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KEY READINGS
Goldberg Textbook - Religion: Contexts and Expressions pg. 255-261
Jewish Marriage.pdfJewish Death and Burial.pdf
Overview
Overview
Within a Jewish adherent's lifetime they will participate in a number of key rituals or rites of passage, namely Brit Milah or Brit Habat, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, Marriage, and the rituals of death, burial and mourning. While these rituals have deep roots in the patriarchal traditions of the Torah, traditional rites have been revised and expanded, particularly as a result of the influence of the women’s movement. Mothers, as well as fathers, have sought and even demanded inclusion in birth, adolescent, and marriage rituals for themselves and for their daughters.
Jewish lifecycle rituals communicates and strengthens group values and norms, helps relieve tensions in moments of transition, promotes family and group bonds, and provides public expressions for personal life passages.
Adherents believe life-cycle rituals:
Guide adherents to see the deeper meaning, even God’s presence, in the ordinary, and sanctify it.
Helps to respond to life changes as more than biological or legal events, and enable people to sanctify the passage of time.
Brings an adherent's focus away from focus only on self and family into connection with God, with the Jewish people, and with Jewish tradition.
Connects to the unseen presences of ancestors and descendants through common or shared experience
Foster not just personal or family identity, but also Jewish identity.
Builds a connection with Jewish belief and tradition as a people of lasting and profound significance.
G-d brings new life
G-d brings new life
Jews believe that all life is given by G-d because in the Torah (Genesis 1) G-d creates man and woman and breathes life into them and then later in the text indicates that they should ‘be fruitful and multiply’.
Judaism considers children as a gift and a blessing from G-d and, although the pain of childbirth was supposedly the punishment for Eve (Genesis 3:16), G-d later tells Abraham (Genesis 17:16) that Sarah will be ‘blessed (and that) ... I will give her a son by you’, so having children is seen as a blessing.
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