Religious rituals and secular rituals: interpenetrating models of childbirth in a modern, Israeli context

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 1993 by Susan Starr Sered

It is not customary by us and there is a logic to it. I know someone who bought things in advance and the baby died.

My husband is a Hassid and concerned with the evil eye and it can be more distressing if you buy things and then there are problems.

Beliefs and procrastination.

It is forbidden |by Jewish law~ and it is also hard if something happens.

The evil eye and it is written not to.

Evil eye. I have had five miscarriages. God wants humility. It seems obvious |not to prepare~.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE MULTIPLICITY OF RITUAL MODELS

Many of the women whom I interviewed reported either having forgotten to use secular rituals and/or religious rituals, or having found them ineffective. The majority of women of this study had difficulty maintaining any particular cultural stance throughout the birth. Patterns running through almost all of the birth descriptions were:

I planned to do Lamaze breathing but I forgot.

The techniques I learned in the childbirth preparation course did not really help.

I wanted to ask God to help my family but I forgot.

I brought a Book of Psalms and a picture of Baba Sali |Moroccan holy man~ to the hospital but left them in my bag. I didn't feel comfortable taking them out.

I guess I should have performed the |obligatory ritual~ hand washing because I went to the toilet while I was in labor, but I didn't get around to it.

One implication of the profusion of fertility models and rituals is that individual women do not fully assimilate any one model, and so are likely to abandon it (or feel abandoned by it) during moments of intense emotion and sensation.

These women's childbirth rituals are a matter of individual choice: there are no societal sanctions carried out against women who do not perform childbirth rituals; nonperformance of rituals is not perceived as either sinful or revolutionary. In modern and pluralistic societies individuals do not necessarily carry out rituals because that is what their grandparents did. To the contrary, individuals learn multiple traditional and nontraditional belief systems from a variety of sources, and feel relatively free to make ritual choices that suit their current situation. In addition, because within male-oriented religious cultures women's rituals tend to lie outside of the framework of uniform and required religious behaviors, women in particular may feel free to select rituals and beliefs that seem meaningful to them. The knowledge that one's ritual package is idiosyncratic, nonobligatory, fluid, and eclectic surely lessens the perceived efficacy of the rituals. At the same time, the opportunity to draw at will from a large cultural reservoire means that individuals can select rituals that closely reflect their own fears, hopes, and dreams.

I suspect that previous studies of childbirth rituals may well have underestimated the extent to which the precise ritual packages of individuals are idiosyncratic. My study suggests that factors encouraging idiosyncratic ritual selection include: modernity (in the sense of emphasis upon the individual rather than the kin group or community), pluralism (in particular, contact with other cultures that are perceived as similar enough to one's own culture to be of ritual interest -- Jewish women in Israel have not adopted childbirth rituals of Muslim women), lack of absolute ritual requirements (in the Jewish case, this condition is met more easily for women than for men), and multiple sources and models of childbirth information (most women of this study learned about birth and birth rituals from many different sources: family members, books, doctors, and strangers).