Sylvia Rothschild

The Courage to Create New Liturgies

[German]

When I was growing up it was made very clear by my teachers that the word defining my Judaism, the word „reform“, was in the present tense and was deliberately chosen to indicate an ongoing process. There was never one historical and monolithic orthodox Judaism that was reformed at one moment in time, but that the Judaism of my community was a living and dynamic religious expression. My teachers and rabbis knew that the process of reforming Judaism was a continuing one, and that everyone in the community was responsible for it.

When I was taught about Judaism people would use the words “prophetic” and “ethical” and “responsible”. My teachers did also use the word “traditional”, but would be honest enough to recognise that there are many traditions in Judaism, and we tend to favour the one we know and devalue the ones we don't. The idea of responding to the people, and of responding to the contexts and real lives of people in the same way that the biblical prophets did was a very powerful lesson for me. At the same time I was taught to respect authority, but not necessarily to accept it without question. A word that has been used in this conference about what we as Jewish women can expect to do in our lives was “courage”. A second important word has been “plurality”. And there is a third word I would add to the mix – “responsibility”. We need to have a sense of our own responsibility for keeping Judaism alive and in good health.

I am myself a passionate creator and writer of liturgy. And in writing new liturgies I am conscious always of the courage it takes to recognise things liturgically when they never have been marked this way before, of the many ways in which important ideas and events can be expressed, and most of all I am conscious that the liturgy has to be Jewish. It has to use Jewish forms and expressions, Jewish structures, Jewish imagery, it has to speak at a deep level to Jews. Liturgy has to be a religious expression, not simply a cultural one or a form of therapy. It has to have a sense of connection to our history and our future as well as be relevant to our present situation. I am very conscious as people are starting to discuss liturgy more and more, that liturgy is one of the things which has kept the Jews together with our particular identity. I sat in the serviced this morning and it was totally different from the service yesterday - but both of them were recognisably Shacharit service. They were different again from the Shacharit my community in England prays, and yet there was a commonality and a connection. There is something that binds us together in services, and I think that is about how we pray, what structures we are following, the narrative and the story we are telling ourselves.

Liturgy is only a tiny part of the Jewish experience, but it is important. It creates our identity and it empowers us. It tells us what we really need to know and it allows us to tell each other what we really believe. Liturgy allows us to express and experience our Judaism. It allows us to have a dialogue. One of the great pleasures I discovered in studying liturgy was just how little new writing there is - I really recommend to everyone that you get hold of an annotated siddur with notes about the history of the prayers and where they all come from. It is such a satisfaction to see how over the centuries Jews have plucked phrases from biblical books and used them differently, rephrased them or put them into a new context and so created new prayer. Finding dialogue with God that has worked for someone else, and using it in a new and different way to create a dialogue that works for us. One of my delights is not so much in the writing of new poems and prayers - although I do that too. It is when I read through the Tanach and find just the half verse that says what I wanted to say. Then being able to feel brave enough and responsible enough, and knowing that I am well within rabbinic tradition - to take that half verse and use it in a new framework. Sometimes even to alter its original meaning by taking it out of its context, or by not taking all the words in the phrase or the verse. It is not new - this process is as old as Jewish prayer, but we need courage in these days to take our texts and reframe them. We need the belief that these texts are ours, that they can speak to us differently, that they can mean something new. And we need the sense of responsibility to these texts so that we create something new, something Jewish, something prayerful.

The strict interpretation or translation of many of our current prayers can repel us, but that doesn't mean we have to turn our back on liturgy. Much of the liturgy that is being written at the moment is women's liturgy. That is simply because of the pressure of the fact that we have lost most historical women's prayers. It is not a new thing that women are writing prayers, we know that women prayed as far back as biblical times, but women's prayers have not been transmitted in the same way as men's prayers have. Often silent, they have very rarely been published beyond someone's hand-written notes maybe. So it is very important that we not only continue to write new liturgy, but that we actually put it out into the public domain - women need to be visible in the liturgy.

So I would suggest to this conference that we should be actively creating communities for ourselves which speak a Judaism we find relevant and enriching, and not engage in passing on tradition for tradition's sake. I believe we should be accepting of the rich variety of ways of expressing Judaism, that we should be courageous in challenging anything that stifles Judaism as a religion of relevance to people's lives, and that we should accept the responsibility of creating a Judaism which has rituals and liturgies that are meaningful to us - and not simply comforting or habitual. My experience in the rabbinate and as a writer of prayers and new rituals is that unless we actually take on the responsibility of reshaping, reforming and re-defining our Judaism, it will become a museum piece, something which we may fondly conserve and visit to look at occasionally, but which has not meaning for our lives and the lives of our children.

Sylvia Rothschild is the Rabbi of Bromley and District Reform Synagogue in London and Chair of the Rabbinic Assambly. She is the co-editor of “Taking up the Trimbel. The Challenge of Creating Ritual” (2000)