Rethinking the Holidays : New Rosh Hashanah Rituals Mark Emerging Trend of Spiritual Renewal, Growing Influence of Women

Rosh Hashanah services at most synagogues follow a time-honored format year in and year out. But not at Maryland’s Columbia Jewish Congregation, thanks to an annual rewriting of parts of the liturgy by the rabbi and synagogue members.

“I try to involve people in rethinking the holiday each year so it’s fresh for them,” said Rabbi Martin Siegel, who leads the 400-family, independent synagogue in Columbia, Md. To aid the process he also asks members to inventory their spiritual pluses and minuses on a form included in the synagogue newsletter.

Across the country in Seattle, Rabbi Ted Falcon asks Rosh Hashanah worshipers at Bet Alef synagogue to imagine themselves standing before a heavenly throne containing “an energy that both witnesses and blesses.”

The exercise, said Falcon, enables congregants “to see themselves as they are. Rosh Hashanah is about spiritual transformation, but you can’t change without first taking honest stock in a non-critical manner. Visualization directly connects you to the process.”

The innovations introduced by Siegel and Falcon are attempts to make Rosh Hashanah--the Jewish new year--more meaningful to their congregants. The two-day holiday, one of Judaism’s holiest, begins this year at sundown Sept. 24.

The two rabbis are not alone.

A growing segment of the American Jewish community is experimenting with liturgical and ritual expressions at a time when mainstream Jewish leaders are expressing concern over the large numbers of Jews who are no longer moved by the faith’s traditional forms.

Those involved say their repackaging is an attempt to bring alive Judaism’s deepest spiritual truths in ways that touch the lives of modern American Jews--those for whom the old ways no longer work, but who still long for religious fulfillment.

“We’re trying to reconnect those who find the juice has gone out of Judaism for them,” said Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center, a Jewish spirituality think tank in Philadelphia. “They’re looking for the joy, not the oy, of Judaism.”

Rosh Hashanah is a traditional time for Jews to reflect on their actions of the previous year in light of Judaism’s highest ideals. For many Jews, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which follows Oct. 4, are the only time they visit a synagogue all year.

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A 1990 study by the Council of Jewish Federations found that while only about 11 percent of the nation’s more than 5.5 million Jews attend synagogue weekly, about 60% attend on the High Holy Days, as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are collectively called.

However, the effort to create Jewish religious forms is not restricted to the High Holy Days. Instead, it has spawned a host of new rituals and prayers for a broad variety of Jewish holidays, life-cycle celebrations and daily events.

The effort is part of a larger movement within American Judaism known as Jewish Renewal. Once restricted to a Jewish subculture heavily

influenced by a 1960s emphasis on spirituality, feminism, the environment and social equality, Jewish Renewal has gradually gained acceptance on the liberal edges of the American Jewish mainstream.

“There’s a new openness to new forms of Jewish expression in mainstream communities,” said Rabbi Warren Stone of Temple Emanuel, a 600-family synagogue in the Washington suburb of Kensington, Md.

“The world is changing, people are changing and Judaism is changing as well,” said Stone, who has introduced guided meditations and healing prayers at his Reform congregation. “The kindling has become a flame, and the flame is moving into the Jewish denominational world.”

A unifying feature of most new rituals is an emphasis on spirituality. Often, the focus is on contemplation or meditation, which are more often associated with Eastern religions than Judaism.

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Rabbi David A. Cooper in the San Fernando Valley, author of “Renewing Your Soul: A Guided Retreat for the Sabbath and Other Days of Rest,” said the emphasis is part of the larger attempt to “take what is intellectual and often dry and make it personal so people can feel a real connection with their faith.”

Cooper, co-rabbi of Makom Ohr Shalom, a “contemplative” congregation in Woodland Hills, said Judaism has always had its meditative side.

“Kabbalists [Jewish mystics] and Hasidic Jews made meditation a part of their practice. It’s only modern rabbinic Judaism, which has been influenced by rationalism, that rejects contemplative practices,” he said.

Many of the Jewish Renewal innovations have originated with Jewish women. One example is a ritual developed to mark the miscarriage of a baby--a personal loss Jewish feminists say is given inadequate attention by traditional Judaism’s emphasis on the mother’s survival.

Modern medicine has largely reduced the threat to the mother’s life, said Rabbi Debra Orenstein of Los Angeles, but has not eliminated “the felt need to express the loss of the child.” The miscarriage ritual, said Orenstein, editor of the multi-volume “Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Passages & Personal Milestones,” allows for expression of that grief.

The ceremony involves tearing a baby blanket and the recitation of psalms that speak of loss and grieving. Tearing clothing is a traditional sign of mourning among Jews.

Jewish mothers also traditionally light candles representing their children on the Sabbath and important holidays. To represent the miscarriage, an unlit candle is used, said Orenstein, a senior fellow at the Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies in Los Angeles.

Another innovation created by women is the establishment of all-female Rosh Chodesh groups that meet to celebrate the new moon. Traditional Judaism marks the new moon with added prayers. Rosh Chodesh (Hebrew for new moon) groups have built on that by adding feasts, personal sharing, singing and stories about female Jewish religious figures.

The innovations do have their critics.

Most Orthodox Jews--who constitute less than 10% of the American Jewish community--see tampering with time-honored liturgies and rituals as a violation of immutable Jewish law. Others dismiss the changes as a threat to existing Jewish organizations and concerns.

UCLA professor Fredelle Z. Spiegel, writing recently in the influential Jerusalem Report magazine, compared the movement’s focus on individual spiritual growth to “eating kosher-style.” By that, she meant it is a pale imitation of traditional, “kosher” Jewish life that places great emphasis on community involvement.

Spiegel, an adjunct professor of Jewish studies, wondered whether that emphasis on the individual threatens to weaken Jewish support for Israel.

“Will inward-looking American Jews feel responsible for the support of a fragmented Israel, or an Israel whose official religious Establishment grows ever more rigid?” wrote Spiegel. “Don’t put any money on it.”

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The Shalom Center’s Waskow disagreed. “We are just as communal as other Jews, just as committed to Israel, although we may not see Israel as the center of Jewish life,” he said.

Moreover, Waskow said Spiegel’s criticism was indicative of mainstream Judaism’s focus on Jewish pain--the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and an Israel surrounded by enemies. That focus, he said, is a prime reason many younger American Jews are turned off by traditional Jewish concerns.

“Traditional Judaism has a great deal of wisdom,” said Waskow, “but some of it is not so wise today, like its patriarchal attitude toward women. Wisdom is provision. It changes, and when it does we need new ways of expressing these changes through ritual and prayers.”

In his new book, “Down to Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex and the Rest of Life,” Waskow notes that Judaism has repeatedly changed to fit the needs of the times.

Today’s Orthodox Judaism, for example, developed after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple prevented continuation of such biblical Jewish practices as animal sacrifices. And Reform and Conservative Judaism--the two largest Jewish religious movements in the United States--developed as a response to the 18th-Century Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality.

Waskow believes that today’s changes in liturgy and ritual--and their underlying message of renewing the faith--may someday prove as profound as the rabbinic innovations instituted after the Second Temple period.

“It will take centuries,” he wrote, “to understand fully and to name accurately what we are doing.”