RITUAL & PRAYER

• RITUAL CREATION
• INVISIBLE PASSAGES:  DIVORCE, CHILDLESSNESS, ​AGING 
• ​PRAYER

---

SEEN IN BETWEEN
REVISITING JEWISH RITUAL 

The Old Made New and the New Made Sacred: The Creation of New Jewish Ritual

Drawing on her experience designing and facilitating rituals, as well as working on the development of Jewish Milestones—the nonprofit organization she cofounded that serves an educational resource for Jews seeking support in creating meaningful Jewish lifecycle rituals—in these sessions Rachel described some of the ritual innovations she witnessed that have deeply impacted the lives of contemporary North American Jews and shared some “best practices” in ritual creation including an introduction to Dr. Vanessa Ochs’ Jewish Ritual Toolbox. 
​

Regarding Invisible Passages

​Celebration of birth, bar/bat mitzvah, and marriage are central to Jewish life, yet equally significant experiences such as childlessness, aging and divorce, most often remain unacknowledged by the Jewish community and unmarked in our ritual lives.  In this series of one-day workshops we study relevant Jewish texts, traditions, and innovative rituals. 

Honoring Loss: The Challenge of Childlessness 
The struggle with infertility or the pain of miscarriage or stillbirth can be devastating. The feeling of loss is often compounded by the silence in the Jewish community that surrounds these experiences.   In this workshop we  look at the examples of Biblical heroines Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah and the Wife of Manoach, as well as Rabbinic texts that convey a profound understanding of the psychosocial components of infertility.   
​
Separate Self: Feeling Whole After Divorce
Though Jewish texts deal extensively with divorce, most passages, like the divorce ("get") ceremony itself, are legalistic and austere.  Both the literature and the ceremony fail to acknowledge the emotional and spiritual consequences of divorce.  In this workshop we explore Jewish texts that speak of separation as holiness.   

Becoming an Elder: Crowns of Glory on Graying Hair
The Torah offers us advice on aging, laws about the treatment of elders, and a variety of images of some of the best-known characters in their “golden” years. Through a close reading of the stories of Sarah, Jacob, and King David, we extract life lessons for ourselves and our aging loved ones.  Then we look at ideas and innovations that have begun to play themselves out in new rituals created to acknowledge the process of aging. 
​

From Eternity to Here: 
How to Make Havdalah... Meaningful

Havdalah: The ancient ritual to ease the transition from Shabbat into the rest of the week is brief, but dramatic and delightfully sensual. Replete with themes of boundary setting, the pull of materialism and the place of spirituality, as well as a recipe for anxiety management, havdalah has the potential to become resonant and powerful in the lives of many modern Jews. 
​

Bakashat Elohim: Desires Divine

Whether initiated in desperation or gratitude, expressed through monologue or dialogue, in prayer or song, communication with the Divine plays an important role in the narratives of most Biblical heroes. Biblical women, from Eve to Esther, make use of a variety of formats to articulate their wide-ranging motives—from the sublime to the ridiculous—for divine connection. What do Biblical women want from God? What does God express directly to them? Where and how do these communications take place? 
​

​Tefillat Nashim: Jewish Women’s Prayers

Using Aliza Lavie’s book of that name (in Hebrew, Yediyot Ahronoth; 2005) as a structuring device, we survey the subjects (from sleep to volunteerism, from rain to menopause), contexts (Tunisia to Auschwitz) forms and content of women’s prayers from Biblical times to the present. The insights afforded by this overview can be helpful in reflecting on both the historical trajectory of women’s prayers and the deep roots of many contemporary Jewish feminist innovations in prayer.