Ritual and Reflection
Moving forward mindfully
Photo by Humphrey Muleba on Unsplash
This weekend, I attended my first Friday night service at our synagogue since the pandemic began with a few hundred other people, inside the building with masks on. While we were a bit spread out, the community felt very alive and united in our joy of being able to sing, dance and pray in a room (albeit a very large room) together. There were kids running around together or with their parents, and I thought: wow, I don’t even know those kids. They were born since I was last here. Or: wow, those kids have grown so much! My oldest seemed right at home and sat with me for a while before joining some friends and also got caught up in the spirit of the evening as we sang in full voices and hearts.
It felt so invigorating and so moving to be there. It felt like such a regular part of my life, to be in community in that way. But it also felt so foreign, like I need to remember the etiquette for being out in public again. A friend of mine asked if I was coming back the next day with my kids, and I told her I would think about it. I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that I’m not ready to do that yet. We will certainly return soon, but I think I need some preparation first.
Priya Parker’s book, The Art of Gathering has been an institutional favorite for years. In fact, our programming team at work has been reading it together and utilizing its principles to recalibrate our programs. Her podcast during the pandemic was instrumental in shaping my thinking of how to make the most from our current moment in how I approached the events I planned. Her recent newsletter addressed the sense that our first gatherings back together require some special consideration given what we’ve been through. She writes that it is important to recognize the moment at which we have arrived and how people may be feeling. We need to allow for reconnecting to the physical spaces we used to occupy and see it as someone seeing the environment and our work product for the first time. Finally, she reminds us to make sure to allow the opportunity to reflect and not to expect too much too fast.
Parker’s approach connects nicely with another concept I have been toying with: the role of ritual. Ritual can mean many things, from something that commonly occurs in religious settings to the routines that surround bedtime for kids. It is a practice that becomes familiar over time that helps people through liminal spaces, from one state of being to another. I enjoy creating rituals to mark special times, and I have been thinking that perhaps the return of my family to synagogue or maybe the end of a pandemic school year and the start of summer and a new year would be made more meaningful through the creation of a ritual.
In thinking through what I would like the ritual to include, I think I will combine Parker’s recommendation of reflection with hope for the future. John Dewey, the great leader of progressive education of the 20th century, famously taught that “we do not learn from experience….we learn from reflecting on experience” , and so in order to make the successes and challenges of living through the pandemic remain relevant, we need to contemplate what we have been through and what is still unfolding in our lives. We need the opportunity to ask our wondering questions and to see what comes up for us. What have we learned about ourselves and about the world around us? Where would we like to find ourselves as a family? As a community? As a nation?
Judaism offers us a ritual every year as we prepare for Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. It is called tashlikh, the symbolic throwing away of our sins. It is part of the serious work we do in making amends with those we may have hurt; we take a serious accounting of our lives to lay the groundwork for our encounter with the Divine as we pray, fast and contemplate for 25 hours. At some time during the 10 days between the new year, Rosh Hashannah, and Yom Kippur, we perform tashlikh at a living body of water and throw items in (can be natural items like leaves and rocks) to demonstrate the power of letting them go and moving forward.
I wonder if there is a role for a different kind of tashlikh for us to perform in returning from the pandemic, to metaphorically say goodbye to the things we would like to leave behind in order to prepare us for the road ahead. Just as the water of tashlikh can carry things away, water can also provide renewal in the form of mikveh, immersion into a pool comprised of rain water. We have a number of rituals that mikveh enacts and they primarily involve the movement from one state of being to another, just what a ritual act should do. As water is a symbol of rebirth, why not figure out a way for us all to jump into a natural pool or some kind of water source to demonstrate that we are not the same people now? We have changed, and the water helps us mark that transformation and leaves us feeling ready to take on what lies ahead.
We celebrate the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashannah, with things that are, in fact, new: the taste of a fruit we haven’t eaten since last year, new clothes to wear to help us feel renewed. I just cut (and donated) my hair and bought some new clothes, and it has helped a lot in readying me for the slow return. I am not ready to totally give up on being comfortable at work, but I feel better about my appearance and ready to greet others with a fresh face.
Rituals guide us slowly and meaningfully from one stage of life to the next. Or sometimes just from one stage of the day to another. But they are a necessary part of how to make life more intentional, more predictable and more consequential.
See you on the other side!