As times change, so do religious rituals. New Jewish rituals have emerged in recent years in response to the COVID pandemic and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
That’s just one finding from Rabbi Vanessa Ochs’ decades of research on Jewish ritual. Her 2007 book, “Inventing Jewish Ritual,” received a National Jewish Book Award.
A professor emerita of the University of Virginia’s department of religious studies and the author of numerous books on the subject, Ochs shared her knowledge with the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5. The event was titled “Inventing New Jewish Rituals.”
“Jewish rituals have always been in a process of being innovated or being reframed because our world shifts, our time shifts,” Ochs said. “There are new needs, new demands, … and we have the opportunity to turn to the vast repertoire of Jewish ritual resources, such as sacred texts and beliefs and theologies, moral and ethical training, Hebrew and Jewish languages, beautiful objects and a range of practices.”
When everything shifted online during the 2020 pandemic, Jewish gatherings were no exception.
“During COVID, whole new rituals emerged: having a Zoom seder — who ever had a Zoom seder before? Now we all know what it is — or a Zoom shiva or even a Zoom funeral,” Ochs said.
She added that, even though the world has since largely returned to normal, some mourning families still opt to gather on Zoom to mark the days after a loved one’s death.
“At a regular in-person shiva, you often don’t hear all the memories people share because they’re usually spoken to the mourners privately,” Ochs noted. “And at a Zoom shiva, it’s like a 360 picture of a person because people from all different aspects of the deceased’s life — friends, relatives, neighbors — they all share their memories and their stories, and you can hear all of it.”
Similarly, Jewish rituals changed in the wake of Oct. 7.
“In Israel and America, people took off the yellow pins they were wearing or the dog tags that remember the hostages,” Ochs said, referring to the period after the last hostage was recovered from Gaza on Jan. 26, 2026. “People took down [kidnapped] posters.”
Some Jewish communities are taking a creative approach to this new era. Adas Israel Congregation in D.C. collected the yellow ribbons and other hostage memorabilia for a local artist’s project.
The Feb. 5 Capital Jewish Museum event was a conversation between Ochs and Sarah Leavitt, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs.
“We were particularly excited about Jewish ritual because that’s something that we look at in the museum,” Leavitt said.
She referenced the recent exhibition “LGBTJews in the Federal City,” which was on display through Jan. 4.
“We talked a lot in that exhibit about some changes in Jewish rituals to make Jewish practice open to all who want to engage in it and make it their own,” Leavitt said. “This idea of layering new ideas, personal ideas, different ideas on top of old traditions is something I’m certainly interested in.”
One example is the adaptation of gender-neutral Hebrew. Instead of using traditional masculine or feminine endings of words, the Nonbinary Hebrew Project suggests a third option, the “-eh” suffix. Leavitt added that some rabbis, cantors, scholars and Hebrew school teachers have begun expanding the idea of Jewish liturgy to be more gender-expansive when referring to both Jewish people and God.
The museum also displayed physical reminders of changing rituals and times.
“We have a slew of documents like a ketubah from a same-sex wedding and a lot of things where language has to be changed, where we have to think about how ancient rituals become meaningful to new generations,” Leavitt said.
Two of Ochs’ most popular courses at UVA were “Jewish Weddings” and “The Passover Haggadah.” The Haggadah doesn’t necessarily have to be an ancient Jewish text, Ochs said.
The website Recustom — which offers “do-it-yourself Judaism for everyone” — provides a Passover Haggadah on environmental stewardship and pieces of rituals related to immigration, mental health, hunger and other themes. Users can choose the material that best fits at their seder tables while still sticking to the underlying Jewish tradition.
“This idea that religion changes is interesting to me,” Leavitt said. “Judaism is obviously an ancient religion, and that ancientness is important to many people, but there’s a lot of groups of Jews who think about tradition as belonging to them.”
This thinking allows modern-day Jews to modify traditions as needed.
“The world that we live in is maybe not the same as the one that our grandparents, our ancestors, lived in. We have to make sense of that,” Leavitt said. “They’re not here to do it for us. So, we have to pursue our own ways in.”
Ochs, who considers herself a Jewish feminist, noted some gender inequality in traditional Judaism as she was growing up.
“I was part of an era of Jewish women who noticed that Jewish women were not permitted to participate in any number of central Jewish ritual practices,” Ochs said. “You had to be a man to wear a tallit, to wear a kippah, and so, … we began to think about, do [Jewish women] want to use the same objects? On what grounds did we want inclusion?”
Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see women in Reform or Conservative synagogues donning yarmulkes or covering their heads with scarves or hats, according to My Jewish Learning. Ochs added that the museum event was interesting because of generational differences between Leavitt and herself in terms of Jewish ritual.
“My conversation partner grew up in [a] world where rituals clearly new to me — Miriam’s Cup [and an] orange on the seder plate — were already in place and could be taken for granted, assumed to be ‘traditional,’” Ochs said.
Miriam’s Cup is a relatively new ritual object placed on the seder table next to the Cup of Elijah, honoring the role of the prophetess in the Exodus and the contributions of Jewish women. An orange on the seder plate is a modern addition symbolizing inclusion, specifically of LGBTQ+ Jews and other marginalized identities in the community, a tradition initiated by Professor Susannah Heschel in the 1980s.
Why does Jewish ritual remain important today?
“It’s really challenging to traverse the moments of our lives, whether they’re difficult ones or joyous ones, and we can all learn from the Jewish ritual creativity of our era,” Ochs said.
“I think all of that is something that we as a museum should find important, because that is going to help future historians and scholars and students understand our moment in time today,” Leavitt said.
