Tag: bris

Sunrise, Sunset: an Amazing Day of Jewish Rituals

Images We all feel gratitude for the beautiful moments in our lives.  In the observant Jewish life we live now those moments are often built around life-cycle events, usually moving and sometimes profound.  Last week, we had a Sunday that brought the entire thing into broad relief.  It's taken me a week to think it through and write about it though.  It was just so huge.

We began early, at a bris.  That's the moment of circumcision, welcoming a Jewish boy into the covenant with God on the 8th day of his life.  This one was held at the parents' home, full of their friends and those of the grandparents.  The mother's mom and dad are good friends of ours, kind, generous, no nonsense people, a librarian and a doctor.  Like any mom, she was helping her daughter.  Like any mom, she was greeting guests with hugs and personal welcomes.  Like any mom, she was dashing from counter to table with salads, platters of food, drinks, desserts.  Unlike most moms though, she did it all with a "crew cut".  In the midst of chemotherapy for breast cancer, she's decided there was no sense in "wearing something silly" to cover her hair loss, so she didn't.  Watching her hold her new grandson, both of them reminding us of the value of life at its most basic, was amazing.  You can imagine how it felt to be part of this – new life, fighting for life, affirming life – all in one family in one day.   It was quite a thing.

Blown away, we set off for our second destination, far less nuanced and very sad. A young friend with a toddler, expecting her second child very soon, had lost her mother to cancer.  The funeral, filled with other young parents with infants in their arms, was sad as they always are, laden with the grief felt by both this daughter and her husband.  Her parents had long been divorced, her ailing father lives with them, and for her last months, her mother had as well.  It's a huge thing to be that responsible for each parent singly and still live with one's responsibilities for spouse and children.  This couple took the responsibilities on gracefully and willingly.  

It was heartbreaking to hear the impassioned tribute this young woman gave to her mother, to understand the depth of her loss.   Jewish funerals are immediate, simple and highly symbolic: the 91st Psalm recited as the procession stops seven times on the way to the grave to symbolize the reluctance to bid farewell, internment in a simple pine box, all attendees contributing to covering the coffin until the grave is full, shovel by shovel, to support the lost and the mourners.   I've always said that the way Jews deal with death is one of my favorite of its many beautiful attributes; it seems to add symbolism to the grief and meaning to the death.  

Deeply depleted, as if a gray cloud had descended on our day, we returned to the car and moved on.  We were late, but able to arrive midway through our next engagement – a wedding.  As you can imagine, it was tough to rally but we did our best.  The bride and groom are a lovely (and very tall!) young couple, with a combined sweetness and wry sense of humor that endeared them to everyone.  So we were honored to be there.  It reminds, too, that life is indeed a circle, as corny as that sounds, filled both with sadness and joy.

We ended this amazing Sunday with a kind of interim ritual – between the beginning of life and the rituals of adulthood: a bar mitzvah party.  The young man celebrating his Saturday Torah reading and entry into Jewish adulthood is a remarkable kid, and the joys of this celebration were compounded by the special nature of this boy and his family – all hugely active in the community – fun, scholarly and kind.  They were the first people we met when we moved to this aging community that has since grown into a thriving, intergenerational congregation.   Newly arrived from Boston, they had chosen it because it needed new members to replace those who had moved away or died.  When we got here, the "bar mitzvah boy" was a little kid.  Now he's a poised young man with legions of friends from age two (really) to 82.  We all consider them a gift.  It was wonderful to celebrate with them.

So that was our day: a journey through Jewish tradition, commemoration of joy and grief, birth and loss, life and death — and a reminder of what an amazing journey we all – Jewish or otherwise, travel together.

How I CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT THE IDEA OF A BRIS

Bris_kidsMany of the Jewish kids I know were circumcised but never had a bris  (a ritual circumcision – complete with ceremony and prayers.)  That was true in our family.  I always thought it as barbaric.  I have come to see the ceremony as one of the loveliest in Judaism.  I’ve just come from one for our rabbi’s fifth child.  The  ceremony begins as the families of the new child line up at the door to the shul and pass him along toward the bimah, with all the congregation singing a song of congratulations.  Many family members – aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings, have a role — blessings to say, children to hold, passages to mark.  Each older sister and brother gets a gift.

There is of course a serious ceremony within the celebration – the honoring of the covenant that God ordered and Abraham honored.   The physical idea of the circumcision is tough – even for deep believers, I think, but it’s interesting that research in sexually transmitted diseases – even AIDS, shows that circumcised men contract and transmit these diseases less frequently.  Of course there’s no hard evidence that there’s a connection but it adds to the considerations about the process itself.

The most important part, to me, is the welcoming of the child into the community  both the broad of those who worship as observant Jews and of the closer extended family that surrounds the synagogue.  There were kids hanging off the railings at the front of the synagogue, family members gathered to the side (that’s the photo), singing, crying and lots of reunions of people from far away who’d come together to celebrate.  The little boy was named for his parent’s cousin who died, at 23, of Muscular Dystrophy.  As the Rabbi spoke about him, he struggled not to weep – the combination of joy at the safe arrival of his son and memory of the loss of the man whose name this child now bears – were almost overwhelming.  Many of us felt it too. 

It’s taken me quite a journey to come to comprehension of it all and I’m sure I haven’t made it clear enough to you – but I guess the bottom line is that the combination of faith, joy, timeless ritual, love and friendship is a powerful  gift — tough to learn to accept but, ultimately, something to treasure.