The rituals of life

 

When I was a young person living at home with my parents and brother, we had a ritual each time we came home after a night out at some celebration or other. Off would go our coats and down would go our handbags and one of us, often my father, would head to the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea. We’d all sit around the kitchen drinking tea and eating biscuits until one by one we headed for sleep. I take two things out of this: one is a reflection on our relative thinness as a family which made eating biscuits not particularly sinfull and the other is an explanation for my lifelong problem with falling asleep which may well have been caused by the caffeine before bed.

There are so many rituals which studded my life. One small example: when my brother and I came home from school, we would sit down to an unvarying afternoon tea of bread and jam in winter or watermelon in summer.

There were many rituals connected with Judaism. Friday nights, for example, were fairly sacred in the sense that we were always at home. I think I was in my 30s before I went out on a Friday night to anything other than Shabbat dinner at someone else’s home. My father would make what I now know was a fairly truncated Kiddush, or set of prayers, and my mother would cook either chicken “cacciatore” or roast beef. The chicken was cooked to extinction in margarine with onions and tomatoes; the roast beef so un-tender that it was virtually un-eatable unless shaved into very small slivers. Other ritual foods like chicken soup and chopped liver were by contrast extraordinarily good.

In my pre-teenage and a little older, I went each Saturday morning with my father to the synagogue. For some reason our shule-going did not include Friday nights. We also went to synagogue in the yearly rituals of holydays such as Passover, Purim, Shavuot and more and, of course, the High Holydays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. Another ritual associated with the High Holydays was buying a new set of nice clothes and a hat. This business of a hat was contentious. I always wanted a great cartwheel of a hat but my mother said I couldn’t have one as I was short and would look like a mushroom!

There were certain rituals connected to rites of passage like barmitzvahs and weddings. The receptions which followed these family events were usually in the evening with dancing to live music and large dinners. In my middle to late teenage it was a ritual to wear a long dress, frequently with a small jacket like a bolero, to these affairs. Long dresses were also worn to balls like those held by various institutions at university and also bridesmaid dresses (of which I had several) were usually long.

I recall an incident associated with a ball which gave me a pretty strong indication that the Almighty took an interest in my spiritual welfare. I had been invited by a non-Jewish boy to a ball being held at one of the posh colleges. Unfortunately, it was scheduled for a Friday night. I begged and pleaded with my parents to let me go and eventually they reluctantly agreed. The big day approached. On the day before, I was sitting in the sun in the Quadrangle at Sydney University when I noticed a rash over both my arms. It was measles! Of course, as fate would have it, I missed the ball. Strike one for the Almighty!

Back to the evening receptions for barmitzvahs and weddings. As I grew independent and came to these events on my own, one ritual was to seek out my parents first thing, say hello and exchange kisses. Another was to greet all the family friends whom I called Aunty and Uncle. Another ritual was to waltz with my (real) Uncle Reg. He was a fantastic dancer so this was a pleasure.

Another ritual in the olden days was to write thank you notes every time you went to a party or a wedding. It was simply de rigueur and the next day, out would come the notepaper, envelopes and stamps.

And a final two rituals concerned with shoes. My father would clean our school schools regularly, buffing them to a shine. And we would store our wellington boots with the tops folded over and pinned down with a peg so the spiders couldn’t get in.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations

US President Harry S Truman:

“It’s a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”