Faithful families and divine bonds of care: relational spirituality in the lived religion of young Mizrahi-Masorti Jewish-Israelis

This paper engages the field of lived religion, which centers practices, gender, power, and marginalized voices while expanding its scope to include an understudied community and explore the role of the family. Using feminist narrative analysis of qualitative interviews, we argue familial contexts serve as core formative spaces for constructing lived religion and sustaining young Mizrahi-Masorti Jewish-Israelis’ identities, often excluded from educational institutions and cultural frameworks. Our study reveals lived religion as an intergenerational process of sustaining practices, beliefs, and identities through the interplay of formal and informal, individual and collective, and intimate and political dimensions. By broadening and innovating the concepts of “relational spirituality” and a “theology of care,” we demonstrate how religious life emerges from dynamic divisions of “spiritual labor” within commitments to, and care for, familial networks. Centering prayer practices, we show how relationships with the divine are shaped in familial terms, expressed through flexible gendered roles and an ethic of care that carries cultural and political significance. It contributes to the study of lived religion by challenging its Western individualistic focus instead highlighting relational, collective, and marginalized dimensions. It also advances scholarship on relational spirituality by connecting micro-level familial practices with macro-level structures and histories, offering a qualitative empirical basis for theoretical insights illuminating the interconnectedness of religious practices, beliefs, and familial and sociocultural dynamics.