Rituals, we know from the study of religion, are supposed to encapsulate a perfect order completely unlike the messiness of lived, daily life. In the ritual space, everything is supposed to go right. This is what marks the disjunctive quality, the profound discontinuity between ritual and life, between that which is pure, by virtue of being set apart and choreographed, and that which is impure, by virtue of being messy. The Days of Awe between Rosh Ha’Shanah and Yom Kippur are no different. The awe is itself performative, and everyone knows exactly how the ritual ends. In the words of the mighty u’netaneh tokef, Who will live and who will die? Who by fire and who by water? Year in and year out, it’s the same script. This is how how things “ought” to be, even when they “are” not, allowing one to go into this period and its settings confident in God’s good forgivingness. One hopes to be inscribed into the book of life. Whatever personal disaster might threaten the individual between this time now and next year is incorporated into larger social systems, with their own rituals of healing, confession, and mourning. Usually the ritual contains the sense of its own ending, which is that life goes on, one way or another, and that there are ways to mitigate those things that go wrong. But this year felt different and uncertain in the synagogue. but between this year and next year, who knows what horrors await, what mass and catastrophic miseries: flooding, earthquakes, refugee crises, nuclear conflict, Nazis in the streets, a ripping apart of the social fabric wrought by a white supremacist in the White House and his minions. This goes beyond the trite truism that reality overwhelms ritual. It is rather the case that ritual systems and the confidence they convey are only able to contain or manage so much dissonance (let’s call it quotidian dissonance), beyond which that confidence that is at the crux of ritual will simply collapse. It might be that under these kinds of situations a different kind of ritual other than rites of atonement is in order; for instance the rites of fasting and lamentations, with which most bourgeois people are unfamiliar; or maybe some performative mode of prophetic screaming, more primed as it is to disaster, and with it own strong sense of an end; or is it in the notion, also in the u’netaneh tokef acts of repentance, prayer, and good deeds might go some way in softening the severity of the decrees that await one.
- Zachary Braiterman is Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. His specialization is modern Jewish thought and philosophical aesthetics. Facebook | Twitter | Academia.edu.
jewishphilosophy place @ Facebook
-
Recent Posts
- Question about Freud re: Surrealism
- Abortion =/= Murder (Jewish Law)
- Medieval Islam & The Dialogue Against the Jews (Peter Alfonsi)
- Virtual Reality Of Holocaust Memory
- Moral Meaning and the Holocaust (James Loeffler)
- (ADL) Anti-Semitism Algorithm
- (James Loeffler) After Charlottesville: Antisemitism, Race, Law (Rudolph Lecture)
- Sefat Emet Passover
- The Hasidic Seder Plate is an Objet de Fantasie
- (Marc Chagall) Les Israélites mangent l’Agneau de la Pâque (1931)
- (Still Lachrymose) The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom (Robert Chazan)
- Stone Cold Truth at Tablet is Schlock
- (Wordle) The Messianic Idea (Nachmanides)
- (Mother & Martyr) Mistress Rachel (Mainz Anonymous)
- Jewish Suffering Human Suffering The Suffering Jesus (Nitzahon Yashan)
- Medieval Anti-Jewish Anti-Semitism (Source Reader)
- Tough Italian Jews (Scroll of Esther) (1616)
- (Esther) Rashi (Aesthetic Judaism)
- Sefat Emet (A Rough Digest)
- (Paul) Toledot Yeshu (Parting of the Ways)
- Russia Ukraine Syria Israel Palestine
- (Re-Alignments) Glory to Ukraine (Anti-Semitism & Liberal Democracy)
- A Few Personal Reflections On Jews and Ukraine, Nostalgia and Points of Departure
- (Ukraine) What They’re Saying On “The Left”
- Pharisees (Matthew)
- (Apocalypse Now) Parting Ways With The Jews (Gospel of Matthew)
- What Trypho Said (Justin Martyr)
- (Technology) Slaves & Automatic Machine Gods (Aristotle)
- (Pro Flacco) You Know How The Jews Stick Together (Cicero)
- anti-Judaism & anti-Semitism (Syllabus)
- aesthetics
- affect
- American Judaism
- ancient Near East
- animals
- anti-Semitism
- architecture
- art
- Ashkenaz
- BDS
- Bible
- blog
- body
- Buber and Rosenzweig
- Buddhism
- China
- Christianity
- cinema
- cosmopolitanism
- death
- Deleuze
- ethics
- gender
- God
- Heschel
- Holocaust
- Husserl
- image
- in-the-car
- India
- Islam
- Israel
- Jerusalem
- Jewish art
- Jewish Philosophy
- Jewish Studies
- Judaism
- Kabbalah-Hasidut
- law
- liberalism
- literature
- Maimonides
- Mendelssohn
- messianism
- Mordecai Kaplan
- Museums & Galleries
- music
- nature
- New York
- object
- Palestine
- parks & gardens
- Passover
- photography
- political theology
- politics
- race
- racism
- religion
- religion and science
- Religious Studies
- ritual
- science
- sculpture
- secularism
- Shabbat & holidays
- Spinoza
- suffering
- synagogue
- Syracuse
- Syracuse University
- Syria
- talmud-midrash
- technology
- what i'm reading
Archives
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012