Inventing Jewish Ritual

This book is not just about Jewish ritual practices but about the dynamics of innovation and continuity in contemporary Jewry and the tensions between the two. Vanessa Ochs, an anthropologist of religion and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, outlines many new rituals and asks several important questions: What gives rise to a new ritual? What gives a ritual authenticity? Does the desire for individual self-fulfillment diminish the community aspect of a ritual? Ochs discusses the impulse to have Jewish ritual respond to many events in the life of a Jew that previously went unrecognized, and considers that the two forces that have influenced the abundance of Jewish ritual innovation in America today are democracy and Jewish feminism; the latter has affected both the adaptation of existing rituals for women and the creation of new ones. Her definition of Jewish rituals is very wide ranging and many of the rituals she describes do not fit into an Orthodox framework. It is hard to take seriously a discussion of a chocolate seder or to see Torah yoga sessions as an alternative to Shabbat morning services, and her discussion of simhat bat seems to incorrectly suggest that the birth of a girl was never celebrated in Jewish ritual before 1973, whereas there were many precedents in Sephardic communities. However, her analyses of innovations at Orthodox Jewish weddings using two articles from a JOFA Journal wedding issue, the new custom of distributing wedding booklets at ceremonies to explain ritual, and the use of Miriam’s cups at the seder, are all fascinating. So is the section she devotes to the decoration of tambourines by Lubavitcher women in preparation to rejoice like Miriam when the Rebbe would announce himself to be Moshiach (Messiah), and how the association of the tambourines with redemption among the female Chabad community has continued. In this book, which garnered the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice, Ochs teaches the important lesson that the passage of time gives innovations authenticity, even in a traditional community, and that many things, that seem strange when introduced, become accepted over time as rituals are made and remade continuously There are few Jewish communities today for example that do not mark the bat mitzvah of a daughter in some public or quasi-public way.