Rabbi Laura Geller and Rabbi Beth Lieberman, coauthors of Moments That Matter: Marking Transitions in Midlife and Beyond, published by CCAR Press, explore how ritual helps us pay attention to life’s transitions, transforming everyday moments into sacred ones.
The famous text in Pirkei Avot about the map of our lives is familiar to many of us: “At five, the study of Bible; at ten, Mishnah; at thirteen, subject to the commandments; at fifteen, Talmud; at eighteen, marriage; at twenty, for career, connected with a community and hopeful about the future; at thirty, the peak of strength; at forty, wisdom; at fifty, able to give counsel; at sixty, old age; at seventy, the fullness of age; at eighty, courage; at ninety, a bent body; at one hundred, as good as dead and gone completely out of the world.” Who said those Rabbis didn’t have a sense of humor?
While this map is clearly not ours, the Rabbis’ four stages of life do still apply. The first is about dedication to learning; the second is about building career and family; the third focuses on wisdom and giving back; the fourth is learning to let go. However, with our lifespans lengthening as an increasing number of people live thirty years longer than earlier generations, the map is changing once again.
These additional thirty-plus years are not tacked on to the end of our lives, but rather occur between midlife and frail old age, and are years of energy and activity. We now face an unprecedented challenge: As we are blessed with more years added to our life, how do we add more life to our years? Psalm 90:12 offers guidance: “Show us how precious each day is; teach us to be fully here.”[i] In other words, pay attention.
Pay attention. This is where ritual comes in. Ritual is a tool—a technology—that helps us to pay attention. Through ritual, we can connect more deeply to what matters in our life and appreciate that we are part of something greater than ourselves.
The truth is that our lives are already filled with ritual, whether those rituals are professional or personal, religious or secular. Morning coffee, prayer, regular conversations with loved ones, weekly family visits, self-care habits, study practices, cultural outings, watch parties, and yoga classes are just a few of the rituals that may fill our lives. By noticing these rituals, we notice what is important to us; through them, we can see what really matters in our life.
Our new book, Moments That Matter: Marking Transitions in Midlife and Beyond, focuses on a specific kind of ritual—those having to do with the life cycle. What are the important moments in this new stage of life—midlife and beyond—that help us notice and pay attention to what really matters in our lives as we grow older? What are those transitions from one social role to another? How might we mark the moments that matter?
For example: A fifty-five-year-old man and his sister called their rabbi on the way to clean out their parents’ apartment just after their mother moved into an assisted living facility. They asked, “What is the prayer you say when you begin to close up the home you grew up in?” This is not a traditional life cycle moment, but a powerful one nonetheless. The answer to their question was not in any standard clergy handbook, yet creating the right prayer and reciting it before the adult children began their work transformed the experience from a chore to a sacred act.
The book offers a template for each ritual while encouraging readers to imagine creating their own. Because of the book, this is exactly what a congregant did when she was leaving her home of more than fifty years. Her granddaughter wrote about what that new ritual meant to her: “When my grandmother decided a few months ago that it was time for her to move on to her next chapter—to sell the home where she and my grandfather lived for over fifty years … it felt right that we bid farewell to this precious house with an evening of sacred celebration and prayer. … With two cousins via Zoom, everyone was able to partake in a special “Ceremony of Goodbye” at the house in April with our two rabbis. We began in the sunroom by saying the Shehechiyanu . It was during the singing of “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell that I started to cry.
“In a guided meditation, we were asked to picture significant memories that took place in this space, and then we said, ‘Baruch otanu b’vo-scheinu, Baruch otanu b’tzei-teinu’ (We are blessed as we come here, we are blessed as we leave here).
“We recited this prayer each time we left a room, to bid each individual space farewell and thank it for all that it gave us. We walked from the sunroom through the dining room and paused for reflection in the upstairs bedrooms, where my dad and uncle shared anecdotes about the games they used to play together and the baseball cards they collected. We traveled downstairs to the primary bedroom to hear from my grandmother about the wonderful and difficult times she spent there with my grandfather, especially towards the end of his life. We said goodbye to the kitchen, which in my memories will always smell like my grandma’s chocolate coconut macaroons.
“After we said our final blessings inside the home, we gathered hand in hand on the front stoop and shared blessings for my grandmother as she begins a new chapter and leaves this precious place behind.”[ii]
This is a new ritual—one of many. Each one is uniquely shaped by the people who want to pay attention to their personal transitions in their own way.
As we learn in the Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 45a, when there is a question as to what the law is, one must “pok chazi mai ama davar, go out and see what the people are doing.” Moments That Matter is filled with stories of innovation and creative ritual from people around North America.
These new rituals create and deepen connections. Some of them are intimate and are held at home with just some close family or intimate friends; some take place within a synagogue, church, sangha, or other place of worship. Others take place outdoors or in a place that has resonance for the ones creating it—the place they were married, the neighborhood where they grew up. Some are virtual, while others celebrate the joy or comfort from being together face to face. Each ritual gives space for individuals to do it themselves and offers thoughts and examples of how clergy can adapt it for a community.
“Go and see what the people are doing.” They are marking the moments that matter.
Rabbi Laura Geller, rabbi emerita of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, was the third woman in the Reform Movement to become a rabbi. Her book, Getting Good at Getting Older, coauthored with her husband Richard Siegel, z”l, was named a National Jewish Book Award finalist in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Please visit her website at www.rabbilaurageller.com.
Rabbi Beth Lieberman serves as adjunct faculty at the Hebrew Union College, School of Rabbinical Studies, in Los Angeles, mentoring the next generation of communal leaders. She is the coeditor of Honoring Tradition, Embracing Modernity: A Reader for the Union for Reform Judaism’s Introduction to Judaism Course and the literary editor of the JPS TANAKH: Revised Edition (Jewish Publication Society and Sefaria.org, 2023). Please visit her website at www.rabbibethlieberman.com.
[i] Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms (Harper Perennial, 1993), 3
[ii] Excerpted and adapted from Dorrit Corwin’s “L’dor Vador, Under One Roof,” Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/blog/ldor-vador-under-one-roof. Used with permission from the author.
