an as-needed basis; and rites of rebellion, in which social rules and norms may be inverted to emphasize their value within a society. Incwala, a ritual found among the Swazi , a group in southern Africa, is a national holiday during which many social rules are suspended or inverted, allowing women to take on men’s public roles and men to take on women’s household duties in a public farce. Among the Swazi, this ritual is understood to illustrate the value of different gender roles in society as well as the importance of social norms in reducing social disorder. In the United States, Halloween is also a rite of rebellion, one in which children go out at night to beg for candy from neighbors. Among the most common broad types of religious ritual, though, are rites of intensification, rites of passage, and rites of affliction.

Rites of Intensification

Called by various names, such as rites of affirmation and calendrical rites, rites of intensification are performed to affirm, strengthen, and maintain bonds of solidarity. Most of the repetitive religious services that are offered through churches, synagogues, and mosques are rites of intensification. These rituals tend to have a rather stable and repetitive structure that allows practitioners to follow along easily. If you attend or participant in any kind of repetitive daily, weekly, or monthly religious ritual, it is likely a rite of intensification. These rites define and indoctrinate individuals so that they identify as a religious community, even though there may be other ritual acts accompanying it. It is not unusual in state religions for these rites to create unity among believers across cultures and nation-states. A good example is the daily practice of Islamic prayer, or salat . Salat involves praying in the direction of the holy city of Mecca at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and evening every day, regardless of where the believer is located or even what they are doing. Salat establishes a direct relationship between the believer and God and affirms one’s membership in a global community of Muslims.

Rites of Passage

First identified by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1909, rites of passage mark social transformations in people’s lives and establish a change in social status within their communities. Associated most commonly with birth, puberty, marriage, and death, these rituals can be prolonged ceremonies during which the individual receives instruction and preparation for this change in their lives. Gennep noted that there are three stages in a rite of passage—separation, transition, and incorporation—and that during the transition stage, the individual must traverse a threshold ( limen in Latin) from their old social position or status to a new one.

• Separation (pre-limen). The separation phase is marked by detachment from one’s previous status. While the person or people involved may be physically separated and held in a special place, the separation normally occurs within daily life over a period of time and is always marked symbolically. Some examples of separation are the formal engagement of a couple with rings and a period of preparation for the upcoming marriage; the process of catechesis, or formal religious instruction, for young people planning to be baptized or confirmed in a Christian church; and wearing special clothing or colors while mourning the death of a family member.
• Transition (liminality). The transition phase is marked by an ambiguity of status and associated with instruction and teaching. This phase is usually restricted to the period in which an active and public ritual transformation is taking place. The person or people involved, already separated from their previous status and identity, are now transformed into a new status. This is the most active phase of a rite of passage. It is highly scripted and almost always involves teachers, guides, or mentors who usher the individuals through the proper steps to a new social status. Some examples of transition are the marriage ceremony itself, the actual baptism or confirmation ritual in the church, and the funeral service for a loved one.
• Incorporation (post-limen). The incorporation phase is marked by a formal public presentation of the person or people who have gone through the ritual. During incorporation, different symbols are used to express a new social status and identity. In this last stage, those going through the transformation begin to assume the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of their new social status. This might include changing their names, moving to a new location, or wearing different clothing. In many rites of passage, this is an extended period that can last from months to years.

Anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) discusses in detail the significance of liminality in rites of passage. During liminality, an individual is what Turner calls “betwixt and between” (95), without social status or standing, outside of the structure, and in transition from one social stage to another. It is a form of social death. Often, the individual will be dressed in uniform, unmarked clothing and follow behaviors associated with humility and anonymity in their culture. There is also an expectation of total obedience during the change of status, as the individual depends on ritual leaders (gatekeepers) to teach, coach, and mentor them through the passage. If there is a cohort of individuals participating in the rite of passage, such as an age grade going through puberty rites, the participants will share a strong sense of equality and social bonding among themselves, referred to as communitas . Through Turner’s research on the Ndembu of Zambia, anthropologists were better able to understand these common mechanisms of social change.

One example of a rite of passage among the Navajo of the southwestern United States is the Kinaaldá. The Kinaaldá is a traditional coming-of-age ceremony (a puberty rite) for young Navajo women that occurs shortly after a girl’s first menstrual cycle and involves her extended family and community (Carey 2010; Meza 2019). Typically, the ceremony lasts four days and occurs both inside a traditional Navajo house, called a hogan , and in the surrounding area, where the girl will periodically run to ensure that she has a strong and healthy life. At the beginning of the ceremony, as separation begins, the girl lies down and her family straightens her limbs and helps dress her and prepare her for the transition. During the days of seclusion, there are many different tasks as the girl is initiated into womanhood. On the third day, she and her mother will bake a corn cake called an alkaan , and then, led by a Navajo medicine man or woman, they will sing prayer songs all night until the sunrise. During the final stage of the Kinaaldá, in the morning of the fourth day, the mother washes her daughter’s hair and dries it with cornmeal (corn is a Navajo deity). The young woman will then take her last run toward the east, now followed by many young children, so that she might eventually become a loving mother whom her children will always follow. After the ceremony, she is reintroduced to her community as a woman and not a child; she is now considered a young adult.

Not all rites of passage are religious. There are also secular rites of passage, such as graduation or quinceañera, a celebratory birthday for 15-year-old girls in many Latin American communities. And sometimes the religious and the secular are intermingled, as in a marriage ceremony that is both civil and religious. Societies use both secular and religious rites of passage to mark changes in the life cycle of their members.

Rites of Affliction

Unlike rites of intensification and many rites of passage, rites of affliction are usually non-calendrical and unplanned. Normally classified as healing rituals or petitions for supernatural intervention, these rites seek remedy or compensation for the affliction. Whether directly through a shamanic journey or through the mediation of a religious leader, communities petition the spirits or deity for healing or a blessing. While illness and health in most Western societies are understood to be biomedical phenomena based on empirical evidence, in non-Western societies and in localized religious traditions across cultures, well-being is viewed as a relationship between body and soul and thus is believed to have a religious component.

While nonbelievers might refer to rites of affliction as superstition , a belief or practice that has no credible evidence for its efficacy, for believers, these religious rites allow them to plead for help and sometimes control the outcome of threatening life events. Rites of affliction, first described by vary greatly depending on the need. People may perform witchcraft and sorcery to determine the source of affliction, exorcism to remove the presence of an adverse spirit, or divination to identify the source of harm. Divination is a practice or test intended to gain understanding, guidance, or advice about an event or situation. There are literally hundreds of different methods of divination. Some examples include scapulimancy (burning the shoulder blade of a cow or antelope and reading a message in the burn pattern), tasseomancy (reading tea leaves at the bottom of a cup), oomancy (rubbing an egg over an area of illness or pain and then breaking it open to read a pattern), bibliomancy (randomly opening the Bible or another book and seeking a message in whatever passage is on that page), reading tarot cards, and checking astrological signs.

One common rite of affliction in the Christian tradition is the laying on of hands. This ritual appears in the Bible, used both as a means of conveying the Holy Spirit (Num. 27:15-23; Acts 8:14–19) and as an act of healing by Christ (Luke 4:40). Today, in many Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, congregations practice the ritual of laying on of hands. Believers place their hands on the shoulders or head of the congregant who seeks healing—whether from social, mental, or physical distress—in the belief that with fervent prayer and physical contact, the Holy Spirit can move from one individual to another to strengthen, heal, and anoint them with God’s grace. Sometimes the “helpers” stand face-to-face or bend over the individual seeking help. Sometimes believers walk behind the individual in need, who sits in a chair, and then lay hands on their shoulders and pray, either silently or aloud so that the afflicted individual can hear the prayer being offered. In these acts, the religious community pools its spiritual and social resources and encourages the afflicted member—a powerful antidote to illness no matter the faith tradition.

Although they are not exclusively associated with rites of affliction and are sometimes performed as acts of obedience, celebration, spiritual merit, enlightenment, or even penance, pilgrimage is often practiced as a rite to seek redress and healing. A sacred journey to a shrine or holy place, pilgrimage is practiced in many religions. Some of the most famous pilgrimages are the hajj, an Islamic pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia; the Christian pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, a site in France where Mary is believed to have appeared; and the Hindu pilgrimage to the River Ganges in India.

The hajj is one of the five pillars, or primary tenets, of Islam. For believers with the physical ability and financial means, completing the hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is essential to their faith. While the pilgrimage itself may occur at any time during the last three months of the Islamic calendar, the last five to six days of the 12th month are those on which the most significant rituals occur. Based on the lunar calendar, the hajj is a movable feast, meaning it is a celebration whose dates vary each year and will occur in different seasons over a cycle of years. Because the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, it does not coincide annually with the Gregorian calendar followed by most of the Western world today.

Historically, pilgrims arrived by walking, using the travel time and its accompanying struggles to focus on growing in their faith. Some individuals continue this traditional means of completing the hajj, but other devotees arrive by boat, bus, or plane, dedicating themselves to contemplation once they arrive. Mecca is an important symbolic place for Muslims because it was the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad. During the hajj ritual, the pilgrims will perform many faith acts, including circling the Ka’aba , a building at the center of the mosque representing the most sacred place, seven times clockwise to open the ritual; praying; running between the nearby hills of Safa and Marwah; clipping their hair; going east of Mecca to confess their sins and seek atonement; gathering pebbles to perform a symbolic stoning of the devil; buying sacrifice vouchers so that an animal will be sacrificed on their behalf; and then again circling the Ka’aba seven times, this time counterclockwise, to close the hajj.

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Rites of passage

Male and Female Poro Altar Figures ( Ndeo ), 19th–mid-20th century, Senufo peoples, Korhogo region, Bandama River region, Côte d’Ivoire, wood, pigment, 60.2 x 14 x 11.8cm ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art )

In many African societies, art plays an important role in various rites of passage throughout the cycle of life. These rituals mark an individual’s transition from one stage of life to another. The birth of a child, a youth’s coming of age, and the funeral of a respected elder are all events in which an individual undergoes a change of status. During these transitional periods, individuals are considered to be especially vulnerable to spiritual forces. Art objects are therefore created and employed to assist in the rite of passage and to reinforce community values.

The birth of a child is an important event, not only for a family but for society as well. Children ensure the continuity of a community, and therefore a woman’s ability to bear children inspires awe. Ideals of motherhood and nurturance are often expressed visually through figurative sculpture. Among the Senufo, for example, female figures pay homage to the important roles women play as founders of lineages and guardians of male initiates (example above). The importance of motherhood is symbolized by a gently swelling belly and lines of scarification radiating from the navel, considered the source of life. In other societies, such as the Bamana, figural sculptures are employed in ceremonies designed to assist women having difficulty conceiving (example below). They serve simultaneously as a point of contact for spiritual intercession and as a visual reminder of physical and moral ideals.

Mother and Child, 15th–20th century, Mali, Bougouni or Dioila region, Bamana peoples, wood, 123.5 x 36.6 x 36.5 cm ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art )

Initiation, or the coming of age of a boy or girl, is a transition frequently marked by ceremony and celebration. The education of youths in preparation for the responsibilities of adulthood is often a long and arduous process. Initiation rites usually begin at the onset of puberty.

Boys, and to a lesser extent girls, are separated from their families and taken to a secluded area on the outskirts of the community where they undergo a sustained period of instruction and, more typically in the past than now, circumcision. At the conclusion of this mentally and physically rigorous period, they are reintroduced to society as fully initiated adults and given the responsibilities and privileges that accompany their new status.During initiation, artworks protect and impart moral lessons to the youths. The spiritual forces associated with this period of transformation are often given visual expression in the form of masked performances.

During the initiation of boys, male dancers wearing wooden masks may make several appearances. Their performances can serve diverse purposes—to educate boys about their future social role, to bolster morale, to impress upon them respect for authority, or simply to entertain and relieve stress. The initiation of girls rarely includes the use of wooden masks, focusing more on transforming the body through the application of pigment.

Headdress, 19th–20th century, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yaka peoples, wood, cane, raffia, pigment, 45.1 x 61 x 54.6 cm ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art )

The women’s Sande society, found among the Mende and their neighbors, is one of the few organizations in which women wear wooden masks as part of initiation ceremonies ( example here ). Many initiation organizations continue in today’s Africa, often adapting to contemporary lifestyles. For example, in the past, the Sande society’s initiation process could take months to complete; now, Sande sessions have adapted to the calendars of secondary schools and initiation may be completed during vacation and holiday periods.

In many African societies, death is not considered an end but rather another transition. The passing of a respected elder is a time of grief and lamentation but also celebration. In this final rite of passage, the deceased joins the realm of the honored ancestors. While the dead are buried soon after death, a formal funeral often takes place at a later time. Funeral ceremonies with masked performances serve to celebrate the life of an individual and to assist the soul of the deceased in his or her passage from the human realm to that of the spirits (example here). Such ceremonies generally mark the end of a period of mourning and may be collective, honoring the lives of the deceased over a number of years.

Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble: Seated Female, 19th–early 20th century, Fang peoples, Okak group, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea, wood, metal, 64 x 20 x 16.5 cm ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art )

Figurative sculpture is also employed to commemorate important ancestors. Representations of the deceased, individualized through details of hairstyle, dress, and scarification, serve not only as memorials but also as a focal point for rituals communicating with ancestors ( example here ). In some central African societies, certain bones of the deceased are believed to contain great power and are preserved in a reliquary. In such cases, figurative sculpture attached to the reliquary does not represent the ancestor but honors and amplifies the power of the sacred relics (example above).

Additional resources:

Senufo Arts and Poro Initiation in Northern Côte d’Ivoire on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Manuel Jordan, Art and Initiation in Western Zambia on Art & Life in Africa (University of Iowa)

Ruth Phillips, Henrietta Cosentino and Rebecca Bussell, Women’s Art and Initiation in Mendeland in Art & Life in Africa (University of Iowa)

Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:

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rite of passage

Definition of rite of passage

Examples of rite of passage in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'rite of passage.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1897, in the meaning defined above

Dictionary Entries Near rite of passage

rite of intensification

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“Rite of passage.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rite%20of%20passage. Accessed 26 May. 2024.

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Rite of Passage

By Sharon Olds

As the guests arrive at our son’s party they gather in the living room— short men, men in first grade with smooth jaws and chins. Hands in pockets, they stand around jostling, jockeying for place, small fights breaking out and calming. One says to another How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So? They eye each other, seeing themselves tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their throats a lot, a room of small bankers, they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you up, a seven says to a six, the midnight cake, round and heavy as a turret behind them on the table. My son, freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks, chest narrow as the balsa keel of a model boat, long hands cool and thin as the day they guided him out of me, speaks up as a host for the sake of the group. We could easily kill a two-year-old , he says in his clear voice . The other men agree, they clear their throats like Generals, they relax and get down to playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

Summary of Rite of Passage

• Popularity of “Rite of Passage”: The poem ‘Rite of Passage’ was written by Sharon Olds, an American teacher, creative writing tutor, and poet. This poetic composition captures the attention to its thought-provoking exploration of a ritual. The poem first appeared in her collection, Strike Sparks published in 2004. By presenting children as if they were adults, behaving in a rebellious manner to showcase their strength and authority, the poetic output becomes truly entertaining.
• “ Rite of Passage” As a Representative of Children’s World: The poem opens with the title having a pun on “rite”. In a captivating manner, the poet narrates the tale of her son’s birthday party, highlighting the significance of his friends’ arrival. She paints a beautiful picture of the gathering of the boys of six or seven years old, behaving as if they are living in the world of adults. They jostle, jockey, push and nudge each other. Their conversation revolves around various subjects , including their age, manners, and present circumstances. How they stand, feel, move and talk becomes a matter of great interest for the poet that she has presented as if they are going to fight like the adults do in battles, posing themselves generals and fighters, with one of them asserting that they could kill a younger one. While it is only a celebration of her son’s birthday, the act of playing war seems to have a figurative importance in our lives.
• Major Themes in “Rite of Passage”: Importance of celebrations, mixing of children, and behaving in a belligerent manner are three important themes of this poem. The poem portrays the birthday gathering of her son, highlighting that he welcomed all his friends, who are approximately his age. This turns into a celebration where they can mingle and gain insights into living in harmony and sharing resources. However, what comes out is their belligerent behavior, as if they are fighting a war leading their respective armies as generals.

Analysis of Literary Devices Used In Rite of Passage

literary devices enhance the aesthetic, significance, and enigmatic nature of poetic works. Sharon Olds  also used some literary devices in this poem whose analysis is as follows.

• Assonance : Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line, such as the sound of /a/ and /e/ in “Hands in pockets, they stand around” the sound of /ee/ in “They eye each other, seeing themselves” and the sound of /aw/ in “model boat, long hands”.
• Alliteration : The poem shows the use of alliteration in the shape of initial consonant sounds of the neighboring words, such as the sound of /h/ in “he holds” and the sound of /j/ in “jostling, jockeying”.
• Consonance : Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line, such as the sound of /l/ in “ We could easily kill a two-year-old ” and the sound of /r/ in “men agree, they clear their throats”.
• Enjambment : It is defined as a thought in verse that does not come to an end at a line break ; rather, it rolls over to the next line. For example;

We could easily kill a two-year-old , he says in his clear voice. The other men agree, they clear their throats like Generals, they relax and get down to playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

• Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. Sharon Olds used imagery in this poem such as “Hands in pockets, they stand”, “They fold their arms and frown. I could beat you” and “the midnight cake, round and heavy as / turret behind them on the table”.
• Metaphor : The title of the poem is an extended metaphor . Some other metaphors are generals and bankers used for children. Their jostling and jockeying are also metaphors for battle.
• Symbolism : Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings that are different from literal meanings. The poem shows the use of symbols fights such as speaking, jostling, nudging, and pushing.
• Simile : The poem shows the use of similes, such as Freckles like specks and chest as narrow as the balsa keel.

Analysis of Poetic Devices Used in Rite of Passage

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

• Diction and Tone : The poem shows beautiful yet colloquial diction . The tone is serious, though, it becomes ironic by the end.
• Free Verse : The poem does not follow any rhyme scheme . Therefore, it is a free verse poem.
• Stanza : A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. The poem is a single stanza with 26 verses.

Quotes to be Used

These lines from “Rite of Passage” are appropriate to quote when talking about the behavior of the children.

As the guests arrive at our son’s party they gather in the living room— short men, men in first grade with smooth jaws and chins.

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Rites of Passage — Rites Of Passage During The Various Stages Of Life

Rites of Passage During The Various Stages of Life

• Categories: Rites of Passage

About this sample

Words: 1993 |

10 min read

Published: Oct 25, 2021

Words: 1993 | Pages: 4 | 10 min read

Table of contents

Introduction.

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Rite of Passage Summary & Analysis by Sharon Olds

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Published in The Dead and the Living in 1984, Sharon Olds's "Rite of Passage" is a poem about the roots of male violence. The poem's speaker, the mother of a boy in first grade, observes the aggressive, competitive behavior of the boys at her son's birthday party. The group bonds over her son's boast that " We could easily kill a two-year-old ," a fantasy that ironically contrasts with his innocent appearance and physical vulnerability. The poem portrays this kind of aggression as an imitation of, and an initiation into, the violent culture of grown men.

• Read the full text of “Rite of Passage”

The Full Text of “Rite of Passage”

“rite of passage” summary, “rite of passage” themes.

Masculinity and Violence

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “rite of passage”.

As the guests ... ... jaws and chins.

Hands in pockets, ... ... —I'm seven. —So?

They eye each ... ... arms and frown.

• Lines 12-15

I could beat ... ... on the table.

Lines 15-20

My son, ... ... out of me,

Lines 20-23

speaks up as ... ... his clear voice.

Lines 23-26

The other ... ... my son's life.

“Rite of Passage” Symbols

Childhood Competition

• Lines 22-26

“Rite of Passage” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

• Line 6: “jostling, jockeying”
• Line 8: “Six,” “seven,” “So”
• Line 12: “fold,” “frown”
• Line 13: “seven says,” “six”
• Line 15: “turret,” “table”
• Line 16: “cheeks”
• Line 17: “chest”
• Line 26: “celebrating,” “son's”
• Line 5: “pockets”
• Line 13: “seven says”
• Line 16: “freckles,” “specks,” “nutmeg”
• Line 26: “playing,” “celebrating”
• Lines 3-4: “short men, men in first grade / with smooth jaws and chins.”
• Lines 15-26: “My son, / freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks, / chest narrow as the balsa keel of a / model boat, long hands / cool and thin as the day they guided him / out of me, speaks up as a host / for the sake of the group. / We could easily kill a two-year-old / , / he says in his clear voice. The other / men agree, they clear their throats / like Generals, they relax and get down to / playing war, celebrating my son's life.”

Parallelism

• Line 3: “short men, men in first grade”
• Line 6: “jostling, jockeying for place,”
• Lines 9-12: “They eye each other, seeing themselves / tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their / throats a lot, a room of small bankers, / they fold their arms and frown.”
• Lines 16-20: “freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks, / chest narrow as the balsa keel of a / model boat, long hands / cool and thin as the day they guided him / out of me,”
• Lines 24-26: “they clear their throats / like Generals, they relax and get down to / playing war, celebrating my son's life.”
• Lines 1-2: “party / they”
• Lines 3-4: “grade / with”
• Lines 5-6: “around / jostling”
• Lines 7-8: “another / How”
• Lines 9-10: “themselves / tiny”
• Lines 10-11: “their / throats”
• Lines 12-13: “you / up”
• Lines 14-15: “a / turret”
• Lines 17-18: “a / model”
• Lines 18-19: “hands / cool”
• Lines 19-20: “him / out”
• Lines 20-21: “host / for”
• Lines 23-24: “other / men”
• Lines 24-25: “throats / like”
• Lines 25-26: “to / playing”
• Line 3: “men, men”
• Line 6: “jostling, jockeying,” “place, small”
• Line 7: “calming. One”
• Line 8: “you? —Six. —I'm seven. —So?”
• Line 9: “other, seeing”
• Line 10: “pupils. They”
• Line 11: “lot, a”
• Lines 12-12: “frown. / I”
• Lines 13-13: “up, / a”
• Line 14: “cake, round”
• Line 15: “turret, behind,” “table. My”
• Line 18: “boat, long”
• Line 20: “me, speaks”
• Line 23: “voice. The”
• Line 24: “agree, they”
• Line 25: “Generals, they”
• Line 26: “war, celebrating”
• Lines 14-15: “the midnight cake, round and heavy as a / turret,”
• Lines 24-25: “they clear their throats / like Generals,”
• Line 6: “jockeying for place”
• Lines 10-11: “They clear their / throats a lot, a room of small bankers,”
• Lines 23-24: “The other / men agree,”

“Rite of Passage” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Midnight cake
• (Location in poem: Lines 5-6: “they stand around / jostling, jockeying for place,”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Rite of Passage”

Rhyme scheme, “rite of passage” speaker, “rite of passage” setting, literary and historical context of “rite of passage”, more “rite of passage” resources, external resources.

The Poem Aloud — Watch Olds read "Rite of Passage" (starting at 18:35).

The Poet's Life and Work — A biography of Olds at the Poetry Foundation.

An Interview with the Poet — Olds discusses the challenges of writing about family.

A Talk by the Poet — Watch Olds deliver a lecture on the craft of poetry.

The Poet's Website — Browse books and media related to Sharon Olds at her website.

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The Role and Significance of Sacraments in Different Religious Traditions

This essay about the role of sacraments in various religious traditions explores how these sacred rites guide and enrich the spiritual lives of believers. It discusses the significance of sacraments in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, highlighting how they function as milestones of faith and spiritual practice. The essay illuminates the different interpretations and practices across these religions, emphasizing their importance in connecting believers with the divine and with each other in a global spiritual landscape.

How it works

In the vast panorama of religious traditions, sacraments act as guiding lights, shepherding the faithful through their spiritual quests. These hallowed practices paint a vivid mosaic of reverence across the spectrum of human spirituality, with each faith contributing its distinct shade to the spiritual canvas.

In Christianity’s radiant pathways, sacraments are celebrated as crucial milestones on the spiritual journey. In the revered tradition of Catholicism, the Seven Sacraments serve as foundations of spiritual grace, each a divine gateway drawing the faithful closer to God’s embrace.

From baptism’s cleansing waters to the solemn pledges of marriage, these rites infuse earthly existence with heavenly purpose, elevating everyday moments to sacred interactions.

Within the mystical borders of Eastern Orthodoxy, sacraments are revered as profound mysteries, enveloped in a divine aura. Here, baptism is not just a ritual but a rite of passage into Christ’s community, while Chrismation bestows upon the faithful a lasting mark of the Holy Spirit. The Eucharist is celebrated as a celestial feast, spiritually nourishing the faithful with divine sustenance and reinforcing their divine connection.

In Protestant domains, sacraments adopt a more symbolic interpretation, where ritual acts transcend their physical nature to connect with the sacred. Baptism symbolizes a rebirth in spirit, openly declaring one’s commitment to Christ’s redeeming power. Similarly, the Eucharist acts as a poignant remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice, binding the community in a collective act of reflection and renewal.

Islam presents sacraments as exquisite expressions of piety, leading adherents towards spiritual communion with the Divine. The Shahada, a declaration of faith, resonates through time as an affirmation of monotheism and one’s devotion to Allah. The practices of Salah, Zakat, Sawm, and Hajj are viewed as transformative rites, each cleansing and deepening the believer’s relationship with their Creator.

Hinduism displays a vibrant spectrum of sacramental events that sanctify the life cycle from birth to death. Each sanskar signifies a crucial phase in an individual’s spiritual development. The Garbhadhana ceremony seeks divine blessings for new life, Upanayana introduces the young to spiritual learning, and Vivaha celebrates the sacred union of marriage.

In Buddhism, sacramental acts are seen as gentle guides on the path to enlightenment. In Theravada Buddhism, ordination is a profound commitment to spiritual growth, while in Mahayana Buddhism, practices like meditation and offerings are viewed as sacramental acts that advance one’s journey towards enlightenment.

Throughout the diverse chorus of faiths, sacraments serve as profound elements of spiritual life, echoing the deep human desire for connection and redemption. From the formal rituals of Catholicism and the enigmatic ceremonies of Eastern Orthodoxy to the reflective practices of Buddhism, these sacred acts are universal symbols of humanity’s eternal quest for spiritual fulfillment, knitting diverse believers together in a global tapestry of faith.

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This One Guy Made the Washington DC Field Trip a Middle School Rite of Passage

No, not the cherry blossoms. It’s the middle school T-shirt, the unofficial signal that spring has sprung in the nation’s capital.

Every year, more than one million eighth graders—about one in every three —can be seen running up and down the National Mall in matching school-colored tees, pacing awkwardly in the Smithsonian , taking lunch at the L’Enfant Plaza and Pentagon City food courts, and racking up soda fountain tabs at the Hard Rock Cafe.

A field trip that started as a business idea has since evolved into a decades-long tradition, bolstering economies and creating entirely new ones . And while it’s become the subject of debate in school districts from Ohio to Massachusetts , in DC, it remains both a fact of life and a total vibe .

Filling the Void

It was quite a different experience from what you might expect of DC tourism these days. In the 1960s, due to political strife and moral resentment against America’s involvement in Vietnam, many young people didn’t have an interest in visiting the president’s house. Bus companies and airlines took note, leaving a void for trips centered around our nation’s history for younger generations. Moreover, Wendel tells me that during his initial trip, “I’m listening to some tour guide who’s probably been picked off the corner, and he’s lecturing kids.”

Convinced he could do better, Wendel coordinated the following year’s trip with a fellow teacher, attempting to give his students a more academically driven experience. The year after that, he founded Lakeland Tours solely to coordinate travel for eighth graders to DC Wendel sold Lakeland Tours in 1999, but he estimates the company helped bring a million students to DC overall; the company is now known as WorldStrides , one of the largest student tourism companies in the country.

All the while, much larger trends were emerging as well. One of the most important—beyond the rapid growth in air travel—was the evolving access to museums. In the early 20th century, museums were seen as bastions of elitism, a place where culture lived but only existed for those deemed worthy of entry. “Culture for culture’s sake was what the Smithsonian meant to its lay visitors,” wrote Louise Connolly in her 1914 book, The Educational Value of Museums . “Young people led through it contracted, not the museum habit, but museophobia, a horror of museums.”

But that sentiment began to change heading into World War II with the rise of the museum as an educational companion (the concept of “visual education,” i.e., using visual aids to enforce concepts , was introduced in the early 1920s). No longer were museums reserved just for the upper echelons; they were a place to engage, learn, and question, no matter who you were.

Today, museums welcome approximately 55 million students from school groups .

How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?

For three to five days—the usual length of the trip—students are whisked around the city from dawn until dusk. It’s not atypical for every day to last from 8:30 am to 10 pm, says Lindsay Hill, the associate director of visitor experience and group tours at Destination DC, where she helps tour groups coordinate with tour operators. She says the jam-packed days are a win-win for everyone involved: Students get to see as much of the city as possible, and there’s less time for them to get into trouble (more on that later.)

The usual stops are the usual suspects: the US Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the MLK Jr. Memorial, several war memorials, the Smithsonian Museums, Arlington National Cemetery, the National Zoo, the Holocaust Museum, and the Ford Theater. (All of these landmarks are free to visit.) You might also have been lucky enough to get a tour of the White House (also free but more challenging to plan), meet your local congressperson, or travel by boat to Mount Vernon to tour George Washington’s landmark estate. Or better yet, maybe you were whisked around DC in an amphibious World War II vehicle — as part of a so-called “duck tour”—allowing you to view landmarks by land and water (a tour that, sadly, no longer operates).

Meanwhile, the Hard Rock Cafe serves as a beacon of sustenance that helps to fuel all that sight-seeing. The Hard Rock not only plans for these travelers—a student group-focused menu, including a soda, entree, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert, ensures that students are “in and out in about an hour,” says Sara Lester, a regional sales and marketing manager at Hard Rock Cafe—but it relies on them, too. Case in point: Through March and April of this year, they’ve welcomed a total of 25,000 eighth graders, putting them on pace to reach 50,000 students by the end of the field trip season.

Not to mention, the Hard Rock isn’t without some political significance. Among its many pieces of music-themed memorabilia, two, in particular, speak to our nation’s history/sense of patriotism: 1) a saxophone played by President Bill Clinton; and 2) a red, white, and blue outfit worn by Beyoncé.

Not-So-Unruly Behavior

“Eighth graders are in a unique position where they’re big enough to be self-reliant, but not so big that they’re going to run out and create havoc in the streets,” explains John Raymond, the vice president of sales and marketing of student tourism company Grand Classroom, which oversees the travel of some 20,000 students to Washington, D.C. annually.

Raymond estimates that over the course of three decades, there have been just five or six instances where students were sent home on a trip. If anything, such rarity speaks perfectly to the eighth-grade mindset. “You don’t want to be outside of the herd. You don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to yourself,” Raymond says.

It helps, too, that the trip isn’t cheap—prices average from $2,000 to $3,000 per student. Additionally, parents must sign a liability waiver that holds them responsible for any financial damages incurred by their child, and no kid wants to have that conversation with mom and dad.

That said, if there is a mischievous will, eighth graders will surely find a way, an attitude that prompted Wendel, while at Lakeland Tours, to hire enlisted military members to sit outside students’ hotel rooms to ensure they didn’t sneak out at night. “That isn’t to say that the kids didn’t win some of the battles,” Wendel says. “But once we had a lights out or a curfew, with about 99% certainty, we were able to keep the kids confined to their rooms.”

It’s worth noting, too, that any havoc the students create is often unintentional and harmless. Or, in true eighth-grade fashion, just plain awkward. “I was accidentally locked in my hotel bathroom during my eighth-grade field trip to DC,” recalls Dan Howie, now a recruiting manager from North Carolina. “Maintenance had to come in and drill through the lock. It took about two hours for them to get me out, and there was quite an audience waiting to see if I’d emerge. It certainly added to my eighth-grade cool-kid mystique.”

The Kids Are Alright

As a result, what may be thought of as a few days for students to get away from their parents and vice-versa—a pitch that Wendel used while working at Lakeland—has become an opportunity for personal growth and cultural exposure. “Getting outside of your home base and what’s comfortable for you is where the change in perspective and the ability to really understand different cultures and people’s backgrounds comes from,” Hill says.

For that alone, maybe it’s worth the trip—matching T-shirts and all. Want more Thrillist? Follow us on  Instagram ,  TikTok ,  Twitter ,  Facebook ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube .

Colin Hanner is a freelance writer based in Chicago. He writes about food, travel, and whatever else he’s interested in.

KITCHEN MANAGER

Job posting for kitchen manager at rite of passage brand.

Are you looking for a rewarding career where you can help improve the lives of at-risk youth?

We’re hiring a Kitchen Manager at Meadowlark Academy in Cheyenne, WY, an affiliate of Rite of Passage.   Our employees are dedicated and passionate individuals that are committed to inspiring positive change in the lives of youth.  Joining our team is more than just a job, it’s an opportunity to create a meaningful career with a company driven by its powerful mission to make a difference.

Rite of Passage is a leading national provider of programs and opportunities for troubled and at-risk youth from social services, welfare agencies and juvenile courts.  With an emphasis on evidence-based practices and positive skill development, combined with our supportive and therapeutic approach, our organization is respected by industry experts as a highly effective solution for our youth.  Since 1984, over 25,000 youths have entered and completed our programs.  ROP has built its reputation on running life-changing educational treatment programs that positively contribute to the community.

What you’ll do:

In this role, you will be primarily responsible for providing quality customer and employee services regarding food, laundry, janitorial and maintenance.  Depending on location, you will report to the designated department Manager or Director and/or the Program Director and supervises the staff in the assigned department(s).

To be considered, you should:

• Have a High School diploma or equivalent.
• Have at least two years of experience supervising 5 or more employees.
• Have at least four years of experience in a related role.
• Be able to pass a criminal background check, drug screen, physical, and TB test.
• Eligible for Medical, Dental, Vision, and Life Insurance after 90 days of employment.
• Choice of supplemental benefits, including Short Term Disability and Life Insurance.
• Eligible for 100% 401k match of up to 6% of your salary after 1 year of employment.
• Paid Time Off that can be used as soon as it accrues.
• Free Meals on shift.
• Employee incentives including On-The-Spot Bonuses, Rams Bucks, and Longevity Awards.
• Growth opportunities nationwide – we have 40 programs in 16 states!
• Tuition Assistance.

Apply today and help us make a difference!

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Student protests are a rite of passage. I went through it, back in the '60s.

Watching the wave of student protests on college campuses nationwide, a retired journalist recalls his own activism and writes: when these students reflect on this moment, i trust they will appreciate, like i have, our country’s commitment to reasonable free speech, peaceable assembly and democracy..

Police use tear gas and nightsticks to break up anti-Vietnam war demonstrations at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Oct. 18, 1967.

Neal Ulevich/AP file

The protests on college campuses around the country, precipitated by Israel’s devastating response to the horrific Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas, bring back memories of the massive militant student activism of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s mostly against the Vietnam War.

I was there, along with thousands of other students who, like today, fit into a variety of categories: Hardcore idealists deeply committed to a cause; moderates who care, but not deeply; and folks with more social than political interest who just want to be where the action is.

I hung out in all three camps at different times, as I suspect many of today’s participants do.

In the fall of 1968, I joined a sit-in occupation of an administrative office at the eastern university I was attending, to protest exclusionary policies at a campus fraternity. We disbanded peacefully and without much push-back when the frat agreed to more non-discriminatory admissions, and hurried off to enjoy weekend party festivities.

Multi-tasking 101.

In the spring and early summer of 1968, at the end of my sophomore year, Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. I was shell-shocked, like almost everyone else, but followed through on a plan to tour Europe on a budget with college friends.

The trip was wonderful, but I had to experience the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago via anodyne, pre-cell phone and internet news in English language newspapers while enjoying the French Riviera. I was regrettably missing the action but having no shortage of fun.

It was surreal and, in retrospect, an amusing recognition that we, like occupants of the caveman era, were hamstrung by minimalist communication tools.

Catching a break to avoid Vietnam War draft

But life goes on, and a combination of personal and family issues prompted me to transfer to a college closer to home, the University of Wisconsin, in the winter of 1969, which turned out to be one of the most turbulent semesters in Madison campus history.

There were marches, massive anti-war demonstrations, broken retail store windows, and National Guard troops firing tear gas and brandishing menacing clubs to move demonstrators, me included, off the streets during protests against the war and university policies.

I joined the crowded demonstrations, in part because it was something to do — a fun activity — but more importantly, because I wanted no part of a divisive and potentially life-threatening war halfway around the world, and campus rules that made no sense, at least to us.

Late that year, after leaving Madison and moving back to Chicago to get my head on straighter, I caught the ultimate break when the Vietnam War draft lottery — each of the 365 days of the year drawn one after another to determine a draft order based on birth date — didn’t get to my June birthday until it was well past the pool of likely draftees.

My relief was palpable, and so memorable that I visited the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. every time I covered stories there in my journalism years to lament the 50,000 casualties whose names are inscribed on the wall — and to remember that, but for the luck of the draw, mine could have been there too.

So now, more than half a century later, I watch the campus chaos from afar, thinking that student demonstrations may alter university policies slightly, but not the overall foreign policy of our country or the internal policies of Middle Eastern governments.

That said, I sympathize with nonviolent student demonstrators, whether deeply or moderately committed or just along for the ride, because that’s a rite of passage — a valuable part of the journey from late adolescence to young adulthood.

Today’s protesters obviously do their thing in a digital world that transmits pictures and words in seconds, heightening the impact and raising the stakes in ways we never imagined in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

But some things haven’t changed. Years later, when these students reflect on this seminal and unforgettable moment in their lives — a moment my grown daughters lament missing during their quieter 1990s campus days — I trust they will appreciate, like I have, our country’s commitment to reasonable free speech, peaceable assembly and a democracy that bends but won’t break — if we don’t let it.

Kids, you don’t make the rules, but Godspeed as you responsibly challenge the ones we’ve established.

Andy Shaw is a retired Chicago journalist, good government watchdog and — way back when — a student activist.

The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines .

The views and opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chicago Sun-Times or any of its affiliates.

Prom is still a fun and glamorous rite of passage in 2024

Alexis Papalia is a TribLive staff writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

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The Hamas Chief and the Israeli Who Saved His Life

In an Israeli prison infirmary, a Jewish dentist came to the aid of a desperately ill Hamas inmate. Years later, the prisoner became a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack.

Yahya Sinwar, left, and Dr. Yuval Bitton at Israel’s Beersheba prison complex, during negotiations for a prisoner swap that would lead to Mr. Sinwar’s 2011 release. Credit...

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By Jo Becker and Adam Sella

Jo Becker reported from Tel Aviv, and Adam Sella from Nir Oz, Israel. Since the early days of the Israel-Hamas war, they have traced the aftereffects of a fateful encounter between Yahya Sinwar and Dr. Yuval Bitton.

• May 26, 2024

This is how Dr. Yuval Bitton remembers the morning of Oct. 7. Being jolted awake just after sunrise by the insistent ringing of his phone. The frantic voice of his daughter, who was traveling abroad, asking, “Dad, what’s happened in Israel? Turn on the TV.”

News anchors were still piecing together the reports: Palestinian gunmen penetrating Israel’s vaunted defenses, infiltrating more than 20 towns and military bases, killing approximately 1,200 people and dragging more than 240 men, women and children into Gaza as hostages.

Even in that first moment, Dr. Bitton says, he knew with certainty who had masterminded the attack: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and Inmate No. 7333335 in the Israeli prison system from 1989 until his release in a prisoner swap in 2011.

But that was not all. Dr. Bitton had a history with Yahya Sinwar.

As he watched the images of terror and death flicker across his screen, he was tormented by a decision he had made nearly two decades before — how, working in a prison infirmary, he had come to the aid of a mysteriously and desperately ill Mr. Sinwar, and how afterward the Hamas leader had told him that “he owed me his life.”

The two men had then formed a relationship of sorts, sworn enemies who nevertheless showed a wary mutual respect. As a dentist and later as a senior intelligence officer for the Israeli prison service, Dr. Bitton had spent hundreds of hours talking with and analyzing Mr. Sinwar, who in the seven months since Oct. 7 has eluded Israel’s forces even as their assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands and turned much of the enclave to rubble. Now American officials believe Mr. Sinwar is calling the shots for Hamas in negotiations over a deal for a cease-fire and the release of some of the hostages.

Dr. Bitton saw that, in a sense, everything that had passed between himself and Mr. Sinwar was a premonition of the events now coming to pass. He understood the way Mr. Sinwar’s mind worked as well as or better than any Israeli official. He knew from experience that the price the Hamas leader would demand for the hostages might well be one Israel would be unwilling to pay.

And by day’s end, he knew something else: Mr. Sinwar’s operatives had his nephew.

THE DAY HE SAVED Yahya Sinwar’s life, Yuval Bitton was 37, running the dental clinic at the Beersheba prison complex, in the Negev desert of southern Israel. He had taken the job eight years earlier, in 1996, fresh out of medical school, assuming he would be treating guards and other employees.

Instead, he’d ended up with a patient roster of some of Israel’s most hardened prisoners, like the Hamas operatives responsible for suicide attacks at a Jerusalem market and a Passover massacre at the Park Hotel, as well as the ultranationalist Israeli who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his peacemaking with the Palestine Liberation Organization. There were times when Dr. Bitton would be drilling the teeth of one terrorist only to learn that outside the prison walls, another had struck.

Mediterranean

prison complex

“During the day you would treat them and at night you come home and cry,” he said. “That happened many, many nights. Once there was a suicide attack near where my parents lived. Sixteen Jews were killed. Who would not cry at night? When you see a small baby being lifted, who wouldn’t cry?”

He tried to compartmentalize. He told himself that as a doctor he was bound by his oath to do no harm. And on particularly bad days, he said, he would remind himself of the words that Israel’s primary architect, David Ben-Gurion, had made his mantra in the years after the nation’s founding: “The State of Israel will be judged not by its wealth, nor by its army, nor by its technology, but by its moral character and human values.”

While some Israeli historians question whether Ben-Gurion always lived by those words, Dr. Bitton took them to heart. It was, he thought, what differentiated him from the prisoners he treated.

PRISON, MR. SINWAR once told an Italian journalist , is a crucible. “Prison builds you,” he said, gives you time to think about what you believe in — “and the price you are willing to pay” for it.

His rite of passage had begun in 1989, two years after the first intifada erupted, protesting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was 27, with a reputation for extreme brutality, convicted of murdering four Palestinians whom Hamas suspected of collaborating with Israel.

He was born in a refugee camp in southern Gaza, where his parents had been forced to live after what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when they were displaced from their homes during the wars surrounding the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. In conversations with fellow prisoners, Mr. Sinwar spoke of how his refugee childhood had led him to Hamas.

“Something he always remembered is that all the men in the camp would go to one bathroom, and the women to another,” said Esmat Mansour, a fellow prisoner held from 1993 to 2013 for killing an Israeli settler. “There was a daily line and you had to wait. And how they distributed food and the humiliation they would undergo. It isn’t something special to him, but it apparently impacted him a lot.”

Mr. Sinwar had been recruited by Hamas’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who made him chief of an internal security unit known as Al Majd. His job was to find and punish those suspected of violating Islamic morality laws or cooperating with the Israeli occupiers.

In an interrogation after his arrest in 1988, he dispassionately described shooting one man, strangling another with his bare hands, suffocating a third with a kaffiyeh, and choking and punching a fourth before tossing him in a hastily dug grave. Records of the interrogation make clear that, far from being remorseful, Mr. Sinwar saw beating confessions out of the collaborators as a righteous duty. One of them, he told interrogators, had even said that “he realized he deserved to die.”

Mr. Sinwar continued his campaign against informants from behind bars. Israeli authorities believed he had ordered the beheadings of at least two prisoners he suspected of snitching. Hamas operatives would throw their severed body parts out of the cell doors and tell the guards to “take the dog’s head,” Dr. Bitton said.

But if Mr. Sinwar was feared by his fellow inmates, he was also respected for his resourcefulness. He tried to escape several times, once surreptitiously digging a hole in his cell floor in hopes of tunneling under the prison and exiting through the visitor center. And he found ways to plot against Israel with Hamas leaders on the outside, managing the smuggling of cellphones into the prison and using lawyers and visitors to ferry messages out.

Often, the message was about finding ways to kidnap Israeli soldiers to trade for Palestinian prisoners. Years later, Mr. Sinwar would say that “for the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him.”

“They were formative years,” Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official who serves as an informal spokesman, said in an interview. “He developed a leadership personality in every sense of the word.”

He also became fluent in Hebrew, taking advantage of an online university program, and devoured Israeli news, to better understand his enemy. A routine search of his cell yielded tens of thousands of pages of painstakingly handwritten Arabic — Mr. Sinwar’s translations of contraband Hebrew-language autobiographies written by the former heads of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet. According to Dr. Bitton, Mr. Sinwar surreptitiously shared the translated pages so other inmates could study the agency’s counterterrorism tactics. He liked to call himself a “specialist in the Jewish people’s history.”

“They wanted prison to be a grave for us, a mill to grind our will, determination and bodies,” Mr. Sinwar once told supporters. “But, thank God, with our belief in our cause we turned the prison into sanctuaries of worship and academies for study.”

Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, elects its leaders democratically, and that structure was mirrored behind bars. In each prison, one committee was charged with making quotidian decisions — who slept in the top bunk, what to watch during allotted TV hours — while another meted out punishments to suspected collaborators, and still others oversaw things like divvying up money sent by Hamas leaders that could be used to purchase food at the commissary.

An elected “emir,” along with members of a high council called the “haya,” ruled over this structure for limited terms. For much of Mr. Sinwar’s time in prison, he alternated as emir with Rawhi Mushtaha, a confidant who had been convicted alongside him for killing collaborators. It was Mr. Sinwar’s turn in 2004.

AT THE TIME, the episode seemed of little consequence. After all, Dr. Bitton said, Mr. Sinwar was supposed to be serving four life terms.

As a dentist in Israel, Dr. Bitton had also trained in general medicine, and was often called upon to assist the three other prison doctors, stitching up wounds or helping with a tricky diagnosis. So when he emerged from seeing his dental patients that day in early 2004 to find several clearly perplexed colleagues surrounding a disoriented Mr. Sinwar, Dr. Bitton did what a doctor does. He joined them.

“What’s going on?” he asked the prisoner.

The two men had met on a number of occasions. Dr. Bitton often wandered back to the prisoners’ wings, partly out of curiosity about how some of Israel’s most fervent enemies thought, and partly because the trust he engendered as a doctor made him a useful intermediary when prison administrators wanted to know what was going on. Just as Mr. Sinwar had learned Hebrew, Dr. Bitton had taught himself Arabic. He became such a regular presence in the cellblocks that some prisoners suspected, wrongly, that he might be an intelligence plant.

Israeli and Palestinian watchdog groups have periodically published scathing reports on conditions for Palestinian prisoners — overcrowded cells lacking proper sanitation and ventilation, harsh interrogations and, in some cases, years of solitary confinement and withholding of proper medical care.

Against that backdrop, Mr. Mansour said, Dr. Bitton stood out. “He treated us like humans.”

“He bought the hearts of the prisoners, truly. He would go into their cells, drink with them and eat with them,” he said. “If there was a problem, he would call and help.”

Lately Dr. Bitton had been working to persuade Mr. Sinwar and others to cooperate with Israeli researchers studying suicide bombings. But in the examining room, Mr. Sinwar didn’t seem to know him.

“Who are you?” Dr. Bitton recalled him asking.

“It’s me, Yuval.”

“Wow, I’m sorry — I didn’t recognize you,” Dr. Bitton said the prisoner replied, before describing his symptoms.

He would stand for prayer and then fall. As he spoke, he seemed to drift in and out of consciousness. But for Dr. Bitton, the most telling sign was Mr. Sinwar’s complaint of a pain in the back of his neck. Something is wrong with his brain, the dentist told his colleagues, perhaps a stroke or an abscess. He needed to go to the hospital, urgently.

He was rushed to the nearby Soroka Medical Center, where doctors performed emergency surgery to remove a malignant and aggressive brain tumor, fatal if left untreated. “If he had not been operated on, it would have burst,” Dr. Bitton said.

A few days later, Dr. Bitton visited Mr. Sinwar in the hospital, together with a prison officer sent to check the security arrangements. They found the prisoner in bed, hooked up to monitors and an IV, but awake. Mr. Sinwar asked the officer, who was Muslim, to thank the dentist.

“Sinwar asked him to explain to me what it means in Islam that I saved his life,” Dr. Bitton recalled. “It was important to him that I understood from a Muslim how important this was in Islam — that he owed me his life.”

MR. SINWAR RARELY if ever spoke to the Israeli prison authorities. But now he began meeting regularly with the dentist, to drink tea and talk.

They would meet back in the cellblocks, two men with strikingly similar features — cropped, prematurely graying hair; dark, quizzically arched eyebrows; high cheekbones. Dr. Bitton, a loquacious, easygoing man, often joshed with the other prisoners, getting them to open up about their families or sports. But with Mr. Sinwar, the talk was all business and dogma.

“The conversations with Sinwar were not personal or emotional,” he said. “They were only about Hamas.”

Mr. Sinwar knew the Quran by heart, and he coolly laid out his organization’s governing doctrines.

“Hamas sees the land we live on as the holy land, like, ‘This is ours, you don’t have a right to live in this land,’” Dr. Bitton said. “It wasn’t political, it was religious.”

Was there no chance, then, for a two-state solution? Dr. Bitton would press him.

Never, Mr. Sinwar would say. Why not? Dr. Bitton would respond.

Because this is the land of Muslims, not for you — I can’t sign away this land.

In a search of his cell, guards had confiscated a handwritten novel that Mr. Sinwar finished at the end of 2004, after the surgery. “You couldn’t make a Hollywood movie about it,” Dr. Bitton laughed. “But it was about the relationship between men, women and the family in Islam.” At least one copy was smuggled out; The New York Times found a typed PDF in an online library.

The novel, “The Thorn and the Carnation,” is a coming-of-age story that limns Mr. Sinwar’s own life: The narrator, a devout Gazan boy named Ahmed, emerges from hiding during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to a life under Israeli occupation. In their cruelty, the occupiers cause the “chests of youth to boil like a cauldron.” In retaliation, Ahmed’s friends and family attack them with knives, ambush them with Molotov cocktails and hunt collaborators so as to “gouge out the eyes that the occupier sees us with from the inside.”

Woven throughout is the theme of the unending sacrifice demanded by the resistance. At university, where he is recruited to Hamas, Ahmed becomes infatuated with a woman he sees walking to and from class. “I am not exaggerating when I say that she truly surpasses the full moon,” he says. Yet their relationship, chaste and proper according to Muslim values, never develops; the reader never even learns the woman’s name.

“I decided to end my love story, if it can even be called a love story,” the narrator says. “I realized that ours is the bitter story of Palestine, for which there is only room for one love … one passion.”

But if Mr. Sinwar, unmarried at the time, ever entertained the notion of an alternative path for himself, he did not share his thoughts with Dr. Bitton. (Indeed, even after his release from prison and subsequent marriage, he has said very little publicly on the subject of his own family, except to note that “the first words my son spoke were ‘father,’ ‘mother’ and ‘drone.’”)

At Beersheba, Mr. Sinwar was unquestionably a prison chieftain, Dr. Bitton said, but he didn’t put on airs — a humble ascetic who shared cooking duties and other chores with more junior inmates.

Every week or so, he would make an improvised knafeh, a Palestinian dessert of sweet cheese and shredded pastry drenched in syrup. The prisoners always awaited his knafeh, Dr. Bitton said. They really liked it — and so did Dr. Bitton, who understood the breaking of bread together as a way to cultivate the relationship.

“I tried it,” he allowed. “Listen, they know how to make knafeh.”

Dr. Bitton was under no illusion about whom he was dealing with. A prison assessment that Dr. Bitton said he helped compile called Mr. Sinwar cruel, cunning and manipulative, an authoritative man with “the ability to carry crowds” who “keeps secrets even inside prison amongst other prisoners.”

Still, there was a certain transactional honesty to their conversations. Each man knew the other had an agenda.

Just as Dr. Bitton probed to better understand the schisms between Hamas and the other Palestinian factions inside the prison, Mr. Sinwar returned again and again to the fissures in Israeli society that he read about in the Hebrew news media, between rich and poor and Sephardic and Ashkenazi and secular and orthodox Jews.

“Now you’re strong, you have 200 atomic warheads,” Mr. Sinwar would say. “But we’ll see, maybe in another 10 to 20 years you’ll weaken, and I’ll attack.”

In 2006, after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas stunned political observers by winning the largest number of seats in the Palestinian Authority’s legislative elections.

Israeli authorities, worried that the election would help legitimize a group that the United States and European Union had designated a terrorist organization, devised a plan to remind the world of Hamas’s true colors by giving some of its incarcerated leaders a media platform on “60 Minutes” and in an interview with Israeli television. Dr. Bitton was tasked with selling the idea to Mr. Sinwar, who would have to sign off.

“Speak freely, you can say whatever you want about Israel,” Dr. Bitton told Mr. Sinwar and other prisoners.

The plan worked, from Dr. Bitton’s perspective. When Abdullah Barghouti, who had organized suicide bombings that killed 66 people, was asked on “60 Minutes” whether he regretted his deeds, he readily answered yes. “I feel bad, ’cause the number only 66,” he said.

Mr. Sinwar, for his part, tried to use his first and only interview with an Israeli television outlet to send a savvier message. With Dr. Bitton looking on, he told the interviewer that Israelis should “be scared” about Hamas’s election victory. But, he added in comments that weren’t aired, much depended on what the Israeli government did next. “From our perspective, we have a right that we’re asking from the Israeli leadership,” he said. “We aren’t asking for the town.”

The next year, to great alarm in Israel, Hamas wrested full control over Gaza in a violent power struggle with Fatah, a secular rival political party.

This was the time, Dr. Bitton decided, to channel the relationships he had built with Mr. Sinwar and other imprisoned Palestinian leaders into a new role, one that would not leave him feeling so conflicted. He applied to become an officer in the Prison Intelligence Service, and after a short course was assigned to Ketziot prison in 2008. The man who “doesn’t understand the motives and roots of their enemy,” he explained, “will not be able to prevent those organizations from doing what they want.”

DR. BITTON WAS quickly thrown into a monumental challenge. Two years earlier, in 2006, an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, had been kidnapped in a daring cross-border raid. Among his captors was none other than Mr. Sinwar’s brother.

The kidnapping profoundly shook Israeli society, with its credo that not a single soldier should be left behind. As the Israeli government, working through a back channel with a team of international intermediaries, attempted to negotiate a prisoner swap, Dr. Bitton was tasked with using his connections to imprisoned Hamas leaders to glean intelligence on what they would accept.

By 2009, Israel had agreed in principle to exchange 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Mr. Shalit. Mr. Sinwar “was managing the negotiations from inside the prison with a group of brothers who were also with him,” according to Ghazi Hamad, the informal Hamas spokesman, who was involved in the negotiations.

There was only one problem: Despite being on the list himself, Mr. Sinwar didn’t think the deal was good enough, according to Gerhard Conrad, a retired German intelligence officer involved in brokering the Shalit deal.

Mr. Sinwar was insisting on freeing “the so-called impossibles,” Mr. Conrad said. Those were the men serving multiple life sentences, men like Mr. Barghouti and Abbas al-Sayed, who had masterminded the Passover suicide attack that had killed 30 people at the Park Hotel.

Saleh al-Arouri, a founder of Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, and a leader of prisoners from the West Bank, approached Dr. Bitton. Would he help push against Mr. Sinwar’s obstinacy?

Mr. al-Arouri “understood they had to compromise — that we would not release everyone,” Dr. Bitton said. “He was more pragmatic.”

Recognizing that the rift between Mr. Sinwar and Mr. al-Arouri could potentially be used to advance the Shalit negotiations, Dr. Bitton got his bosses to sign off on a plan aimed at deepening the division. At Mr. al-Arouri’s request, prison officials brought together 42 influential West Bank inmates from three separate prisons so that Mr. al-Arouri could win them to his side.

But pressuring Mr. Sinwar turned out to be much harder.

Dr. Bitton saw what he was up against in 2010, when, amid the stalled Shalit negotiations, Mr. Sinwar tried to compel all 1,600 Hamas prisoners to join a hunger strike that would have left many of them dead. The goal wasn’t even to free prisoners, just to release two from long-term solitary confinement. In that moment, Dr. Bitton said, he realized there would never be a Shalit deal as long as Mr. Sinwar remained in the way.

“He was willing to pay a heavy price for principle,” Dr. Bitton said, “even if the price wasn’t proportional to the goal.”

Even after the Shalit negotiators managed to convince the Israelis in 2011 to release additional prisoners, bringing the total to 1,027 — including some, though not nearly all of the “impossibles” — Mr. Sinwar remained opposed.

But by this point, Mr. al-Arouri had been released from prison and was a member of the Hamas negotiating team, led by Ahmad al-Jabari, a top commander who had led the raid that captured Mr. Shalit. Under pressure from Egyptian mediators, the team concluded that this was as good a deal as they were going to get.

Mr. Sinwar’s authority had been diluted. But just to be sure, the Israelis put him in solitary confinement until the deal was done. (Mr. al-Arouri was killed in an Israeli airstrike this past January.)

On Oct. 18, 2011, Dr. Bitton stood in the yard of Ketziot prison, watching as Mr. Sinwar boarded a bus to Gaza. Having witnessed the persuasive power of Mr. Sinwar’s leadership up close, Dr. Bitton said he had urged the negotiators not to free him. But he was overruled, he said, because Mr. Sinwar “didn’t have as much Jewish blood on his hands” as some of the others.

“I thought you need to look at the capabilities of the prisoner to use their abilities against Israel and not just what he did — his potential,” Dr. Bitton said.

In news video footage from that day, Mr. Sinwar does not look all that pleased either, scowling on a makeshift stage in central Gaza City as Ismail Haniyeh, then leader of Hamas in Gaza, gleefully waves to the thousands gathered to celebrate the prisoners’ release. Hours later, in an interview with Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV, a defiant Mr. Sinwar made a promise.

“We shall spare no efforts to liberate the rest of our brothers and sisters,” he said. “We urge the Qassam Brigades to kidnap more soldiers to exchange them for the freedom of our loved ones who are still behind bars.”

“He told us what he was going to do,” Dr. Bitton said. “We didn’t want to listen.”

ABOUT 6:30 A.M. on Oct. 7, Dr. Bitton’s nephew, Tamir Adar, woke up in Nir Oz, a kibbutz less than two miles from the Gaza border. Mr. Adar, 38, worked as a farmer, and he normally rose early so that he would have time to enjoy the long summer afternoons, drinking beer as he watched his daughter and son splash around in the community pool.

That morning, as air raid sirens blared, rockets pierced the sky and sporadic gunfire ricocheted off walls, Mr. Adar left his wife and children in their house’s small safe room and went out to join the kibbutz’s armed emergency response team.

At 8:30 a.m., he sent his wife a WhatsApp message: She should not open the safe-room door, not even if he came pleading to be let in. The kibbutz had been overrun.

At 4 p.m., soldiers finally arrived and called residents out of their safe rooms. Mr. Adar was nowhere to be found. His mother, Yael, called her brother, Dr. Bitton: “Tamir has disappeared.”

Roughly 100 Nir Oz residents — a quarter of the population — had been killed or kidnapped in the Hamas raid. The world quickly knew that Mr. Adar’s paternal grandmother, 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, was among them, as viral video showed armed militants carrying her to Gaza in a stolen golf cart. It would be three weeks before Israeli officials could confirm that Mr. Adar had been taken hostage, too.

Before, his mother worked as the administrator for a school district near the Gaza border. Now she gave herself over to the hostages’ cause, attending marches and demonstrations to pressure the government into striking a deal with Hamas for their release.

“One day you’re hopeful and the next in despair,” she said. “One day you’re crying and the next you’re able to gather yourself.”

She wondered whether she should ask her brother to leverage his connections, but decided against it. “What could I tell him?” she said. “Call Sinwar?”

In the years since the Shalit deal, Dr. Bitton had climbed the ranks of the Israeli Prison Service, becoming the head of its intelligence division and then a deputy commander overseeing 12 prisons before retiring in 2021. Mr. Sinwar had traced a parallel arc. After his release, he was elected to a role akin to Hamas defense minister. And in 2017, he was elected leader of Hamas in Gaza, overseeing all aspects of life on the Strip.

It hadn’t escaped Dr. Bitton’s notice that the Hamas assault came at a time of deep division in Israel, the nation wracked by protests over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts, demanded by the right-wing parties crucial to his political survival, to dilute the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. It was precisely the type of schism that Mr. Sinwar had spoken of years before at Beersheba, when he said he would attack at a time of internal strife.

Dr. Bitton held small hope for his nephew’s release. For Mr. Sinwar, the hostages were a means to an end — freeing the Palestinian prisoners left behind in the Shalit deal and putting the Palestinian cause back on the world stage. Even if Mr. Sinwar knew who his nephew was, Dr. Bitton said, “at the end he looks at us as Jews.”

Still, in one of their last conversations, on the day Mr. Sinwar was freed, the Hamas leader had again thanked him for saving his life. Mr. Sinwar had even asked for his phone number, though Dr. Bitton had to refuse because prison employees are forbidden to communicate with Hamas leaders on the outside. He believed that Mr. Sinwar would feel bound by a kind of code, and that if he was made aware that Hamas held Dr. Bitton’s nephew, he at least would not allow him to be mistreated.

“Beyond the fact that we are enemies, at the end of the day there is also his personal outlook,” Dr. Bitton said. “In my opinion, he would treat him the same way I did, saving his life despite being an enemy.”

Several weeks after the Hamas attack, in the hope that Mr. Sinwar was still an avid follower of Israeli news media, Dr. Bitton decided to give a television interview. In it, he said only that he had been part of a team that had diagnosed Mr. Sinwar decades before, and that his nephew was among the hostages. (In other interviews, he similarly downplayed his role, because, he said, he was worried about how he might be perceived by a nation in mourning.)

In late November, Mr. Adar’s grandmother was released in a weeklong cease-fire deal that saw 105 of the hostages freed, mostly women and children. What Dr. Bitton knew but could not say in his family’s moment of joy was that Mr. Sinwar would hold on to military-age men like Mr. Adar until the very end, to guarantee his own survival.

“Can I tell my sister that they’re releasing Yaffa Adar, Tamir’s grandma, and that that will be the last release and Tamir will remain there? I can’t say it, but I know him and I know what he’ll do,” Dr. Bitton said. “That’s why I stayed silent, but I’m eating my heart out.”

Yet there was reason to believe that his nephew was still alive. In the wake of Dr. Bitton’s TV interview, Israeli intelligence learned that Mr. Sinwar was asking about Mr. Adar’s well-being, and that subordinates had assured him that he was all right.

It turned out the subordinates had asked after the wrong person. On Jan. 5, the government told the family what new intelligence showed: Wounded while defending his kibbutz, Mr. Adar had apparently died not long after being dragged into Gaza, one of at least 35 hostages believed to be dead, among roughly 125 still being held.

Dr. Bitton returned to Nir Oz on a sunny winter morning. Blackened buildings peeked out between columnar cactuses, deafening booms from artillery shells interrupted chirping parrots and cooing doves, and an acrid smell still hung in the air. “The smell of death,” Dr. Bitton said, wrinkling his nose.

Rounding a corner, he stopped. “That’s his blood,” he said, his face tightening in grief as he pointed toward a concrete wall that once hid the kibbutz’s dumpsters, now a dark-stained marker of his nephew’s last stand. And nearby, a small memorial, a fleet of toy tractors.

“Do you see what’s lost?” Dr. Bitton said. “It’s like that here. No one remains, just birds and stories.”

These days, Dr. Bitton meets regularly with the hostages’ families, sharing everything he learned about Mr. Sinwar, to help them manage expectations. In recent weeks, international negotiators have pressed Israel and Hamas to accept a deal that, in its first phase, would see some of the hostages exchanged for many more Palestinian prisoners and a temporary cease-fire, according to officials familiar with the process. But Hamas has held out for a total cessation of hostilities that would leave it in charge of Gaza, a red line for the Israeli government.

“I tell the families not to get their hopes up,” Dr. Bitton said. “In this situation there is no chance.”

Dr. Bitton and his sister have revisited, over and again, that long-ago day in the prison infirmary. Ms. Adar said they try to laugh at the “absurdity” of it all. “On the one hand my brother saved a life, and on the other his sister lost her boy to the same person he saved.”

She assures him there was nothing else he could have done.

“These are our values. Yuval never would have acted differently, never, and neither would I,” she said. “But in the end we were screwed.”

First and foremost by their own government, they said. Hamas is Hamas, as Dr. Bitton put it. “With Sinwar, I know he wants to destroy us,” Ms. Adar echoed. “My greatest anger is that there was no one to defend our borders.”

Not everyone in Israel seems to see it that way. Sitting together in a cafe in Eilat, a town on the Red Sea where the survivors of Nir Oz were first relocated, brother and sister were approached by a stranger. The woman fixed her gaze on Dr. Bitton, apparently recognizing him from his interview on TV. She had a question.

“Why did you save him?” she asked. “Why?”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon. Julie Tate contributed research.

Jo Becker is a reporter in the investigative unit and a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.” More about Jo Becker

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