Rejoice in Our Heritage: Home Rituals for Secular and Humanistic Jews

By Seid, Rabbi Judith
Kopinvant Secular Press, Pamphlet , $8.00

The secularist Jewish movement is at a crucial point in its development.

Members of the movement cherish their secularism, yet feel a need for those rituals and spiritual qualities hitherto found only within the confines of organized religion.

Secularist Jews, therefore, are expressing needs for Jewish ritual, statements which acknowledge the particularly Jewish nature of an action, an anchoring feature in our lives as Jews, connecting us with our people throughout the world and throughout time and with our own deeply felt convictions.

There have been three historical responses to the need for ritual. The first response has been that of adoption. Some secularist Jews have fully adopted all the traditional rituals of Jewish life, even those that do not fit their own religious ideas. The second sort of response is invention. These ceremonies are satisfying and do indeed contain an element of ethical teaching, but they have not a word in common with what the rest of klal Israel is saying.

The third response has been that of adaptation. Serious secularists have in recent decades synthesized new, appropriate rituals from the traditional ways and from personal needs. Examples of this creative adaptation can be seen in the Arbeter Ring funeral service, in the folk-shule seders, in the Shabbes services of small communities of Jewish students.

However, none of these rituals are shared; rather, each organization formulates its own and there is no sense of shared experience with other Secular and Humanistic Jews throughout the world.

These home rituals for Secular and Humanistic Jews are an attempt to use the third pathway, the way of adaptation and synthesis, to fill the need for a Jewish anchor in the home. From the introduction