The Ark

New customs are being invented in Jewish tradition and the internet is partly responsible. Breaking the glass under the wedding canopy is now being preceded by breaking a plate with one's mother-in-law. Dr Sam Cooper explains why the trend is growing.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

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Rachael Kohn: So you thought breaking plates was an old Greek custom! Go to a Jewish wedding and be surprised.

Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but old customs are being invented as we speak. Even though customs are meant to be old and inherited, more often than not they've been tempered with, added to, or even borrowed from another tradition. And so it is with Judaism, the religion most associated with customary law, codified in the Talmud.

Dr Sam Cooper is an anthropologist from Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, where he's lived for 30 years and witnessed many weddings, which always include the groom stamping on the glass.

Sam Cooper: I think it's an integral part of the wedding ceremony, it's kind of a signifier for the entire wedding. It's also something that is kind of a finishing point, and of course when you break something, especially if you smash it into smithereens, it represents a kind of irreversibility. The wedding has just happened, it's at least symbolically is not going to repeat itself or reverse itself in any kind of way. This is meant to be forever.

Rachael Kohn: Now Sam, that does seem like a violent thing to do, but what does it actually mean?

Sam Cooper: What it actually means is what the people see in it. What I see in it is a kind of irreversibility and a kind of ending.

The actual custom is reported in the Talmud where a prominent rabbi came to the wedding of a friend of his son and discovered there was too much fun going on. The Talmud calls it holalot, which means a really rowdy good time. And he sent his servants to get a precious piece of glass, and in the middle of all the dancing and singing, he made a space in the middle of the dancers and smashed the glass violently in order to tell them that they were just too happy about the whole thing.

You shouldn't be that exuberant about anything, everything is done I think in Jewish life with just a touch of sadness. And Jewish life would have lots of symbols or customary acts like that finishing, we put a stone on the grave when we're finished with the funeral, we do other acts that aren't necessarily violent, but they are acts that say 'This is over now, we're not going to change it any more, we're going to go on with our lives, taking this new situation into consideration.'

Rachael Kohn: Isn't there a bit of historical allusion there to the destruction of the Temple?

Sam Cooper: Absolutely, but that comes not at the point where the custom is introduced, but it's introduced some hundreds of years later, and there's another custom that has existed in Jewish life, but was only known to a limited number of groups called the breaking of the plate. That happens at the beginning of a wedding nowadays, or just before the beginning of a wedding, where not the bridegroom, but the mothers of the bride and groom get together and they smash a very large plate.

Rachael Kohn: Some people would see that as a protest of the work in the kitchen that is about to begin!

Sam Cooper: Well it may well be. Anyone who's a Jungian psychologist might see it in quite a different way. I see it as opening the ceremony, in the same way that you close it, a very Jewish custom of creating certain kinds of symmetry. Now this custom has vague origins, but what we can say is since this custom has been elaborated or developed in Israeli life today what we see is that the mothers say, "If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem"; in other words they tie this destruction of the plate to the destruction of the Temple just as some time in the development of the custom of breaking of the cup, the words "If I forget thee Oh Jerusalem" were added.

Rachael Kohn: I would guess that today with so much changing in social life, particularly the advancement of women and one can see that in Judaism, that rituals around the wedding would reflect some of their interests.

Sam Cooper: I think the idea of this breaking of the plate and the women doing it, in particular the mothers are doing it, represents that kind of development. I think it would be very difficult for an anthropologist to say that customs exist without being embedded in whatever the social reality is at a particular point in time.

I think it would be very easy to say that here is something that is being re-elaborated, re-absorbed into the system or expanded in the cultural system, because or along with ideas about what the place of women is today, and how women and the interests of Jewish women to practice more and to act more in Jewish ceremony. Recently one of my colleagues, a senior professor at Bar Ilan University, also a rabbi, which I'm not, went into a detailed discussion of women reading the Torah, and making blessings over the Torah.

Rachael Kohn: Your particular field is quite interesting, and I would imagine constantly evolving, and that is to look at how customs are invented. Now in a way that's a paradox in some people's minds because they think of customs as some artefact from the past.

Sam Cooper: Well that's the interesting thing about customs, no matter what, even when they were invented yesterday, in people's minds they represent the past. But the fact is that every custom has to be invented some time. It might be yesterday, it might have been 100 years ago, it might have been 1,000 years ago. Once it's invented, and especially if it appears to be a bit exotic or different, or slightly out of context, then that custom carries a number of associated meanings which repeat themselves almost every time we look at people and ask them about what they're doing. Custom seems to mean something about authenticity, it seems to have something to do about a very distant and vague past, it seems to tie the practitioner of that custom into a whole series of cultural, social and in this case religious facts with which this person may or may not be familiar but which seem an obvious extension of the act that's been done.

One example of that I've always been curious about and I've been going to synagogues for over 50 years, so I can say something at least about my reaction to the custom, is the custom that I saw, I saw it even here in Australia, only among a few people in Sydney but among quite a few people in the synagogue I visited in Perth several years ago, of pointing to the Torah when it's raised with the little pinky finger of the right hand.

I was a guest in that synagogue so I didn't run around asking the people, What are you doing, and why are you doing that? But I have done that in my synagogue. And by and large, most of the people who I've asked didn't know. I asked a colleague of mine who is a full Professor and quite a good scholar, although not necessarily in Jewish studies, I asked him why, what's that all about, what did he think he was doing when he was doing that, and he told me he didn't know but he would find out. And we met again for coffee two weeks later and he said, 'I've found out. When you pick up the Torah and show it to everybody, the sentence that read says "This is the Torah that Moses gave to Israel", and so we're supposed to point at it, but it's not nice to point with your index, so you point with your pinky.'

Well as an anthropologist I couldn't throw that back in his face, but somehow or other that did not seem to me to be the kind of explanation that I would e3xpect, and my reasoning for this kind of custom goes back to the idea that by doing something that's quite unique and somewhat exotic or mystical, or mysterious, a statement is being made, and a statement has to do with a) 'I really know what I'm doing', and b) 'I got it from somewhere, there's some kind of past that comes here.' And c) 'I'm doing something that's extremely authentic.' And here I would just add that the rationale for the kinds of the things that I'm looking at is that it seems to me that in the modern world especially in the West, we are looking for this kind of authenticity.

People want to have their identities verified, they want to be able to say that they are somebody who belongs in some particular kind of place. And that's a very difficult proposition. One of the ways to solve that kind of problem is to take on exotic dress, do exotic acts, learn exotic crafts and trades etc. And so my rationale for looking at customs and the way they work, in modern Jewish life, somehow or other always ends up being connected to identity, to authenticity, to rapid culture change and to the flow of people into the religious system, not known as being strongly connected with it.

Rachael Kohn: Well when you talk about culture change and society and change, one things of Israel today, a society that's often rocked by tragedy. I wonder whether there are customs being developed or responses to tragedies such as terrorist bombings, that in some way function to reaffirm Jewish identity and at the same time provide some comfort.

Sam Cooper: Usually the collective aspect of identity and loss seems to be more and more emphasised. So when we had the helicopter accident some years ago where 72 soldiers were killed when two helicopters crashed, not in a war situation even, but just having taken off in the north to go into Lebanon to replace some other soldiers, they were out there, the funeral and the mourning was certainly, I observed that in many places in Israel, were certainly not an individual kind of thing, but it was a collective thing.

Entire communities came out, and in the funerals that took place, they appeared to be very spontaneous, but secondly, they involved hundreds, if not thousands of people in local communities. In my synagogue, in Israel, when we say the Memorial Prayer on the high holidays, it has been the custom that the younger people who have parents, especially those who have parents that are present in the synagogue, leave. And the older people stay in, and they mourn their late departed relatives, even mentioning each one by name.

In my synagogue, when we had to say Yizkor (Memorial Prayer) the two people who were in charge of the service, got up and said 'It's not contagious, you can stay in', meaning you're not going to die from it, there's no mumbo jumbo here. And the person who was asked to say Yizkor was actually a young soldier whose parents were present in the room, something that I'd never seen happen before. And when he said this Yizkor, the entire personal part of the memorial was made quite small. It was something that was said very quickly, each person individually said their own particular Yizkor for their dear departed, and then the service was elaborated only in the direction of the departed soldiers, the people who had been killed in terror attacks and those kinds of things, making the entire Yizkor business into something that it hadn't been as far as I know in the past, and that is a kind of collective or periodic collective mourning over those people who sort of fell on the altar of the State.

I have to tell you, I was not particularly happy but be that as it may, I sat back and became an anthropologist for a minute, and looked back and tried to understand what this direction might possibly mean, and this underlying tension in Israeli society between personal and collective seems to now be expressed through this kind of custom.

Rachael Kohn: Let's finish on Shabbat. Now that is the most ubiquitously practiced Jewish celebration, every week is an opportunity to incorporate or possibly invent some new customs. What have you seen as an anthropologist?

Sam Cooper: There are for example, the traditions of 'how much singing', you know we're going to have a singing Shabbat, they call it now a Carlebach minyan (service), they even have them here.

Rachael Kohn: That's a reference to the singer Shlomo Carlebach?

Sam Cooper: That's a reference to the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach who wrote lots of music that was very popular from around 1958 until the time of his death.

Rachael Kohn: And that was in the 1980s.

Sam Cooper: The mid-'80s I believe. But again you know, the Carlebach minyan is well known for taking almost all day and singing out every part, and lots of young people go and to meet other young people of course, but also to participate in this way in the synagogue service. Those kinds of things that are going on.

Rachael Kohn: What about the Internet though? I mean I would think that's a source for a lot of new ideas, newfangled ideas.

Sam Cooper: I'll tell you a story of an old, newfangled idea, (I like the contrast of old-new): when my wife's brother and my soon-to-be sister-in-law got married, the wedding was in Los Angeles, they now live in Dallas, I brought up at some point with my sister-in-law after the wedding something that had to do with a custom that I didn't know, personally know very well, which is the plate-breaking before the wedding. And she said, 'Well of course, we did that before the wedding.'

Now she comes from a community that I don't think beforehand knew very much about Jewish weddings at all. And I said, 'Well, how did you do that? Why did you this?' She said, 'Well we looked up the Jewish wedding sites on the Internet and there was this very nice custom, so I let your mother-in-law, my wife's mother, and the bride's mother, and they got together and they broke a plate before the wedding, as part of the customs that we did.'

And of course you know, there are all kinds of things that develop out of that, and that's still growing, what you do with the pieces of the plate. And the answer is, you give the pieces to unmarried women as a charm that they get married, and now there's a place that makes plates, it's not just a plain plate any more, it's a decorated plate that has sentences from the Torah and from other places written on it. If you get a whole word, as your piece of the plate, well then it's a really important treasure.

And then the latest thing that I heard is other leftover pieces that aren't given out are made into a mosaic with a new family name, and pasted on a board, and the plate becomes a symbol, again, for something that perhaps it wasn't in the first place, a symbol for the new family as it develops. And now they have a board that they can put on their front door and say 'This is Goldstein's House'.

Rachael Kohn: Dr Sam Cooper is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Next week: the scientific truth of the Exodus miracles. Cambridge University Professor Colin Humphreys shares his findings. That's next week on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

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