On Ritual Innovation

It was this Sabbath, Shabbat Parah of 1922, that American Jewish history and arguably all of Jewish history changed forever, and in my opinion, for the better. Less than a mile away from here – on 86th and Central Park West, at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, twelve-year-old Judith Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, was called to the bimah for her bat mitzvah. She recited the brakhah, read a portion of the Torah in Hebrew and in English, and changed the course of our people forever. “No thunder sounded,” Judith Kaplan later recalled, “no lightning struck … and the rest of the day was all rejoicing.” Truth be told, the world did not change overnight. It was not until 1931 that the first girl was called up as a bat mitzvah in a Reform synagogue, and by 1948 only about one-third of Conservative congregations conducted bat mitzvah ceremonies. But here we are, just shy of one hundred years since that propitious date, and neither we nor the kosher catering industry could imagine Jewish life without bat mitzvahs. The ritual itself may not be uniform, but its practice has become axiomatic for Reform, Conservative and even many Orthodox communities. Today the passage of Jewish girls into womanhood is marked no differently than that of Jewish boys into manhood – a momentous ritual innovation that continues to shape Jewish life and living.

Ritual innovation is never a simple process. Religious or secular, private or communal, we count on our rituals to be stable; they are the touchstones of our identity. We attend public events expecting them to begin with the singing of national anthems. At the seventh inning of a baseball game we instinctively stand up with tens of thousands of strangers to sing “Take Me Out to The Ball Game.” On those rare occasions that the New York Jets do move the football ten yards forward, we know to say, “And that’s a Jets … First Down!” Most rituals are far less public and conscious. Think of the “pleases,” and “thank yous” and other social graces that pepper our days. Rituals are the stable and shared language by which bridges are established between individuals or among groups of people.

As Jews we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg. We may call ourselves the “People of the Book,” but it is our rituals that define who we are as a people. Our rites of passage from brisses to bat mitzvahs, to breaking glasses under the huppah, including the customs of the shiva house. It could be waving the lulav on Sukkot, spinning a dreidel on Hanukkah, or bringing in Shabbat by lighting the candles. Our rituals don’t just connect us to each other, they prompt us to draw from our sacred past. Think about how many rituals are codified into the Passover Seder that we will celebrate in a few weeks. The intended and cumulative effect is stated: To “see ourselves as if we came out of Egypt.” Rituals operate in what ritual theorists call the subjunctive tense, a world of “as if,” a world that although it is not our actual reality, defines our identity. (Seligman, et. al., Ritual and Its Consequences) Most of all, rituals give expression to a nonverbal world which would otherwise lack expression. Ask anyone who has had a piece of clothing torn upon the passing of a loved one, placed a shovelful of earth into an open grave, beaten their chest in true contrition over a wrong that can not be righted, or watched their child stand at the Torah for the first time. Ritual done right accesses a place in the human soul that can not be reached by words or by any other means. Ritual done right is not only critical to who we are as Jews, but sits at the heart of what it means to be human.

All of which is why, when we change ritual, or worse, bungle it or fumble it, people get very, very sensitive. As many here know, my parents are British. As many may not know, my dad doesn’t like turkey – never has, never will. To this day, I recall with great horror the year that my English mother – as a gesture of love for my dad – prepared Cornish hens for Thanksgiving dinner. Intellectually, who cares? It was one bird switched out for another. Intellect, however, has nothing to do with it. For me and my American-bred brothers, the memory of that Thanksgiving dinner without turkey sits like an open wound. The danger of innovation is, I believe, the message of today’s Torah reading. It is never stated what the sin of Aaron’s two sons Nadav and Avihu actually was. And there is certainly never any indication that whatever their sin was, it merited the punishment it received. All the text says is that they offered an “eish zarah,” most often understood as an alien or foreign fire, but more simply translated as something “different.” The prior verses provide specific instruction on how to make an offering but Nadav and Avihu (like my mother) did otherwise. Was it good? Was it bad? We don’t know, and that’s not the point. All we know is that it was different: different than instructed, different than expected, different than what came before. It was different. They innovated and they paid the price – a rather large one at that.

It is precisely because we take ritual so seriously, that whether it is Nadav and Avihu or Mordecai Kaplan, there is a natural inclination to resist and reject anything that is different than what came before. We know that every ritual, from the red heifer ritual of today’s maftir, to the bat mitzvah ceremony, was by definition initially an act of innovation. In the words of the University of Virginia’s Dr. Vanessa Ochs, “Part of the efficacy of rituals is that we can easily trick ourselves into believing that our invented rituals were never new, re-embraced or remade. But the fact is that all of our rituals were at one point created. They were new and then, because they were embraced, they became real.” ("Reinventing Jewish Ritual" in Contact: Journal of the Steinhardt Foundation, Winter 2010) I love it when I get anxiety-filled phone calls from new parents asking about the permissible window for their daughter’s baby naming – as if their daughter’s Jewish identity is somehow contingent on a ritual that was not in existence for the first few thousand years of our people’s history. Legal battles are waged for the right to display a Hanukkah menorah in public space alongside Christmas decorations, as if the integrity of our people is somehow hanging on our ability to do something that nobody did until 50 years ago. Intellectually, it makes no sense. But when it comes to ritual, intellect has nothing to do it with it. Jews, but really all people, believe their ritual life to be stable, sacred and inviolable – even, and sometimes especially, when it comes to rituals that are unto themselves innovations.

If there was ever a place where we could track this conversation, it is right here in this room. Let’s start with some fun ones. Did you know that up until the mid-1980s, top hats and tails were standard High Holiday garb for our now increasingly open-necked bimah? Cantor Lefkowitz once shared with me that the late Cantor Putterman did not allow the final stanza of Ein Keloheinu, whether he objected to its theology or maybe just wanted to get to kiddush a little sooner we don’t know. For that matter, in the days of Rabbi Nadich, z”l, and the late Cantor Putterman, Kaddish Shalem, the full kaddish, was never recited – the leadership believing it to be a break in the flow of the service. Until 1958, this congregation used the Reconstructionist Siddur, a prayer book that was burned publicly in Midtown Manhattan by the Agudath Harabonim in 1945, the same year we adopted it. In fact, long after Rabbi Steinberg’s tenure, many in this congregation continued to recite an alternative brakhah when called to the Torah, rejecting language of chosenness (asher bahar banu mikol ha-amim) for the softer option of being brought closer to God’s service (asher keravtanu le’avodato). We used to stand whenever we said the sh’ma, but we don’t anymore. There was never duchenen, the recital of the priestly blessing by kohanim, until Rabbi Lincoln’s tenure, and it was only under the influence of the former Chancellor of the Seminary that our community instituted the full Torah reading instead of the congregation’s long-standing practice of the triennial Torah reading. I can give you a million more examples – when we bow, how we pray, the melodies and prayer books we use. The present-day very eclectic ritual life of Park Avenue Synagogue is a reflection of our idiosyncratic congregational history. Rituals have been retained and rituals shed based on the sensibility, needs, and aspirations of our congregational family at any given moment.

That process, to be clear, continues today. It is because I believe in the centrality of ritual in Jewish life that we must be as thoughtful about ritual innovation as we have always been. I am eyes wide open to the fear of the “different.” But as sure as I am that the changes made by my predecessors did not come without their share of growing pains, I am doubly sure that the present strength of our community is a reflection of the trust, care and courage with which those changes were made. Any changes we will make to our Shabbat morning service – the timing, the Torah reading, the length, the music – will be implemented with the same concern for the Jewish future as has always guided our congregational efforts. The specifics will change – they always have – but the overall goal remains as constant as ever. To create a service of the mind and heart, responsive to those sitting in the pews and accessible to those seeking a point of entry. Will it be easy? Of course not. Will we get it right from the get-go? I doubt it. But if we trust each other, if we are willing to share a spirit of experimentation, and if we are intellectually honest enough to admit that every single thing we do, by definition, was at one time itself an innovation, then maybe, just maybe, our community can live up to being the laboratory of Jewish life we aspire to be.

For me, the most significant aspect of Kaplan’s introduction of a bat mitzvah ceremony is not what took place on that particular Shabbat morning, nor for that matter, the fact that today we look back and wonder how it could ever have been otherwise. The scene that resonates with me is one that took place the night before in the Kaplan home, as Rabbi Kaplan sat with his daughter reviewing her Torah reading and brochos. There was a heated conversation between Rabbi Kaplan’s mother and his mother in-law, that Judith Kaplan would recall with great clarity years later. “Talk to your son,” said Kaplan’s mother-in law to his mother. Tell him not to do this thing.” Rabbi Kaplan’s mother responded to her macheteneste, “You know a son doesn’t listen to his mother. You talk to your daughter. Tell her to tell him not to do this thing.” Ultimately, we know, neither grandmother prevailed. The event went as planned and Jewish history was forever changed.

It is not hard, not hard at all, for me to imagine what Kaplan was thinking as his mother and mother in-law carried on in the next room over how best to convince him not to do what he was planning on doing. I hear those voices today – literally and figuratively. I am strengthened by words Kaplan would provide later in his life for what he did, the four “reasons” he instituted the bat mitzvah ceremony. What were they? His four daughters: Judith, Hadassah, Naomi and Selma. (Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, p. 301). In those days and our own, it is the very love we have for our Judaism that calls on us to create a Jewish expression that speaks to the future stakeholders of our people. As such we will innovate and we will retain, we will do whatever is necessary in order to arrive at that vibrant place where we will, God willing, look back and wonder aloud to each other how it could ever have been any different.