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CASE STUDY ONE: MIRIAM’S TAMBOURINE C H A P T E R 6 M I first noticed tambourines in the homes of Lubavitch Hasidic women, though it was not initially clear to me that I was seeing what was for these women an important new ritual object: a “Miriam’s tambourine.”1 I saw the tambourines first in Morristown, New Jersey—then my hometown and the home of the Lubavitch Rabbinical College of America. I was doing fieldwork between March and July of 1994, a period just before and after the death of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. In those days, most of the Lubavitch women I encountered in Morristown and in Crown Heights, the Lubavitch headquarters, believed their Rebbe would not die, but rather would emerge—“rise up” was the expression they used—as the Messiah of their community. The tambourines, I discovered over time, had spiritual agency. Owning them, decorating them, or just having them around channeled anxiety, released creative energy, and mobilized the community of Lubavitch women worldwide. Through the tambourines, Lubavitch women identified with the biblical Miriam and the confident ancient Israelite women who gracefully had saved the day when their husbands quarreled, complained, despaired, and withdrew from procreation under Pharaoh’s edicts. If a woman had a tambourine of her own, she could better tell the story of Miriam’s faithfulness. In telling the story, she would not just remember it, but experience herself as an incarnation of Miriam, a woman of great faith in bleak times. The tambourine eased women across a threatening transition, guiding and assuring them, and most of all affirming God’s presence and beneficence. I saw the Lubavitch women, in the context of their leader’s impending death, asserting themselves as ritual and spiritual experts. As theirs is a community in which men are meant to be more visible in public and women have more agency in the private realm, the tambourines enabled the women to expand their roles without risk: Behind sweetly decorated tambourines, they asserted their spiritual leadership at a traumatic time, and held their families and community together. Through their tambourines—in virtuoso, lived religious performances —they maintained faith and community during a crisis. Passover 1994 Ignoring their exhaustion, stepping beyond their anxiety about all the cleaning and the tasks that remained to be done, Lubavitch women prepared for Passover in the spring of 1994 with particular exhilaration because of their certainty that the Messianic Age was approaching . Recent acts of violence had given the Lubavitch women I knew the sense that they were living in nightmarish times, a period of overwhelming tragedy and suffering, just the kind of times that were supposed to precede the coming of the Messiah. On February 25, Baruch Goldstein had massacred Palestinians worshipping in Hebron. Days later, in a seeming act of revenge on the other side of the world, Rashad Baz had opened fire on a convoy of Lubavitch students, killing Ari Halberstam and severely injuring his friend Nachum Sasonkin as they drove back over the Brooklyn Bridge after praying for the Rebbe at Beth Israel Hospital. There was Ari’s funeral, with hundreds coming to mourn. This was all on top of an earlier wound the community still felt, the killing of one of their yeshivah students, Yankel Rosen168 INVENTING JEWISH RITUAL baum, during riots in Crown Heights in 1991. Lubavitch leaders declared that at such moments of intense darkness, when everything seemed to be falling apart, a coming light could be glimpsed. This classic Jewish narrative felt especially descriptive of the present moment. During this time, the Lubavitch women I knew were especially energetic, hopeful, and geared up, as though they were expectant mothers hovering over delivery dates. Many said they believed that just as the Children of Israel had been redeemed from bondage in Egypt on account of the righteous women of that generation, so would the Jews of today be brought out of golus2 (physical and spiritual exile) and into ge’ulo (the Messianic Age) on account of the righteous women of their own generation. They believed they themselves had the potential and the responsibility to bring the Messiah. It was a matter of believing deeply, praying, spreading the belief, doing mitzvos (commandments), reaching out to the world, and spreading light, goodness, and Torah. Lubavitch women regularly told me that redemption was imminent because of righteous women. The primary source for their conviction was the midrash on Exodus. They knew this text well, from...

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