INTRODUCTORY UNIT - RITUALS, CULTURE AND US

4. ON RITUALS AND CULTURE: HOW IT ALL FITS TOGETHER

One of the most basic facts of human existence is that life never proceeds in an absolutely smooth line. The lives of all of us as humans proceed through a series of bumps as we make our way through the different stages of our existence. As we grow, we pass through a series of milestones, some biological and some cultural, that punctuate our lives from the beginning, when we open our eyes in birth, to the end, when we close them in death. Between birth and death, the stages are likely to include such major turning points as puberty and entrance into maturity, fertility and marriage, parenting, elder care and old age.

Another of the basic truths of human existence is the fact that, as well as being born into a biological family, we are all born into a cultural grouping of one kind or another. These groupings are intermediary tribal-national frameworks that exist between the individual biological family and the vast universal cosmos that we call humankind. Most of these frameworks undergo great changes over time. The Jewish framework, according to the tradition, started off as a distinct family and in time became a series of tribes. These tribes themselves became at a certain point in time (the monarchical era of David and Solomon), largely subsumed in a national framework.

These frameworks, originally geographically based, but increasingly scattered in the modern world, traditionally served many purposes.

• They provided safety and a place of refuge for the individual.
• They provided an economic framework and safety net.
• They also provided identity and a series of values and beliefs that gave the individual a key to negotiating the mysteries of the world and to living a successful and fulfilling life.

Some of these functions have fallen away in the modern world where other institutions - primarily those of the modern state - have often stepped in to replace the traditional social and educational functions of the cultural group. Where the group has been divided up into a number of different countries, many of the original functions of community have largely been lost. However, the provision of cultural identity is one of the most enduring and all cultural groups have endeavored to continue to survive, in order to ensure the passing down of that identity, since it is the cultural identity that ultimately cements the individual to the group in the modern world. For a group to relinquish this area would be suicidal.

The Jews provide a telling example of this process. More than most groups, because of their peculiar history as a people who left or were pushed out of the land that served as the territorial base for the national framework - the Land of Israel -, their story has developed in many different lands. As such, over time, many of the original functions of the Israelite or Judean state were lost. For example, they no longer were able to defend themselves in the traditional way and, for most of their history, they had to make do with the often inadequate protection which they received from the leaders of the lands where they lived. But the attempt to provide a cultural and religious framework for all Jews never ceased: when just about all other functions of the Jewish collective had broken down, this was the one that survived.

We have mentioned two important truths about the human condition. As people, we go through many stages in our lives. In addition, we are all born into larger cultural units of tribes or nations. These two most fundamental biological and cultural truths are closely linked. In all cultures, tribes and nations, there have evolved a complex series of rituals around the major turning points in human life, which have been crucial in guiding the path of the individual through the difficult and tortuous path of human existence. These rituals have been focal in building and reinforcing the connection of the individual to the group and in transmitting the values and perspectives of the culture to the participant. These are the life cycle rituals.

It is important to understand that these central turning points of human life are the magnets which have attracted clusters of ritualistic acts and thus act as a public stage for the display of cultural values and attitudes. Through these landmarks, values can both be perceived and analyzed. However, it is not only the life cycle turning-points which are significant in this regard. At all times in an individual's life, those values and attitudes are working to condition and frame the life of that person, to bind him or her to the group culture. They might be especially overt, more apparent and more powerful when they appear on the surface of life in the public arena at the crucial turning points of individual's life, but they are no less present in everyday life when the individual stands, not at some transitional juncture in his or her life but, rather, is floating in the calmer waters that mark the journey from one transitional turning-point on the life path towards the next one.

There may, for example, be major ritualistic ceremonies that exist in a certain culture around the entry into maturity and once again around the time of marriage. It may also be that between these two points there is no major ceremonial moment that marks a point of transition. However, the culture works in the interim period to fashion the attitudes of the individual and prepare them for the next turning point, in this case marriage, so that life's journey will hopefully bring that individual calmly towards that next major intersection, which the culture perceives as all important.