The Coexistence of Change and Continuity - Timbrel Style

When the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was dying in 1994, a new ritual object, a “Miriam’s tambourine” arose among Lubavitch women around the world. Just as Miriam and the other Israelite women had when they escaped Egypt through the parting of the Red Sea, these Lubavitch women would dance with their tambourines to herald in a better era. The Lubavitch women believed that, instead of dying, their Rebbe would arise as the Messiah and herald in the Messianic Age. In the months before the Rebbe’s death, Lubavitch women bought these tambourines and carried them around in order to play them when the Rebbe arose as the Messiah. Even after the Rebbe’s death, the women carried around their tambourines as symbols of an upcoming Messianic Age nevertheless. The symbolism of the positivism of Miriam and the Biblical Israelite women had grown on the Lubavitch women, and their ritual object had transformed both itself and the identity of the women.

Even though the Lubavitch women follow what is often considered ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the women’s view of ritual still transforms itself and themselves. These women can be considered both “guardians of continuity” and “agents of change,” professing to follow the exact words of the Torah while changing ritual in order to fit their personal interpretations. As Barbara Orenstein claims that Judaism views the progress of the world as both linear and cyclical, effective Judaism must place continuity and change in constant dialectic with one another. Driver’s order and transformation must constantly balance each other out. From the smorgasbord Judaism of the Rabbinic era to feminist innovation to Lubavitch symbolism, Judaism has always faced the challenges of both staying true to its thousand-years old history while avoiding the ritual boredom that may accompany such truth.