Imagining A Shmita Bowl: 7 Explorations for Ritual Use

A bowl is an invitation to conversation – an empty vessel to be filled .. or not… and with what? It’s the perfect ritual object to approach a year whose primary identity is to be empty of “business as usual” but full of possibility.When you approach other ritual objects used throughout the cycles of the Jewish calendar, there are clear parameters – to be kept or broken by the artist / practitioner. A chanukkia has a certain number of branches with rules about how they should be arranged. A lulav and etrog set are highly regulated by halacha (Jewish law). The lived experience of each person celebrating the holiday also informs our concepts of what the ritual object is. But most Jews have little to no lived experience of shmita. How do we approach a ritual for a holiday we’ve never really celebrated? Originally, the goal was to create a singular shmita bowl, made to sit on the table for the entire shmita year, and to be used ritually. Emmett and Nili, an artist and an educator, found themselves circling the same questions throughout their process – Do we figure out a ritual first and build a bowl that reflects it? Or imagine a bowl and ask what type of ritual it invites? They decided to invite the community in on the conversation. Eighteen people responded with ideas of a special bowl they imagined using for the shmita year. They discussed the responses and continued the conversations, with Nili sharing shmita Torah and Emmett making more bowls. The result was a series of 49 bowls, which were grouped into 7 major archetypes of ritual activation, outlined in the attached PDF. The completed bowls are reflections of our ongoing, unfinished conversations. They are also finished ritual objects available for sale/distribution and reproduction.