This Ritual Life Archive
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Here you will find out about ways to enhance your holiday experience, to celebrate or mark a meaningful life cycle event, and to deepen your experience of the everyday.
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Guiding Our Growing Children Toward Independence…
Why did God decide to create humans? Out of loneliness? Curiosity? A need to be loved? A need for creative, thinking, feeling partners? Whatever the reason, God had some fine hopes, and pinned them all on the Big Plan: Give us Freedom and make us images of God. God then lived through untold generations of humans who were disappointing, who fell short, who denied or undermined The Plan, or who were just plain evil – along with all the (relatively fewer) folds who were loving and cared and stood up to injustice and fought suffering. The miracle of life, the real miracle, is that God stuck with us for so long, instead of throwing in the towel and just giving up the whole painful frustrating exercise. Talk about patience! Apparently God has simply never give up the hope, planted before Eden, that with our freedom, with our independence, we would eventually perfect the world.
Meditation:
A message to my children –
Your life will be filled with challenges, for you and for us. As you grow, you will bring both great joy to us and grow away from us in ways that hurt. Our hope for you is that as you grow in independence and make your own decisions that we will always be open to one another. That after all arguments there will be reconciliation and a recommitment to the love which holds us together. May your flourish, not as an image of us, but as who you are meant to be.
Blessing:
She-petarani me’onsho shel zeh.
Released me from the responsibility to discipline my child.
Teaching:
"When the children are blessed, the parents are blessed through them."
(Zohar I 227b)
(CLAL Faculty)
CLAL's National Jewish Resource Center develops and publishes rituals that
help to bridge the gap between our contemporary lives and the ancient wisdom of the Jewish
tradition. We invite you to become a partner with us in thinking about the place of ritual
in our lives and in developing new ritual resources for our time. If you are interested in
being part of this exciting endeavor, visit with us in the Ritual Resource Area
of the CLAL website by clicking here.
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