Abstract
Jewish holidays have always been considered a sociocultural framework that designs the Jewish communal landscape. One such ritual is Tu BiSh’vat Seder, a ritual conducted annually by various Jewish congregations and social movements on the 15th of the month of Sh’vat. These communities conduct the ritual with its traditional festival symbols and infuse it with new social and cultural interpretations. This essay presents an ethnographic analysis of a Reform Tu BiSh’vat Seder in Israel in which the holiday’s spiritual narrative and symbols were related to the female congregants’ bodies and expressed their social interaction. Observing the women’s preparations for the Seder, participating in the performance of the ritual itself, and listening to the female Rabbi’s sermon allowed me to understand the diverse gendered meanings which are infused into the ritual. The Tu BiSh’vat Seder revealed the female congregants’ attitudes toward their own bodies and ages and even their attitudes toward one another. Furthermore, by participating in the Seder, they did not only produce sisterhood and feminine solidarity but also blurred the boundaries between their private homes and the congregational space. Thus, it can be said that the Reform congregation serves as a safe space that provides a viable Jewish theological framework and is an arena for gender discourses.
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Notes
For example, Rabbi Moses Sofer (1762–1839), the Hatam Sofer, was one of the most vociferous opponents of the Reform movement during its initial rise in early nineteenth-century central Europe. In an 1819 letter, which upon its posthumous publication achieved almost canonical status among Sofer’s students and followers, he articulated a sharply adversarial approach to the Reform congregation (Ferziger 2014: 53).
The Neo Kabbalah revival, which includes a resurgence of Kabbalistic and Hasidic doctrines and practices and an integration of Kabbalistic themes in various cultural fields, coincides with the emergence of the New Age and other related spiritual and new religious movements in the last decades of the twentieth century (Huss 2007: 107).
Rabbi Raz conducts semiweekly lessons in the Beit Midrash about the weekly portion and various Talmudic topics.
Tikkun is derived from the Hebrew verb “letaken,” meaning to repair. In Kabbalistic philosophy, it acquired a spiritual meaning of repairing oneself and/or the world; hence the well-known term “tikkun olam,” meaning “to repair the world.”
Mimouna is a traditional North African Jewish celebration dinner at the end of Passover.
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Ben-Lulu, E. “We are Already Dried Fruits”: Women Celebrating a Tu BiSh’vat Seder in an Israeli Reform Congregation. Cont Jewry 40, 453–469 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-020-09342-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-020-09342-2