Rabbi Sarah Wolf

March 27, 2009

What do we do?

It is the first week of rabbinical school and the first school-wide service.  Two of my classmates arrive late and, seeing a sheet with people’s names on it outside the door to the chapel, sign in, then come sit with the rest of the congregation.  When it comes time to recite Kaddish, the service leader reads the names of those whose yartzeits fall that week from the list that has been collected on a sheet set up outside the chapel.  Naturally, my classmates’ names are included in the list of loved ones who have passed away.  After the service, the students approach the teacher who had been leading the service, explain what had happened, and ask urgently, “What do we do?!” 

It’s a telling question, “what do we do?”  In these few words so much is revealed about what it means to be a human and what it means to be a Jew.  What do we do?    The students know that having their names read on the Kaddish list is more than a simple mistake to be brushed off and forgotten.  It is a transgression of the way things ought to be.  Now, if you asked my classmates, “Does reading a living person’s name before Kaddish have any negative consequences?  Does it cause something bad to happen to the person?” they would say, “Of course not, that’s ridiculous.”  And yet, they ask “what do we do?”  Something must be done to fix this breach.      

This urge to do something, however irrational or unexplainable, to repair the irreparable, is, I think, a universal human trait, and it is universally answered by ritual.  Ritual speaks to us on a different level, not the level of the mind but the level of the kishkes, making sense of what we cannot intellectually understand.  It works not because it actually changes our physical condition or surroundings, but because it helps us make meaning of our experiences.   

When a person is converting to Judaism, she visits the mikveh, the ritual bath, and immerses herself three times.  The waters of the mikveh transform the convert: a non-Jew enters the mikveh, but a Jew exits it.  Now, does the mikveh water have magical powers?  Does the act of immersing in the mikveh actually change the essential makeup of a person?  No.  Nevertheless, the ritual of immersion does effect conversion in a real way.  Just ask a convert who has undergone the ritual and she will tell you that it was no everyday bubble bath; the ritual was, in fact, transformative. 

Jews are lucky: we have many, many rituals.  Nearly every milestone in life, every holiday and season and lifecycle moment, from birth to death, is marked by ritual.   We acknowledge the moving from being a non-Jew to becoming a Jew, from being a child to becoming an adult, being single to being married.  All of these transitions include an unknown, almost dangerous quality, a liminal moment when we are neither this nor that, here nor there.  It is ritual that acts as a bridge, safely carrying us from one state to another.  And it is these ritual moments that form our most potent and poignant memories.  Whether it is a wedding day or Yom Kippur, the rituals we perform shape our identities and tell our stories, showing us both what we are and what we would like to be.

This week we begin reading the book of Leviticus.  The first portion, Vayikra, details the different kinds of animal sacrifices that the Israelites can offer.  It seems like a book that requires what my teacher Rachel Adler describes as a “decoder ring” to figure out.  Offering up animals on an altar does not seem to speak to most of us today, even on an emotional, nonrational level.  Yet the importance of the sacrificial cult to the ancient Israelites cannot be overstated.  The word for sacrifice is “korban,” coming from the same root as the verb “to come close.”  Making animal sacrifices was our people’s primary way of acting out a life in covenant with God.  Slaughtering animals on an altar sounds pretty bizarre, not to mention unpleasant, but on a symbolic level, in the world of ritual, it is a powerful and effective act of worship.  As Dr. Adler explains, for the Israelites, “One comes close to God by giving back some of the life with which God has gifted us.”  But even if we can logically explain the symbolism of the sacrificial cult, we will probably never truly understand its power.  Like all rituals, even those we continue to perform today, these acts simply don’t make sense.  In our modern, post-Enlightenment world, this fact can be hugely frustrating.  So naturally, reading the book of Leviticus and trying to make rational sense of it can be like hitting your head against a wall (a ritual I wouldn’t recommend).  But what we can draw from Leviticus is the role of sacrifice in the ancient Israelite imagination.  These portions offer us the opportunity to ask ourselves how we too can use rituals to draw close to God.

My classmates asked our teacher, “What do we do?” and he responded wisely, with a ritual.  He brought them up in front of the ark, with the Torah, the symbol of life and strength, in view, and offered them a blessing.  They recited Birkat haGomel, the words traditionally said upon escaping a serious illness or other danger.  After affirming the blessings of life and wellbeing, the students left satisfied, having set the world right again.  Now if only it were always that easy.