c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) All religious communities urgently need to create new rituals to provide spiritually satisfying responses to the complexities of our modern lives. Happily, some gifted rabbis, priests and ministers are responding to this challenge.

Recently, a friend gave birth to male twins. Sadly, one twin was stillborn and the surviving baby remains in an incubator. The distraught parents inquired about Jewish religious practice at this sad moment in their lives.

Orthodox Judaism requires no name or a funeral service for the dead child. Orthodox authorities assert the stillborn twin had neither life nor a soul. Some scholars attribute this position to a grim historic reality: because many pregnancies in earlier centuries ended in such a painful manner, funerals and formal namings of stillborn infants were simply not performed.

But my friends were not satisfied with the traditional Jewish response. They desperately wanted a respectful and formal Jewish closure for their dead child. Indeed, they eagerly desired a name to remember their loss. The mother poignantly said on the telephone: “After all, my little son was a part of my body and my family’s hopes for seven months. We can’t just ignore that fact.”

Fortunately, other branches of Judaism do provide a meaningful ritual that meets the needs of such bereaved parents. Reciting comforting prayers and giving the stillborn a name provided enormous solace for my friends. Although the loss remains deep, the new rituals have personalized the tiny infant who will be a permanent part of his parents’ memories.

Divorce is always painful, and the bitter arguments leading up to the final dissolution of a marriage frequently rob couples of their humanity and compassion. Even divorces among persons of religious faith are all too often merely cold legal formalities lacking, and here’s that popular word again, proper “closure.”

Once again, creative Jewish and Christian liturgists have provided new religious ceremonies formally ending a marriage while still affirming the inherent humanity and hopes of the ex-spouses. In such rituals, divorcing parents also have the opportunity to express continuing love for their children.

Some divorced people have told me of the comfort and strength they derived from a simple religious ceremony that wrote “finis” on their marriage, but not on their future lives or their eternal love for their children.

While there are many religious rites to celebrate a child’s birth, including ritual circumcision and christenings, the arrival of adoptive children into a family should also be marked by an appropriate religious ritual. Adopted children often have problems that may include the quest for their natural parents.

A welcoming ceremony into a new home validates both the adoptive parents and their new child. The ritual should be repeated when a child is old enough to grasp its meaning. Such rites may not prevent anxiety and turmoil, but purposeful religious rituals can provide assurance that adoptive children are wanted and loved.

In a society filled with melded families where the description of children may be “yours, mine, and ours,” some new rituals are needed to provide a sense of family unity. Stepchildren and half-siblings abound in modern America, but unfortunately many religious communities still operate as if all families contain only one set of parents and two children. The reality is, of course, otherwise.

Increasingly, when 13-year-old bar/bat mitzvah children are called to read from the sacred Torah scroll in front of a large congregation, they are frequently accompanied by parents, grandparents, stepparents, stepbrothers and sisters, and sometimes the “significant others” of their divorced or separated parents. Religious rituals of warm inclusion are needed on such crowded pulpits lest someone, anyone, feels excluded from the ceremony.

Perhaps Jewish and Christian traditionalists will argue that new rituals are not needed. They will declare the ancient rites and ceremonies are quite sufficient.

But religions have constantly reinterpreted old ceremonies or invented new ones to fit new existential situations. In Judaism, Passover became the annual remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, and the destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the Romans became a formal part of the liturgical calendar. In more recent times, Yom HaShoah in April commemorates the tragedy of the Nazi Holocaust, and Yom HaAtzmaut celebrates the May 1948 birth of modern Israel.

If holidays can be created or reinterpreted for events involving the entire Jewish people, surely the same talent and skill can be applied to creating or re-interpreting rituals that commemorate important events in the lives of individuals.

DEA END RUDIN