RETURNING
I remember things from my early childhood from about adult chest height down. So it checks out that my memories of Temple (we didn’t call it synagogue or shul) would be mostly 3’ or lower from the ground.
My dad’s belt buckle-a basic, hollow rectangle, silver on black leather. Trying to braid the ends of his Tallis (prayer shawl) which would not stay. My itchy white tights and shiny black Mary Janes, clacking on the wood parquet floor. My sisters’ dimples and giggles as we tried not to crack up with whatever little mischief we managed to create.
I remember counting the number of pages left in the service. Noting after the Mourner’s Kaddish (which oddly didn’t say one word about death or mourning) we were in the home stretch. Observing which pink ribbon bookmarks were frayed vs. intact. Marking the goal line, placing the aforementioned ribbon at the last song that would announce services end, and for kids, the start of the Oneg (dessert).
After the Oneg, the end of the night remains crystal clear for me too. We headed home, full of sugar, trying to keep our eyes open. During summer we were picking pebbles out of the heels of our translucent pink jellies in the back seat of dad’s car. The smell of white leather seats and the sound of tires on thick gravel, while an occasional headlight flashed in the dark.
Before departure, our focus: dessert. We’d earned it. Our biggest clue that it was nearly time to attack the long tables of treats? In Bedford New York in 1984: Adon Olam. With the first few bars, everyone who had been sleepily making it through Friday night would suddenly come back to life, comically concisely belting out the first line, before fading to a mumble.
When I hear Adon Olam, I am instantly back there; my sense-memories explode. I can practically smell how that tallis bag smelled. Ancient and precious and pristine all at once. To 7-year-old me, the song simply said, “Oh, done? Adieu! Oneg time.” It brought me back to my body, marking my transition from almost asleep on my dad’s blue velvet Tallis bag, to awake and ready to party.
I love how songs transport us, bringing us back in time. We suddenly feel all the feels. It feels like a magical superpower to choose what we want to feel (hope, joy, grief, heartbreak, love.) Do we go deeper with the music or tune out and disconnect a bit from reality?
Returning to the same melody can mean the end of an era or just a small shift in time. In Judaism, songs clue you in on more than just a finish line. Sit down, get up, genuflect, come back up, sway silently, be boisterous. The Wedding March? Stand up; here comes the bride.
A New Year rollsover? Auld Lang Syne, of friends, forgotten. We made another trip around the sun, returning to where we started our orbit the year prior? And beginnings: Feliz Compleaños, in celebration of our birth. The National Anthem’s final bars become a signal: Time to play ball.
Music holds clues to what comes next, quieting the parts of us that can’t handle change. It’s how we transition from rest and Shabbat and go back to our week of work. Like the rhythm and predictability of the Jewish Life Cycle–music is a guide for new developments; returning to the familiar, a comfort.
In dark times, and in times of celebration, returning to the same song becomes a sacred act. For me, Adon Olam took me from: “I am bored and sleepy” to “I am eating cookies,” followed by laughing and bouncing off the walls. Little-me had discerned my own meaning to a millennia’s old poem; and with that, my own ritual was born. I did not yet know the literal connections I would find to this song, some 35 years later.
RITUALS
Ritual helps us pay attention. From the joy of a recovery to the grief of a funeral, ritual helps us inhabit the breadth of human experience.- Rabbi Kami Knapp
Like the transition on Fridays from an ordinary weekday to a sacred eve, and from services to the Oneg, rituals help us flip a switch, even when one moment in time flows into the next.
Can I just say, we Jews have rituals dialed in? It’s true! Except for a brief hiatus (and rejection of all things religious in my 20’s), I always enjoyed the rituals, the music. I never stopped admiring Jewish people’s ingenuity, and practicality.
There’s a prayer for literally everything. Specific clothing or colors to mark each event. Even my atheist, former-catholic partner is on board due to the ritual, familiar, and fairly easy to implement traditions. Need a way to mark an occasion? We got you. “Here! Eat, eat!” (Except on fasting holidays.)
We take stock of the new, the changing, the lost, the found. A birth, a death, a marriage, a transition into adulthood, but also the smaller moments. The end of the day. The first bite of bread.
“These rituals exist because they were successful at helping our forebears to successfully navigate their liminal moments. In our time, people turn to Jewish ritual, in part, because they want to be connected to the Jewish people and to Jewish history…rituals also provide an opportunity for us to express our hopes.”— Life Cycle–Reconstructing Judaism
Hot tip for anyone wanting to make a religion/culture/cult survive 6000 years: Make it simple to connect with, simple to do, and practice with others. As Jew-adjacent Sarah Ruhl noted in the Atlantic, “A faith that endured historical exile required the home to be a refuge for the lighting of candles.” Most of our mourning services take place in our living room, and not a sanctuary.
Jewish rituals have survived millennia because we we focus on building community. We celebrate growth, and grieve losses with friends and family; we bear witness for each other. Yes, this really happened. In our “liminal moments,” our barely perceptible transitions, do not go ignored.
Jewish rituals are rolled out for mourners in a logical procession. Prescriptive and designed for comfort: honoring your grief, the person you lost, and their relationship to their community. Each stage is appropriate for one’s level of grief. Limited choices prevent any opportunity for decision paralysis. Can’t think? No problem! Just point to this or that (Traditional shroud or suit? Pine box or a shiny Cadillac-coffin.)
I remember this grieving “process” when my dad died in 2011. Without leaning on the default Jewish rituals for death, I am sure I’d still be staring in shock, not knowing what to do next.
“Fighting is a way to channel grief, but not sustainable 24/7. It will drown the changemaker before tide has turned. When the weight of things is simply too much, rest is needed most.” — “Bereft of Summer” by Emily Weltman
As a sleep-deprived new mom, recently back to work, suddenly faced with arranging a funeral with my 6-month-pregnant sister, these limitations were so helpful. We had to decide it all: when to bury him, where, in what. The headstone. (What words sum up an entire life for a songwriter?)
The surreal yet practical process remains clear to this day. The jokes, tears, anger, and smiles remain vivid. Frozen moments hold like Kodachrome picture slides from the 80s, brief yet vibrant.
This was when I learned about the Jewish ritual of Kriah. Jews in mourning wear a frayed, “torn” black ribbon, pinned on. Historically Kriah was more prescriptive: A mourner would tear their clothes. The left side was torn for parents.) “It is done standing to show strength in a time of grief.”
This small ritual was present in the Capitol this week, as democratic rituals were interrupted. Serving as floor leader to certify President-elect Biden, Senator Raskin stood up and spoke about losing his son only a few days earlier. Raskin could stand and show his strength thanks to his practice of Kriah. His words prompted “a bipartisan standing ovation” just minutes before MAGA terrorists breached the building. I like to think it helped then too.
“He peered around the room, patting his heart in gratitude. His fingers lingered over a torn black cloth affixed to the lapel of his gray suit jacket. The day before, Raskin had buried his 25-year-old son…”– Jamie Raskin Lost His Son. Then He Fled a Mob.
Despite his grief, he said he felt his son was with him. The ritual of Kriah was present as a symbol of strength in unmitigated pain and terror. I find Kriah brilliant for its simplicity. One small, sacred act serves as a signal to others. The ribbon says, “I am suffering, please handle with care.” Who in our nation isn’t grieving this week?
REFLECTING
Rituals from Judaism helped me stay grounded when I was lost. By connecting with the past through rituals, we are active participants, rather than bystanders. How do we find our bearings, our place, in this story?
It’s important we all pause and honor what we lost in 2020. Our world changed dramatically overnight and much of it out of sight. We must honor the experiences and those who’ve disappeared, especially when so many have denied that people everywhere were dying.
“When we know we are the bridge, we understand just how important we are, and why our impact must never be taken for granted.”-Layla F. Saad
Without rituals, how would we have made sense of all this change and profoundly decentering loss, especially when 90% of our time is now spent in sweatpants? As Adrienne Marie Browne noted in her farewell letter to 2020, “i got to cook and do yoga and take baths and dance and think and pray and be in ritual from the same place where i write all my thoughts.”
As Kamala Harris said at the DNC: “ We are a nation that’s grieving. Grieving the loss of life, the loss of jobs, the loss of opportunities, the loss of normalcy. And yes, the loss of certainty.”
In 2021, grieving and uncertainty continue. More lives were lost this week from Covid and domestic terrorists. We must acknowledge the fear and anticipatory grief of what’s to come. We may have lost our democracy.
As we look back, maybe you’ve been lucky not to lose a loved one, but, everyone has lost something — a best friendship, a lost dream vacation, a big wedding, or a graduation ceremony. We lost revered icons: Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Representative John Lewis, and actor Chadwick Boseman. We lost a summer..
When our Collective Grief grew, the need for rituals and being with our “tribe” did too. Yet, coming together to grieve wasn’t easy.
First, (rightfully) the number of gatherers permitted in person has been limited. Jews technically have a minimum number of mourners required to begin services: a minyan, (once defined as 10 men). How Judaism has community baked in is usually smart, (as long as we update a minyan to include any gender).
Second, virtual rituals can be awkward. I admit I was not a fan of zoom spirituality at first. It felt like cheap take-out, “religion-to-go”. But, when push came to shove, after 6 months in quarantine, and deeper grief, I got over it by the fall, in time for High Holidays.
On Rosh Hashanah, I needed the familiar acts and words to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died earlier that day. I logged in, and just 72 easy steps later, I was in a Zoom room service. It worked out surprisingly well.
I was able to cry, hear the words clearly, ignore the millions of distractions for my ADHD brain. I was able to be horizontal after a taxing week and take breaks when I could no longer sit still. And while I was alone, I knew I was with my community of liberal Jewish mourners, spread across Portland and beyond.
For Erev Yom Kippur, I’ve had my own ritual for 10 years. Once a year, I go to services to be alone, and sit, to remember my dad––to just be (instead of kibbitzing with my yentas.)
Stuck at home a few years ago, I played Kol Nidre on Youtube, trying to recreate some feeling of gathering with others, who were also reflecting on the fragility of life. My ad hoc version of digital solemnity lacked an important community element. I missed the solidarity of fellow Jews, also acknowledging their lost love ones. But in 2020, I was able to feel solidarity, knowing my friends were online in PJs too.
Both virtual 2020 services were unexpectedly more intimate. Almost face to face, spiritual leaders, rather than spread out over a large crowd, seem to be speaking only to me. As Jeremy Smith noted in the Slate Zoom funerals “might be better than an in-person one. Certainly, it is no less ‘real.’”
Tuning in for memorials or services online can have other surprising benefits.
Two days after an intimate burial with only close family in attendance, 97 extended family members and friends of their dad’s logged on to the platform from all over the country.
“We got to celebrate with a lot of people who knew him from different parts of his life, who wouldn’t have been able to attend otherwise,” his daughter told CNN.
Hiding from our grief, or trying to ignore it will not result in healing. As my Rabbi shared, we need “a container of resilience” and for me, that container comes through shared rituals and deep analytical conversation, (something Jews enjoy, to a fault).
Tara Brach, in her book True Refuge, writes about the distinction between the kinds of refuge that support our well-being and security and those we think protect us but don’t. “False refuges,” she calls them. She writes. “They can’t save us from what we most fear, the pain of loss and separation.” What will help us is “a refuge that is vast enough to embrace our most profound experience of suffering.” In other words, true refuge doesn’t block out fear. It involves creating a container of resilience and companionship through which we can live our lives wholeheartedly even with fear present.- Rabbi Ben Barrett, Amidst Fear, Building Refuge
Overwhelmed by 2020, I needed new “containers” of my own, (not my “false refuge” of Twitter, doom scrolling.) Deeper into activism and parenting than I had been in years, I needed to make space to process. Once again the answer came through rituals and community. Just last month I joined two cohorts looking for the same comforts and safe containers.
One was a group led by “unparenting coach” Nic Strack, and Olivia-James of Inquisitive Human, called Holding Tension. discussed relationships, grief, and how two things can be true at once. We met 3 times over a rough month; it was a “true refuge” in every sense.
The other space, I found through my congregation, a small study group learning Middot, once a week via Zoom. We learned about 1 Hebrew word, 1 concept a week, and focused on practicing that 1 Jewish virtue or value, (like Yirah, יִראָה which translates to awe, wonder, apprehension).
That 6-week hour-long class was all I could manage for myself. (Zoom yoga is tough with ADHD, to lie there still, with open tabs of my laptop calling.) I could think about one word a week, or say 1 meditation, right?
It was simple: 1 word a week becomes a “sacred action.” By the end, we were all so happy to have that “container” to process everything going on. We agreed as a cohort to do the entire 6-weeks again, (first thing in 2021), holding space for each other, even when our spiritual leader could not join.
RENEWING
While I look forward to continuing in a “container of resilience”, I can’t help but wonder: what new grief or joy will 2021 bring? How do we mark the change from a year of hell to a year of hope? What will honor all that we have lost and all that we discovered?
“When we have rituals in place, we create structures within which we live our lives. They keep us standing, and they help us continue to move in our direction of choice.”–Daisy Rosales
To move forward together, what if we collectively practice Kriah? What if we wear a black ribbon? Wear this ribbon in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, too. During the National Anthem, instead of kneeling what if we “tear our left sleeve, while standing silently”? (Jews don’t really kneel anyway; it’s in the “rules”.)
Like the red AIDS ribbon of the ’80s, we can all say, this is happening. I see your fear and grief; I am with you. The ribbon would identify allies and signal fellow mourners.
Or we could choose one word. Like Middot, simplicity sticks. Maybe our word is כָבוד, kavod, which means dignity, honor, & respect.
For me, a song, stuck in my head since childhood, is most fitting. As I discovered writing this, Adon Olam is all about life and death. transformations, shifting, loss, hope, and unity. It is said upon waking, sleeping, and apparently as someone lay dying.
1000 years later this poem/song is perfect for pandemic life’s transitions. From 2020 to 2021. From the GOP to a true democratic leader. From death and dying to embracing life. I will hum it when friends get the vaccine, liberating us from isolation.
Keep in mind:
Jews don’t mourn forever. We have 7 days of deep in-it mourning. Then 1 year after burial, we return to our loved one’s grave, to “unveil” the headstone, marking the end of our period of mourning. A return to the end, and a new beginning. After, each year, we light a yortzeit candle from home in remembrance.
Rituals help define “barely perceptible transitions”; we can decide when mourning is over.
To mark the end of this pandemic, unveiling a new start, I can repeat these words, subbing “The Universe” for “God”:
[Into God’s hand] I commit my spirit
When I sleep, and I awake
And with my spirit, my body
[Adonai], is with me, I will not fear.
With tiny rituals like a ribbon or a song, we can embrace grief, not fear it. Honor transitions in any way you choose. Find that connection with “The Universe” and your people.
As we continue to be together in our isolation, we will need more companionship, more empathy, in 2021. These losses deserve proper attention. We must continue to “embrace our most profound experience of suffering.” And, we must create our own rituals to cope with whatever lies ahead.
May we all be comforted.
And may the memory of all of us be a blessing for each other, now and always.
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: Emily O. Weltman