Australian Aboriginal people, have very advanced social and cultural structure. Australia is comprised of several thousand different aboriginal groups and territories. Acceptance into another community relied on endorsement from the elders of the community you were leaving. Family bonds and ties are extremely strong.

Hence, one explanation may be that participation was essentially mandatory to be considered part of the community at all, and to be recognised as an adult.

> What must the observer get from it

The compulsion to raise and seek answers for questions like this has a lot to do with it.

Over the last couple centuries, increasingly much of the world has been inducted into a culture that looks at life from the perspective of an individual, looks at that individual's life through the lens of economy and benefit, and invites the individual to approach that life as some engineer seeking optimization.

For many, this way of seeing the world as economic individuals is even projected onto the people of elsewhere and elsewhen, taking for granted that they must have been doing the same thing whether they knew it or not.

A different perspective sees ritual and tradition as the blood and flesh of a community or legacy, and sees the community and legacy that lives for hundreds or thousands of years as the far more important thing than the individual that arrives and leaves over the pittance of just a few decades.

For a community, carrying forward a ritual is like breathing, and an individual who fully understands themselves as a fleeting little lung cell in this long-lasting community implicitly fulfills their role of perpetuating the community's life by practicing the ritual.

But what's interesting is that asking questions framed like yours is itself a kind of ritual, perpetuating a different (and much more recently birthed) community, and there are countless other rituals of "modernity" that we implicitly peform. These rituals are so natural to us that we barely even recognize them as something outside of us... the same, most likely, your great-grandparents with theirs.

> So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations?

Probably some combination of of a large pool of rituals in traditional societies (so the probability of any of them carrying over 500 generations is greater than that of a single given one), high fertility (so if you don't feel inclined to carry it, some of your siblings/cousins do) and utility (some rituals may increase surviving odds of people that follow them). This particular ritual don't seem very useful, but maybe it has some unexpected benefical side effect, say, the plant they traditionally picked the sticks from, when burned, could shoo away insects that were potential vectors for disease (completely made up example, just to make the point clearer).

I assume by unable you mean they had to stop due to persecution? It sounds from this article that this practice that had survived so long also hit an abrupt stop when faced with persecution from colonizers (at least that's why I'm assuming they have to go by records from 1880 and not just ask the current practitioners). I think this says more about the ability for persecution to shut down a cultural practice more than any quality that practice has to have to survive.

You can still go to or host, say, a Seder, no? That kind of cultural transmission doesn't rely on individual families but in the case of the rituals of Judaism and lots of other religions it seems to have been fairly effective.

> So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations?

There's literally nothing else but this.

> motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor?

There's no vigor. There are almost no outside influences. There's almost no rebellious thought. You're raised into this life, and you know the rituals by heart from a young age.

> Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power,

Any isolated/primitive culture with no outside influences. Throughout the 20th century ethnographers collected thousands of such rituals before they disappeared after contact with the outside world.

> So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor?

I think small, pre-literate societies on the edge of survival rely heavily on "traditional" knowledge, and for very good reasons.

One of my anthropology professors told me a story about a village (I forget his source for this, but it sounded like he had one). They had an old woman, probably in her 80s, toothless, partly blind, and mostly immobile. She only survived because of a significant ongoing effort of the village.

Then the village had a bad year, a famine. And the old woman said, "This happened when I was a child. What you need to do is take the leaves of such-and-such a plant. They're poisonous. But if you beat them with rocks, soak them, and let them age a bit, then they're disgusting but edible." And so the village remained fed. The old woman was contributing to the village's survival, because she was a source of mostly-forgotten knowledge.

Similarly, we know that modern hunter-gatherers might be able to find and identify 47 species of edible mushrooms in their local climate. This knowledge base can easily be the equivalent of a college education focused just on finding food.

Now, inland Australia is famously one of the most inhospitable places in earth. Early European explorers noticed just how difficult it was to survive there. But the locals someone managed just fine. They knew all the tricks.

So my guess is that the kind of society which can remember how to find and prepare 47 kinds of edible mushrooms, or which can survive a famine that occurs every 75 years, or which can survive inland Australia, is a society with significant respect for ancestral knowledge. Learning the rituals may often be a matter of life and death.

The modern world is different because we have books, and science, and high division of labor. If we forget how to do our grandparents' jobs, someone else will still learn. Or the nature of work will change so much that a new generation needs to learn a new way of working.

The story of Pleiades might be as old as 100 000 years.

The main thing is you need to live near other people with the same rituals.

I suspect your grandparents moved to the US after the holocaust and settled somewhere far from other Jews. Judaism can not be practiced in isolation, it was not setup that way.

Also, nothing stopping you from finding a Chabad near you and reclaiming at least a portion of your heritage.

Hmm, I’d say this is a problem that Jesus, the Rastafarians, the Amish and your own tradition grappled with.

Jesus was in the world, but not of the world.

Rastafarians step one foot at a time out of Babylon.

The Amish have removed themselves for the most part, but they are still somewhat free riders on the greater society.

Jews celebrate the sabbath. In this way, 6 days a week they are of the world, and can share in its prosperity, but one day is reserved for keeping the traditions.