ritual

Where do rituals come from? What's odd is that nothing exactly happens during most rituals - nothing observable, that is. In many ways, my wife and I were no different on the morning before our wedding than in the evening afterward. And in another very real way, everything had changed. That's the effect of ritual. By going through a religious event, we announce the sacredness and the continuity of tradition in public. At the same time, we take the ordinary and imbue it with holiness.

Take the Bar Mitzvah: this Jewish coming of age ceremony probably once served as a tribal initiation rite, like those still seen in some pre-industrial societies. Now, it's marked by an adolescent Jew's coming up to read from the Torah (Pentateuch). Maybe one family in ancient Judea wanted to mark their son's puberty in a public Israelite way. They approached their local religious leader and asked how they could celebrate the day in a special way. The sage made a few suggestions, and later, other families and communities adopted the idea. With time, it became the local practice, and eventually a religious standard.

Gradually, these rituals can fill up our lives. The sages and rabbis of the Jewish tradition understood this principle well. God cannot be contained or explained, and in order to appreciate the divine in daily life, we need actions and symbols. That's how ritual serves. Early ritual innovators created these "metaphors for the sacred," as Rabbi Cheryl Peretz calls them.

These metaphors bring blessing into our lives and draw us closer to God. For me, being Jewish and doing Jewish rituals add warmth to my life. Judaism gives me a comparison against which to consider the value (or faddishness) of the modern, liberal, Western experience. I can renew my focus through regular prayer, among other rituals.

Because rituals fit within a coherent system, a traditional person can accept the less than ideal aspects of the system as much as possible, so as best to gain the blessing. Also, he or she respects the historic practice, and avoids radical change so as not to do excessive violence to the system. Some harmful practices or trivial aspects do get left behind. Personally, I am conservative in this – I think it is necessarily to be humble and also smart to give the tradition the benefit of the doubt.