On Tuesday, Oct. 22, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute and Brandeis Hillel co-hosted Prof. Vanessa Ochs, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. The talk, taking place in the Usdan International Lounge, centered on Och’s research on new Jewish rituals in Israel and the diaspora in response to ongoing war. “These new rituals do not answer Jewish theological questions, and Jewish ritual never does,” Professor Ochs explained. “Rituals provide answers to [the questions]: Who are my people? Are there others who know how I feel? How do I go on? Who knows what I’ve been through? How can I tell this story?”

Ochs, who was ordained as a rabbi at Beit Cocheman, is a leading feminist scholar and author. Her 2007 book “Inventing Jewish Ritual” was the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award. She also serves as a long-standing member of the HBI academic advising committee. 

“My whole career, I’ve studied Jewish rituals that have been innovated over the past fifty years,” she said. “Despite the tendency to imagine that rituals ordained by God are practiced perfectly, all Jewish rituals have changed in form.” 

Ochs referenced Passover as an example: the first Passover was celebrated in Egypt, followed by Passovers in Israel, and then in exile. Only many centuries later did Jews use the Haggadah.

As an ethnographer who primarily studies Jewish communities but also a practicing Jew, Ochs describes herself as “both in and out of the Jewish community.”  Conducting research on one’s own community “takes training and practice, but it’s also like keeping a journal, or watching a play when you work in theater,” she said.

Before Oct. 7, Ochs studied Jewish ritual responses to the 2020 pandemic, such as Zoom shivas, or Jewish mourning ceremony. “The first Zoom shiva I went to was very odd,” Ochs said. “Rarely does a ritual done for the first time ever feel right.” Like anything else, however, new rituals can begin to feel authentic over time, she said. 

Ochs’s pre-war research was systematic, if not conventional: she combed through Hallmark cards and went into Jewish people’s homes, looking through their refrigerators for clues of new traditions. After Oct. 7, Ochs collected whatever she could get her hands on: books, prints and articles about Jewish responses to the attack. 

She cited the yellow hostage ribbon, saving empty seats for hostages and wearing dog tags as examples of new rituals. “There is a three-compartment Jewish toolbox for making a new ritual: Jewish cultural texts, a rich vocabulary of Jewish ritual objects and actions and core Jewish understandings.” 

These elements allow new Jewish rituals to feel somewhat familiar. Ochs suggested that the empty seats reserved for hostages may be inspired in part by the tradition to reserve a seat at the Passover table for Elijah, a Jewish prophet. 

While rituals may not answer age-old existential questions, studying them — and participating in them — have served as ways for Ochs and many Jews to process their collective grief, fear and worry over the past year.