By Tamara Cohen and Rabbi Rona Shapiro
Each of us, no matter how secular or religious, has rituals in our lives. One woman remembers years ago, when her sister and she waited for the school bus on a busy street corner by their house. The girls had a phrase they said each time they heard the screech of an ambulance. Neither considered that they had created a ritual. They never discussed the language they wanted to use for their prayer.
But they recognized that the situation of hearing an ambulance demanded a response. There was a dangerous thing happening, and the sisters wanted a way to bring order and calm to themselves as witnesses to that danger. The girls also wanted a way to express their hope that the danger would pass and everyone in trouble would be okay.
Children constantly create ritual: to put dolls to sleep, end fights with friends, and make sense of the mystery of the world. Adults often have private rituals, too, in how we leave the house or brush our teeth.
We preserve these patterns unselfconsciously, and they help us feel safe. For life's major thresholds – birth, puberty, illness, death – however, we often turn to religion. While Judaism offers a wealth of traditions for such occasions, we too often hand over to religious "experts" – usually rabbis – all of our creative potential for using ritual to make meaning in our lives. Instead of seeing ourselves as partners with the experts, if not experts ourselves, we let others "do ritual" for us, or we forgo ritual all together.
The Need for Ritual
Life has a way of reminding us of our need for ritual.
- A woman miscarries.
- Another gives birth.
- A couple decides to begin the adoption process.
- A grandfather who expressed his wish to be cremated dies and no rabbi in the area is willing to officiate.
- Two men fall in love and want to sanctify their relationship.
- A girl tells her mother that she has just gotten her period.
- A woman turns 65 and wants to celebrate.
- A youngest son goes to college, and his parents are suddenly faced with a new reality.
Life happens. And it presents us with changes – unexpected and unanticipated. As we face these changes, we have choices.
- Do we want to sanctify them?
- Do we use them as opportunities to connect ourselves to generations past and future?
- Do we choose to share our transitions with a larger community?
- Do we want our personal lives to be bridges to our Jewish lives and bridges to the Divine?
Sometimes, when we answer these questions in the affirmative, the next step is quite simple. There are thousand-year-old traditions of what blessings to say, what foods to eat, what clothes to wear. But, sometimes, Jewish tradition does not yet have in place the ritual that will fill our need. There is a blessing to say upon seeing a rainbow, but, until recently, there has been no blessing to say upon giving birth. There is a ritual for marking the beginning of Jewish adulthood, but, until recently, there has been no ritual for honoring the passage into Jewish old age.
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