Last update - 00:00 10/01/2008
Getting it rite
By Esther Solomon
Reinventing Jewish Ritual by Vanessa L. Ochs. Jewish Publication Society, 276 pages, $25 (paperback)
Every Sunday morning in the year leading up to my 12th birthday, together with a small cohort of other girls, I would attend a bat hayil (daughter of valor) course at my family's London synagogue. Organized by a volunteer from the Lubavitch movement, the bat hayil was quite deliberately in name and content not a bat mitzvah, with that custom's public ritual and its name suggesting an equivalence to or mimicking of a boy's bar mitzvah. The course devoted some time to the study of a limited number of Jewish texts, but much more on activities such as making challot, embroidering a challah cover, and learning "how to run a Jewish household."
The course's mission was to familiarize us "girls" with the defined roles and religious imperatives of a conservative world view, and in so doing to provide a more feminine and "modest" alternative to the bat mitzvah ceremonies, with their whiff of egalitarianism, that had become mainstream in modern-Orthodox synagogues.
However reactionary it was, the bat hayil course and its truncated ceremony constitute new forms of ritual practice. They are products of the 20th century that the learned sages of the past would not have recognized, and were in this case developed by the ultra-Orthodox, a community wary to the extreme of religious innovation.
The circumscribed innovation of the bat hayil is not the focus of Vanessa L. Ochs's fascinating "Reinventing Jewish Ritual," but the dynamics of conservation and change, and the tensions between them, are very much alive within it. Ochs, a self-declared "ritual innovator," anthropologist of religion (she is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia), and a "liberal, traditional" Jew, explores how new rituals have emerged and continue to multiply primarily within progressive Jewish environments in the United States - making her book an investigation, in Ochs' words, of "minhag America" at the turn of the 21st century.
Ochs is a gentle guide to the world of new Jewish ritual, both for newcomers to the concept and for those who are already immersed within it. She cites her own biography -she grew up in an Orthodox Russian emigre household in the 1950s, where "any Jewish practice that I wasn't used to seemed spiritually illegitimate and aesthetically offensive" - to express her understanding of the resistance that her readers might feel to embracing innovation.
Ochs notes the lack of resonance from which new rituals - praying to the beat of a drum, Torah yoga, mezuzot for cars, healing ceremonies - can suffer. She even admits to her own ritual "cringe moments," for instance, when she sees tallitot (prayer shawls) personalized with the colors of a favorite sports team. On the other hand, Ochs can appreciate the idea that the Passover table should be graced with an orange, to signify lesbian and gay Jews who have been seen as outsiders, or "others," and equipped with "liberated eggs" from free-range chickens.
The key issue for new ritual in the eyes of many Jews, even when compatibility with Jewish law is not a priority, is its authenticity, or at least, the aura of authenticity around it. Ochs examines at length what authenticity really means in a ritual context. Is it a question of age, of content, of presentation? Ochs points out that ritual practices can "acquire the feeling of being natural" - after all, all Jewish practice started at a specific point in time and a specific cultural context, and the rituals we have today would be foreign to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Jewish practice, Ochs contends, is not a collection of museum pieces worthy of cultural preservation. Neither is it a form of hallowed imitation, for we can never reconstruct the first Biblical seder or the first Yom Kippur. The author claims that slavishness with regard to the past retards our own development as individual spiritual agents; she advises us to "stop looking backwards for signs of an authentic Judaism in an enchanted shtetl."
Constantly renewing itself
Ochs points out that Jewish practice is a wide and dynamic spectrum, constantly renewing itself, most successfully when rituals answer specific needs and when they are created using elements of the Jewish ritual toolbox - links to Jewish themes, to ritual objects, and to Hebrew. Ritual can expand the reach of sacred spaces and times to encompass room dedication ceremonies, writing explanatory booklets for a wedding and Shabbat "angel" cards (cards with positive, or "angelic," character traits written on them designed to trigger reflection and discussion); its definition can be widened further to include both broad and specific social justice campaigns such as tikkun olam, ecology and Darfur as religious, ritual imperatives.
In its author's enthusiasm for the new and the self-created, Ochs' book begs some awkward questions. Her desire to escape historical and religious precedent can sometimes create a self-regarding myopia about the historical and religious sources of apparently "new" rituals. Thus she describes the "creation" of a ceremony to celebrate the birth of a Jewish girl and dates its first occurrence to 1970.
In fact, zeved habat (gift of the daughter) ceremonies, in Sephardic and Italian communities, have been held since the seventeenth century; the las fadas ceremony, among the Jews of Spain, the Balkans and Turkey, dates back to the medieval period; and a naming ritual characteristic of the Jews of France and Germany, the Hollekreisch ceremony, is described by Simcha of Vitry in the thirteenth century.
Another difficult thread in Ochs' book is her discussion of the source of "permission" and the definition of "success" for a new ritual. Ochs approvingly sees current-day ritual-makers as connected to a philosophy of self-fulfillment in which community and even God take second place to the subjective feeling of spiritual satisfaction of the individual. By her accounting, ritual success is not indicated by popularity or rabbinic approval or endurance over time but rather by its immediate meaning to the practitioner him- or herself. We are not bound to codes of religious behavior because of guilt, fear or tribal identity, but are individuals on our own quests. This is a "seeker-oriented spirituality ... [Jews today are] spiritual consumers for anything that can make life more worth living."
It is easy to hear on the one hand echoes of the hippie Jews of the 1960s, and on the other, the consumer-as-free-agent approach that is so highly representative of American society, including the Jewish community. The strong democratic and egalitarian impulses are, as Ochs emphasizes, the two primary influences on modern ritual innovation. Perhaps this is simply the next stage in opening up Jewish practice, by which, through history, ritual authority has moved down through the hierarchy from priests to rabbis to congregants, or, in more apt terms, "participants," creating the "Jew It Yourself" generation, as it's been called by noted Jewish blogger Dan Sieradski.
On the other hand, "democratic" religious practice opens the door to an infinite fragmentation and atomization of Jewish ritual, between and within traditional and progressive Jewish denominations. The elevation of the subjective religious satisfaction above all points to potential fractures in the sense of community and in a shared religious culture, whereby one person's "Jewish" ritual appears unrecognizably alien to his or her fellow-Jew.
One example in the book serves to illustrate the gap between Jewish tradition, a necessarily particularistic yet communal construct, and the universalistic feel-good spirit of some new rituals. Ochs describes the journey of a "new" niggun, or wordless melody, entitled the "e-o" niggun, originally picked up by a Jewish educator in South Africa, as it travels through campuses and progressive Jewish groupings.
What is the secret to the viral spread of this South African township melody among Jewish Americans in 2003? Ochs believes that "one clear answer... is [that] young American Jews are yearning to produce and hear a harmony of different voices, particularly at a time when neither the State of Israel nor any single concern within American Judaism galvanizes them. When they sing a song within a Jewish context, it allows them to feel a Jewish connection. Its international flavor allows them to identify, as well, as citizens of the world. The result: they are simultaneously experiencing distinctiveness and connection."
A melody with no distinctive Jewish roots has become an "authentic" anthem for non-establishment Jews by virtue of its catchiness and the context in which it is sung. It is worthwhile considering whether the generic conditions of the presence of an innovative spirit, the collective experience as well as openness to new sources of spiritual content are sufficient to characterize singing such a melody as a Jewish ritual at all.
Some readers will see Ochs' book as another expression of New Age spirituality, in which Judaism is just a tokenistic framework; for others, new rituals are a legitimate and welcoming part of the evolution of Jewish practice that has gone on for thousands of years. What is clear is that many younger Jews are increasingly turning to less established forms of Jewish expressions and identity, such as flourishing independent and post-denominational communities, and new rituals - enduring or not - are surely not far behind.
Even in the most seemingly resistant, traditionalist communities, innovations - such as my bat hayil - that once seemed newfangled, if not subversive, are demonstrating impressive staying power, once they have been domesticated to fit the values of the community within which they are practiced. My bat hayil course culminated in a minor Sunday morning gathering in synagogue, where we participants read out short, uncontentious talks on famous women in the Bible that we hadn't actually written ourselves.
The form and the content of the course and the final ceremony used - unconsciously - elements of Ochs' Jewish ritual toolbox to provide an atmosphere of authenticity and community. However, it failed to furnish a sense of personal spiritual achievement. To mix metaphors, the long quest for the holy grail of Jewish ritual innovation that enjoys both communal and individual resonances is clearly fraught with the perils of shallowness and rupture, but also the reward of creating a unique Jewish idiom in respectful dialogue with the past as well as the present.
Esther Solomon is a senior editor at Haaretz.com.