About ritual

 
Art by Betsy Platkin Teutsch

Ritualwell.org is all about Jewish ritual innovations for holidays and lifecycles as well as new expressions of time-honored Jewish customs. We want to encourage you to be creative in making or adapting rituals that meet your own personal, religious, and aesthetic requirements.

Making a ritual your own can involve many dedicated hours of research, writing and compiling, or it can involve spending just a little bit of time personalizing something that already exists. But regardless of how much time you want to (or can) spend working on your ritual, it is helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the ritual?
• Is it to make and mark a transition?
• To honor and celebrate?
• To enable healing?
• To strengthen and solidify relationship?
• To remember?
• To state beliefs and express hope for the future?

Your ritual is probably going to accomplish a combination of these purposes. Thinking clearly about which of these is most important to you should help you end up with something that achieves your desired outcome.

How to Start

In LIFECYCLES: Jewish Women on Life Passages & Personal Milestones, Volume 1 (Jewish Lights), Rabbi Debra Orenstein suggests thinking about a ritual in three stages—a beginning, middle, and end. In the course of the ritual, the person moves out of his or her old stage of life, through a transition, and into an after stage. For example, a couple getting married moves from their separate single lives (marked in the ceremony by their separation before the wedding/separate tisches (ceremonial tables)/separate entrance/mikveh), to joining together in marriage (kiddushin/exchange of rings), to celebrating their new status as a married couple (seven blessings, wedding feast).

While all rituals might not divide so neatly, it is useful to think about the moment of transition.

• What will happen?
• Who will witness it?
• How will they know that it that has happened?
• What change is taking place?
• What will be different after the ritual?

In my experience, the strongest rituals are those in which something actually happens—for example, an exchange of rings, the giving of a name, immersion in a mikveh.

That "something" can be effected in words; it does not have to be a physical act, though the physical act can make it more tangible. Often we are acting out something that has already occurred, play-acting as it were—the couple was already a couple before they got married, the baby's name was already chosen.

Ceremony makes the event official before assembled friends and family and indirectly, before the greater community of Israel. If we invest belief in the power of ritual, the ritual itself effects a change in our status (by, for example, creating a new family in the people Israel or by entering a baby into the covenant).

Ritual Checklist

Spend some time reminding yourself of your past experience with ritual.

• Think about rituals you love and rituals you don't like at all.
• Think about what both works for you about ritual and what doesn't.
• Think both in terms of Jewish ritual and more secular ritual.
• What kind of birthday parties do you like?
• What is it about Shabbat that makes you feel good and what about it pushes you away?
• Notice if patterns emerge.
• Are there certain settings you find more spiritual?
• Are you a person who likes taking charge and being the center of attention, or not?
• Is music important to you?
• What size group feels comfortable and appropriate for the ritual you are contemplating?

An incomplete list of factors to consider (some of these may seem very important and others less so):

Setting – Inside/outside, home/synagogue, sitting on floor/pillows/folding chairs, around a table like a seder.

Language – Hebrew/English/other; Who does the talking?; Do you use traditional God-language or alternative language?

Participants – Usually it is the act of witnessing by a community of friends and or family that gives a ritual potency. Who is present (or absent) and how big or small a group you gather will affect the nature of the ritual and how it will feel for you. Consider the advantages and disadvantages of your different options. Consider also how you invite those present to participate (e.g., offering blessings, carrying the baby, even saying amen).

Time – Both when in the day and year to hold it and for how long.

Documents – Do you want to create a document you will take away from this ceremony like a ketubah (wedding contract) or a get (divorce agreement)? Do you want the participants to take something home with them?

Tzedakah – One way in which our personal joy or sadness can be shared with the community is through the giving of tzedakah (charity). There are many creative ways to do this—wedding guests can be invited to donate to a cause of the couple's choosing; toys can be collected at a babynaming to give to a children's hospital.

Music/Song – Some kind of music, singing, or chanting is an essential aspect of most ritual. This can be done with or without instruments, in any language, or with no words at all.

Food – Almost every Jewish ritual has food associated with it. Sometimes there are prescribed foods (e.g., matzah for Passover, challah for Shabbat, eggs for a funeral) and sometimes just the very sharing of a meal is a way in which the community comes together.

Ritual Symbols – As was indicated above, there are myriad Jewish ritual items that you might want to incorporate into your ritual in traditional and non-traditional ways. These elements include different kinds of candles, symbolic foods, ritual clothing, and other objects. Use ritualwell's Symbols Tapestry as your toolbox for creating your own ceremony.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Less is more. It is tempting to include every good idea you have in your ritual. This can make for an overly long ceremony. Giving the elements you have chosen the time they deserve is more important than including everything that could be included. Think about which elements are central; think about the movement of the ceremony (the beginning, middle, and end), and keep it short and meaningful.

Avoid over-explanation. A successful ritual should be relatively self-explanatory, like a work of art. While some explanation is probably necessary, think about when and how you explain things. You might want to introduce the ritual and explain what you will do before you begin and then go through the ritual without interrupting the flow. More explanation could be included at the end or handed out in a written program. In general, you will need to strike a balance between helping people understand the ritual and letting the ritual flow and speak, as it were, for itself.

Balance the personal and the communal. A successful ritual is both. If it is too personal it may be opaque to the participants and probably others won't be able to reuse it. (This may not matter to you). The personal, however, makes the ritual more meaningful for everyone. The personal is what brought you here and is at the heart of the matter. So find a balance between your own words and experiences and words of the tradition and the community.

Don't do it alone! Your ritual will be enhanced by planning and talking about it with others. You can get help from a rabbi, a teacher, a Jewish librarian, a person or clergy member of another faith, or a friend—anyone who has a good sense of these things. The very act of talking it through with someone else will help you clarify what it is you are trying to do. Others can also help you figure out if your ritual rings true, if it makes sense, if it accomplishes what you hope to—in short, if it works.

Check the ritualwell.org bibliography, which lists both general sources on ritual as well as books and links unique to the ritual you are planning.

Have fun! Be your own wizard! Don't be afraid to make "mistakes"—the people you gathered are there to support you. And remember: ritual is one of the most powerful tools we have for facing the chaos and joy of life. Use it!

For an article by Marcia Cohn Spiegel with more ideas about planning a ritual, please click here.