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Reviewed by:
  • Inventing Jewish Ritual
  • Caryn Aviv
Inventing Jewish Ritual, by Vanessa Ochs. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007. 276 pp. $25.00.

Commentators of contemporary Jewish life often fall into two categories. Some anxiously describe the Jewish world as dying, teetering on the brink of an assimilation crisis. These Jews see the world as a glass more than half-empty. More optimistic observers see reasons to celebrate and imagine the Jewish world as a glass half-full. In Vanessa Ochs’ new book, Inventing Jewish Ritual, that proverbial glass is not just half-full, it’s joyously overflowing.

The title of this book is somewhat of a misnomer and actually doesn’t do it justice. Inventing Jewish Ritual is not just a thought-provoking and accessibly written analysis of the ways in which Jews from every denominational stripe (and beyond) are coming up with new rituals. Vanessa Ochs has also written richly ethnographic accounts of how people imagine new possibilities for living creative and inspired Jewish lives. By providing case studies, sample texts, snippets of email exchanges, fieldnotes, and websites, Ochs offers fascinating [End Page 98] descriptions of how contemporary Jews borrow freely from diverse cultural currents, sometimes in extraordinary and surprising ways. The ethnography makes plain her primary argument: that Jews are constantly re-interpreting and expanding what “counts” as authentically Jewish (whether objects, stories, or practices). In other words, Inventing Jewish Ritual charts how Jews are making American Judaism a more meaningful, relevant, interesting, and compelling place to call “home.”

Ochs begins her analysis with a personal discussion of how she herself came to ritual innovation, albeit slowly and over a few decades. Initially hesitant and tentative, her first efforts to create new Jewish rituals emerged out her own desire to ritually acknowledge moments in her life and community using tools and concepts from Judaism. Ochs came of age with Jewish feminism, a movement that she credits, along with American democratic “do-it-yourself ” impulses and the havurah movement, as primarily responsible for this extraordinary flowering of new Jewish rituals, practices, and material objects circulating amongst American Jews for the past generation. But the creativity she witnesses is both eclectic and decidedly not denominational. Innovation seems to be emerging from all corners of Jewish life—from Haredi attempts to regulate internet usage through chevrusa-style monitoring of websites to Heeb magazine to new “ritualists”—people (usually women) who eschew traditional rabbinic training and provide customized lifecycle rituals, often for people estranged and alienated from traditional forms of Jewish communal worship and organizational life.

What’s also astonishing, but perhaps not surprising, is how quickly new (and seemingly radical) innovative rituals become incorporated into so many people’s lives, and take on the patina of tradition. Thanks to the veritable explosion of blogs, listserves, and websites where Jews can post and circulate new rituals and their explanations, the time-frame for adoption has become compressed. In several cases, these new rituals quickly acquire historical narratives, legends, and origin myths that accompany their practice. The most familiar case is the story and now widespread practice of putting an orange on the seder plate at Passover. Here, the various circulating legends provide insight into how new rituals can prompt multiple, and sometimes competing, narrative versions of their origins. Most people mistakenly attribute the orange-seder plate ritual to a fictitious, tense exchange between Susannah Heschel and an irate congregant, who angrily retorted that “allowing women up on the bimah is like putting an orange on the seder plate!” In fact, the “real” story is much more radical. Apparently, Heschel learned about college students who placed crusts of bread on their seder plate to express solidarity with Jewish women and queers. Heschel modified this emerging ritual by putting an orange on the [End Page 99] seder plate, and asked participants at her seder to spit out the orange seeds, which represented homophobia. But in the circulation and retelling of this ritual, both the offending crusts of bread and the queers dropped out of the story, perhaps leading to its more widespread ritual adoption as a more palatable symbol of women’s participation in Jewish life.

One place where the analysis gets confusing is...

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