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"Judaism Customs and practices."
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Mothers and children
This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children, it also advances recent efforts to write a comparative Jewish-Christian social history.
Elisheva Baumgarten draws on a rich trove of primary sources to give a full portrait of medieval Jewish family life during the period of childhood from birth to the beginning of formal education at age seven. Illustrating the importance of understanding Jewish practice in the context of Christian society and recognizing the shared foundations in both societies, Baumgarten's examination of Jewish and Christian practices and attitudes is explicitly comparative. Her analysis is also wideranging, covering nearly every aspect of home life and childrearing, including pregnancy, midwifery, birth and initiation rituals, nursing, sterility, infanticide, remarriage, attitudes toward mothers and fathers, gender hierarchies, divorce, widowhood, early education, and the place of children in the home, synagogue, and community.
A richly detailed and deeply researched contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors,Mothers and Childrenprovides a key analysis of the history of Jewish families in medieval Ashkenaz.
eBook
Writing on water : the sounds of Jewish prayer
\"\"Writing on Water\" is a first-hand account of the thoughts, lives and rituals of the secretly practicing strictly religious Jews during the era of Communism in Eastern Europe (primarily in Budapest) with especial focus on their traditional ritual chant as part of a total acoustic experience (\"soundscape\"). The book is based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of orally transmitted material. The subject matter is unique both in the choice of the communities and its focus on sound. I attempt to explain how melodies and soundscapes become the sustaining/protective \"environment\", as well as the vehicle, for the expression of world-orientation - in a situation when open speech is inconceivable. The first part of the book is a journey toward the lives/sounds of these communities, the second contains documentary interviews, and the third describes the communities' disintegration after 1990. The book conveys scholarly results through poetry, prose-poems and art-photos\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Ritual Innovation in the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism
Are the rituals in the Hebrew Bible of great antiquity, practiced unchanged from earliest times, or are they the products of later innovators? The canonical text is clear: ritual innovation is repudiated as when Jeroboam I of Israel inaugurate a novel cult at Bethel and Dan. Most rituals are traced back to Moses. From Julius Wellhausen to Jacob Milgrom, this issue has divided critical scholarship. With the rich documentation from the late Second Temple period, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is apparent that rituals were changed. Were such rituals practiced, or were they forms of textual imagination? How do rituals change and how are such changes authorized? Do textual innovation and ritual innovation relate? What light might ritual changes between the Hebrew Bible and late Second Temple texts shed on the history of ritual in the Hebrew Bible?
The essays in this volume engage the various issues that arise when rituals are considered as practices that may be invented and subject to change. A number of essays examine how biblical texts show evidence of changing ritual practices, some use textual change to discuss related changes in ritual practice, while others discuss evidence for ritual change from material culture.
eBook
Little Red Ruthie : a Hanukkah tale
Heading through the forest to her Bubbe Basha's house to make latkes (potato pancakes) on the first night of Hanukkah, Little Red Ruthie encounters a hungry wolf. Includes a recipe for latkes.
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Inventing Jewish Ritual
Vanessa Ochs invites her readers to explore how Jewish practice can be more meaningful through renewing, reshaping, and even creating new rituals, such as naming ceremonies for welcoming baby girls, healing services, Miriam's cup, mitzvah days, egalitarian wedding practices, and commitment ceremonies.
We think of rituals -- the patterned ways of doing things that have shared and often multiple meanings -- as being steeped in tradition and therefore unalterable. But rituals have always been reinvented. When we perform ancient rituals in a particular place and time they are no longer quite the same rituals they once were. Each is a debut, an innovation: this Sabbath meal, this Passover seder, this wedding -- firsts in their own unique ways.
In the last 30 years there has been a surge of interest in reinventing ritual, in what is called minhag America. Ochs describes the range and diversity of interest in this Jewish
American experience and examines how it reflects tradition as it revives Jewish culture and faith. And she shows us how to create our own ritual objects, sacred spaces, ceremonies, and liturgies that can be paths to greater personal connection with history and with holiness: baby-naming ceremonies for girls, divorce rituals, Shabbat practices, homemade haggadahs, ritual baths, healing services.
Through these and more, we see that American Judaism is a dynamic cultural process very much open to change and a source of great personal and communal meaning.
eBook
Purim chicken
Just before the farm animals put on their annual Purim play celebrating Queen Esther, the star of the show goes missing, and Cluck the chicken knows she must be brave and determined like Queen Esther to save her friend.
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The Shtiebelization of Modern Jewry
Custom and ritual, or their Hebrew equivalent minhag, has intrigued rabbis and scholars for generations. Here, Simcha Fishbane treats minhag from a socio-anthropological perspective. She discusses the theory and model of minhagim, using the Mishnah Berurah and the Arukh Hashulkhan, analyses rabbinic texts concerned with custom, and describes current rituals from a socio-anthropological viewpoint.
eBook
Purity, body, and self in early rabbinic literature
This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis’ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one's self and one's body and, more broadly, the relations between one’s self and one's human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.
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Contested Rituals
InContested Rituals, Robin Judd shows that circumcision and kosher butchering became focal points of political struggle among the German state, its municipal governments, Jews, and Gentiles. In 1843, some German-Jewish fathers refused to circumcise their sons, prompting their Jewish communities to reconsider their standards for membership. Nearly a century later, in 1933, another blood ritual, kosher butchering, served as a political and cultural touchstone when the Nazis built upon a decades-old controversy concerning the practice and prohibited it.
In describing these events and related controversies that raged during the intervening years, Judd explores the nature and escalation of the ritual debates as they transcended the boundaries of the local Jewish community to include non-Jews who sought to protect, restrict, or prohibit these rites. Judd argues that the ritual debates grew out of broad shifts in German politics: the competition between local and regional authority following unification, the possibility of government intervention in private affairs, the place of religious difference in the modern age, and the relationship of the German state to its religious and ethnic minorities, including Catholics. Anti-Semitism was only one factor driving the debates and it often functioned in unexpected ways. Judd gives us a new understanding of the formation of German political systems, the importance of religious practices to Jewish political leadership, the interaction of Jews with the German government, and the reaction of Germans of all faiths to political change.
eBook