Now in these last two lectures we have attempted to distinguish two very different sorts of Judaism. We should be mindful, of course, that the Kabbalah itself emerges out of Rabbinic Judaism. Like the earlier Rabbis, these Kabbalistic sages inherit the Bible, and in their mystical Midrashim they too are responding to and interpreting that foundational text. Indeed, we can say that for some centuries mysticism was the normative way of being a Rabbinic Jew. So let us conclude our remarks on Jewish mysticism by noting how even this bold teaching domesticated by some of the impulses of the earlier Rabbinic Judaism, notably its sense of a transcendent God who is ultimately unknowable, its strong here and now orientation, its thoroughgoing monotheism.

It should be noted first of all that the Kabbalists understood themselves as inhabiting two teaching domains. The first, in which they taught as rabbis, was the more public, visible exoteric world of the Rabbinic Judaism of their day. The second world, much less visible, indeed hidden often from public scrutiny, was world of a mystical Judaism practiced among a small circle of elite and fully educated Jews. The Kabbalists, often the leading Rabbis of their own communities, saw themselves as writing for two different audiences. Thus the Medieval Spanish Rabbi Nachmanides composed a conventional Bible commentary (though one brilliant enough to get itself inscribed on the standard page of the printed Bible along with Rashi, the other great Medieval commentator), a commentary which contains only hints to his esoteric teachings that were available to a much more limited audience. The Kabbalists were aware of the many dangers in the secret teachings they propounded, including the possibility that they might be suggesting a new polytheism in their descriptions of the unfolding Godhead into ten potencies. Thus they chose a strategy that would keep their more mystical views concealed from the unlearned who might be kept astray. Of course, even if one of the less learned got his hands on a Zohar manuscript it is unlike that he could make heads or tails of this highly coded work, one more way the Kabbalist veiled their teachings

Like so many innovative interpreters of the Biblical text, the Kabbalists considered their own views to be a true Judaism, a traditional Judaism. The very term Kabbalah means that which was received, that is, the traditions from the past that were handed down (orally and secretly as they imagined) from master to disciple. Many of the Kabbalistic texts composed in the 13th century make claims for themselves of their own antiquity, putting into the mouths of the sages of the Talmud the mysticism being developing in Medieval Spain in the 12-14th centuries. This was not seen as some fraudulent claim, but a style of writing long used in Jewish circles in which a radical contemporizing of Judaism understands itself as something profoundly traditional, something as Scholem says is "as old as the hills."

And in so many ways the Kabbalah is traditional. For example, in its mainstream forms such as the Zohar, God's transcendence, despite his unfolding into different personalities, is theologically protected in various ways. For example, the very highest state of the divinity as Eiyn Sof (literally, That Without End, i.e., The Infinite) is seen as not really involved in the process of unfolding. He is, as we discussed elsewhere, so utterly transcendent that he is not even mentioned in the Zohar. (In other texts by the author of the Zohar, Moses de Leon, Eiyn Sof's transcendence from the theogonic process is elaborated upon.) The Zohar also argues that first three of the Sefirot--Keter (Crown), Chokhmah (Wisdom), and Binah (Understanding)--are likewise completely unknowable so highly spiritualized are they. The material world of creation is formed only by the lower seven of the Sefirot, and here world formation is compared to a seal that impresses its imprint on wax and is then removed from the wax.

One can see elsewhere this strongly theistic and transcendence-oriented Jewish mysticism in the Zohar. And it is not a surprise to cultural historians of Judaism that it is this more conservative mysticisms that becomes the dominant trajectory in the Kabbalah for the next three centuries. The Zohar's appearance in the 1280s in Spain eclipses some competing Jewish mysticisms that understood the divine unfolding as one of overflow of divine being as a stream of divine essence rushes downward, sometimes described in terms of stream of light, other times as a seminal flow from within the Godhead. This rival trajectory in the Kabbalah articulates a mysticism that is much more emphatically immanence-oriented. It announces in bold pantheism terms that the material created world is composed of divine substance, claiming that the world is filled with divinity, that God is in the world as opposed to the more conservative formula that the world is within God.

This radical mysticism is also much more explicit about the mystical exercises which lead to ecstasy, to the capacity of the human to enjoy unitive experiences with the divinity, even a divine identity. It celebrates in so many ways the impulses towards fusion, and its aim seems to be the liquidation of the mystic and the world in the pure spirit of the Divine. It is in this tradition that the mystic experiences himself as the Divine Nothing, that is, one fully absorbed into the Fullness of the divine Being in which no distinctions can be made.

The more traditional Kabbalah, we might say, balances the impulse towards fusion--an erotics of desire rendered into a religious longing--with another deeply human impulse, the delight in a state (or feeling) we sometimes translates fear, awe, that sense of terrible mystery which overwhelms the self and dramatically makes one aware of ones limitations. Here too the term Nothingness is often used as a term for self-identification when one has achieved this state of wonder. Here, however, the term points to how little the human has in common with this utterly transcendent, unknowable and completely incommensurate divinity that is encountered, and encounter with such grandeur that everything human feels like naught.

This state has been described in the religious classic The Idea of the Holy (where the more accurate translation from the German would render the Gefuhl as "feeling") as the numinous. The author theologian, Rudolf Otto described this subjective state as one derived from an encounter with the mysterium tremendum, an overpowering force which renders the human awe-struck. Not exactly a state cultivated much these days, it is often associated with the sense of wonder at the grand Canyon, the feelings one experiences when nature is unleashed in a hurricane, even the kinds of delights we take in riding a roller coaster or going to a horror film that can really scare us. For Otto it was the "feeling-response" that one has in an encounter with the "Wholly Other," an encounter with something so unfamiliar that we are only left with a sense of strangeness and the awareness of the limits of our minds to comprehend. It is a rapture in which, as Otto indicates by an epigraph, that "a God comprehended is no God."

The Kabbalists would agree, for like so many of the other medieval Jewish thinkers they appreciated awe as an even more basic religious response than love. Whereas love produces the kind of fusion and identity with the divinity that is so highly esteemed in the Kabbalah, awe produces a sense of distance and unfamiliarity. And it was just this position of distance, this sense that God is "Wholly Other," that the Kabbalah wishes to preserve from the earlier Judaisms where notions divine transcendence are so dominant.

Indeed, the earliest strata of Jewish mysticism going back to the late Rabbinic period are much more oriented to exercises that cultivate awe and distance. This legacy was sustained within the Kabbalah, along with the traditions that encouraged intoxication with the divinity who penetrated the deepest recesses of the soul. This mix of intimacy and alienation (a medieval term for ecstasy), the ways that one could be in a state in which God might feel more familiar to oneself than one's deepest self while at the same time be experienced as completely remote and uncanny; this cultivation of the impulses towards fusion along with a parallel cultivation of the impulse that makes known the abyss between the Creator and creature, this is the mixture of oppositions which make the Kabbalah so fully paradoxical.

Now the conservatism of Zoharic Kabbalah is only relative to the competing Jewish mysticsms it. When compared to recent forms of Rabbinic Judaism even this more domesticated mysticism appears rather wild. Jewish mysticism we might describe as a charismatically charged Judaism, and the rituals of the Kabbalah are instruments through which the presence of the living God can be palpably experienced. Rabbinic Judaism, as one can see it enacted in Heilman's report of the six circles of Talmud study among the modern Orthodox, might be considered a religion that delights in a certain routinization of charisma. Heilman describes a discussion in one of the circles about the inevitable loss of kavanah in prayer, the inability to sustain the deliberate hovering attentiveness to ones actions that the utopian rabbinic texts demand, yet nevertheless acknowledge as unlikely to be always achieved:

" 'It's certain,' Zusya adds, 'that someone who didn't direct his devotions and therefore repeated his prayers would on the second time also fail to achieve kavannah.'

Embedded in this comment is Zusya's similar personal conviction about human capacities for devotion. Restating and thereby reaffirming the rabbis' judgment, that prayers lacking proper devotion need not be repeated, Zusya, like Yosef, tacitly stamps the wisdom of the Talmud into his own frame of thinking.

'Precisely,' Yosef replies, as the rest of us laugh in our own public confirmation of this 'truth' about the general weakness we share in our capacity to pray with kavannah. Subtly but unmistakably, the conversation is moving from a repetition of the traditional Jewish position on kavannah to a public common agreement about its social and psychological accuracy.

In the spirit of fellowship fostered by this common coming to terms with the view of the Talmud, Zusya offers a personal revelation: 'I recall that I once forgot to recite Yaleh ve yovo [a special insertion in the liturgy for festivals] , but remembered by omission when I had ended my prayers. I prayed a second time--and forgot to say it again!" he admits, laughing."

And Heilman comments: "To be sure, for the insider to the world of Orthodox prayer, this revelation is nothing new; there is no shocking confession here. There is, however, a reconfirmation that, among practicing Orthodox Jews, the situation of kavannah in prayers remains as it has been since at least the times of the Talmud's decision. Then as now, devotion, concentration, intention, and intensity has been hard to maintain even among the putatively pious."

Indeed in an earlier study on prayer and study life in a suburban neo-Orthodox synagogue, Heilman suggests that a focus on such dramatic expressions of Jewish "intensity" might actually obscure the reality of this Judaism. His study is all about the cultivation of the ordinary that goes on in this religious setting. There he argues for a religious life that is as much occupied with gossip, joking, arguments, fellowship, as its is with study and prayer. He warns the reader: "Throughout my emphasis is neither on the nostalgic nor the exotic but rather on the ordinary, daily, familiar dimensions of the [synagogue] setting. Such an approach presumes that the ordinary being the stuff of everyday life must, even more than the unusually dramatic, be comprehended if one is ever to decipher a culture and a people."

The focus on ordinariness, I would argue, is not merely the anthropologist's choice of where culture is revealed, but is the quite deliberately unsensational realm in which Rabbinic Judaism gets enacted. Thus Heilman, when he finally gets around to describing prayer in the synagogue after nearly 200 pages of descriptions of gossip, and so forth

" While group singing allows the members to engage in collective action, it must not be allowed to envelop anyone so completely that he cannot afterward disengage himself and become otherwise involved. Accordingly, when members join in the singing, they do so with an undercurrent of detachment, so that they will not seem completely enraptured. As suggested earlier, the conventionalization of prayer restricts flights of ecstasy at the same time that it makes prayer possible on a day-to-day basis. Kavannah, that feeling of worshipful devotion and involvement, is rarely allowed ultimate exhibition. Indeed, one man, who appears enraptured during even the most simple of group songs, has become the object of open ridicule among the members, his exhibitions of devotional fervor having become something of a public joke. ('The guy is off his rocker; I mean he gets a little carried away,' one member puts it. Others agree.) The delicate balance between detachment and involvement is not always maintained. Some members, like this man, become captured by the song, while others remain so detached that their participation is limited to listening. Most people, however, learn to orchestrate their actions in conformity with the majority and thereby maintain the normative level of involvement."

The Rabbinic Judaism of the classical utopian texts like the Mishnah distrusts ecstatic transports, these flights from the here and now of the ordinary world. And when these models for a religious life become models of that life, ones that can be carefully observed and analyzed, the much more restrained, highly self-regulated Judaism becomes quite apparent. For Heilman, therefore, neo-Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism is therefore most appropriately studied by focusing on the ordinary social drams through which one could perceive "norms, tensions, rivalries, loyalties, social positions and roles, conflict and consensus, and strategic interventions" (p. 57). Heilman's concluding observation to his study Synagogue Life focuses on the social interactions, especially the ones that express mutual obligation and social control so evident in the community he studied. And what he says there can be applied to his matching volume on Talmud study:

"The sources of obligation are myriad appearing in many… dimensions of congregational life. Whether one looks at charity donation, joking, dinner invitations, or elsewhere, one finds that then people inexorably establish mutual obligations. Like members of a family, the congregants cannot help tying themselves together to share so much of their lives with one another….

"Beyond acting as a source of bonding among the congregants, obligations serve as a mechanism of social control. If one couples the religious and ritual obligations prescribed by halacha with the particular communal and institutional obligations [of the congregation], one discovers a system of behavior which in many ways restrains individuality…."

It is precisely the coupling of halakha, the religious centerpiece of Rabbinic Judaism, with ordinary social interaction, that will be our focus for understanding two contemporary expressions of the Judaism of the rabbis. Rabbinic Judaism had its origins in a circumstance in which an inter-dependent community of the exiled was the condition for the survival for Jews who had lost all the national instruments that sustain a social identity. The destruction of the Temple was the precipitating crisis out of which Rabbinic Judaism emerged as a way of sustaining a social identity. And for some Jews there is an abiding need to continue to forge an inter-dependent community of Jews so that Jews will survive. Not surprisingly the enacted forms of Rabbinic Judaism once again prove themselves successful in establishing and sustaining such communities. We turn our attention now to two very different expressions of rabbinic Judaism. The first is the neo-Orthodoxy of Jews who we might say live in the Mishnah Peah 1 we read some time ago, the one that introduces the morning prayers.

You recall that we read the Mishna as a model for a community of "mutual obligations." The Mishah reads: "These are the commandments which have no fixed measure: the corners of the field, the first fruits, the offerings brought on appearing before the Lord at the three festivals, the practice of charity and the study of the Torah. These are the things, of which a man enjoys the fruits in this world, while the stock remains for him for the world to come: honoring father and mother, deeds of loving kindness, timely attendance at the house of study morning and evening, hospitality to wayfarers, visiting the sick, dowering the bride, attending the dead to the grave, devotion in prayer, and making peace between man and his fellow; but the study of the Torah is equivalent to them all."

The second community of the Haredim, the Ultra-Orthodox, inhabit with much apprehension mixed with a large dose of animosity Mishah Avodah Zarah, that almost paranoid Judaism with its fear of contamination, its demonization of the Other, its almost out-of-control anxiety of being out of control.

We turn first to the neo-Orthodox. In a passage in Heilman (on one of the missing pages from your packet), the author quotes the Talmudic statement "Give me khavruse [the fellowship of the study group] or give me death" and compares it to the well known Patrick Henry declaration "Give me liberty or give me death." He then comments: "If these two statements are taken to be symbolic or at least indicative of a cultural ethos, then one might conclude that where Americans consider liberty to be more important than an individual's life, traditional Jews [we would say, Rabbinic Jews], for whom life is with people, regard fellowship to be as paramount."

Heilman's orientation throughout this study is what we would call Durkheimian. That is, along with Durkheim he sees religion as essentially social, or more precisely it is through religious sentiment, belief and practice that the community and a social identity is forged. Indeed, in this Durkheimian mood Heilman suggests that it is through one's social identity survival--person and collective--is assured. Thus he states in connection with the khavruse fellowship attained in the study circles:

"…again to cite Durkheim, 'Man is more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from the collectivity, that is to say, the more self-centered his life. ' In the khavruse and during the shiur [the study session], there are, however, no rewards for individualism and self-centeredness. Rather here one can escape feelings of isolation and share instead familiarity, fellowship, and community " (p. 225).

Indeed, noting how much of the time in lernen was spent in the ordinary ways of making social ties through trivial conversation, prestation (the giving of token gifts like the snuff), gossip, schmoozing, etc. Heilman observes: "…it often seemed to me that the lerners looked forward more to being in one another's company then to going through the complex and frequently sense texts. They would often spend as much as a third of their time together in preliminary and then postliminary conversation. Ass much and sometimes more than formal study, these conversations served to stimulate a collective consciousness and weave social bonds" (p. 22)

Of course, the study session with its focus on the text, some object external to the group, was just what allowed for the occasion of this fellowship, but was also the religious activity and instrument that makes possibly the "collective consciousness" the shared sentiments, the sense very sense of belonging within the group. Heilman thus remarks: "The participants did not however limit themselves to cues and echoes. They responded, as already noted, with glosses, comments, questions, and even brief digressions. As if reverberating with what they heard around them, they made references to similar arguments elsewhere in the Talmud, worked out analogous principles of logic for other religious obligations, began elliptical narrations of other tales which underscored the saving grace of religious behavior. Each of these performances progressively engaged the speakers with one another, the topics in questions, the Talmud or Scripture, and finally their culture. In the final analysis, the process described here is the same as that which Durkheim long ago characterized as essential to the vitality of collective life. To him it was clear that at the root of the enthusiasm that people generated for common behavior and values was a celebration of the sensations of collective sentiment and consciousness--culture. These feelings could be perceived only "by fixing themselves upon external objects."

In our case, the Talmud and its associated discussion constitute such an external object, such a representation of culture. As each participant becomes caught up in his public declamation of Talmud, Scripture, and commentary, "the sentiments provoked by his words come back to him, but enlarged and amplified, and to this degree they strengthen his own sentiments." In this, one discovers an essential attraction lernen has for those who feel attached to the world of the Talmud. In the course of the cultural performance, an increase of collective force overflows the boundaries of the page and text."

On many occasions in his study, Heilman is noting just how these enactments, these cultural performances are materializations of the model for a Jewish life and a Jewish identity that is contained in the utopian blueprint that the Talmud is. The "new history" of Boyarin reminds us that for ancient rabbis who composed the Mishnah and Gemorah the descriptions of Jewish life for them might have only be utopian ideals, merely model for a Judaism, not a model of it. For these later Rabbinic Jews it is, however a model of the Judaism that they are enacting, and in such enactments they assimilate and express the ancient Rabbinic ideals. Heilman observes:

"In the process, they define their picture of their world or make sense of the events through which they and their forebears have lived. This publicly acted-out education, the result of an ongoing stream of talk, stamps into the men's consciousness the traditional patterns of Jewish life associated with the way of the Talmud. Its truths become theirs. In the performance, described here and others like it, this cultural trauma, long since stamped into the collective unconscious of the traditional Jew, can be observed being played out and worked through again. In the plastic drama of lernen, however, the individual "expresses it in action," the action of his discussion."

What goes on inside the text is dramatically being enacted outside the text. Thus when difficulties are to being pose to the text, the favored questions are not new ones that might display the individual ingenuity of one of the lerners, but a reiteration of a question posed by one of the traditional commentators on the page being studied:

"Comparing the men's questions and comments with those in the Talmud, one cannot help but be struck by the similarity in logic and order and their self-imposed limitations on inquiry. Like the rabbis in the pages before them, the lerners appear to immerse themselves in and accept the legitimacy of the past while trying primarily to acquire a clarity about it. They do not simply read through the arguments but play them (or at least their analogues) out, as if they were the rabbis themselves. In this near mimicry, they transform their lernen into a cultural performance. They not only "see" the Temple rites; they see them as did the rabbis of the Talmud."

And when there appears to be a crisis in solving a problematic text, a challenge to the Rav's authority, the solution within the text and the one arrived at by those studying the text allows for textual as well as social reintegration. Thus you recall the account of the "rebellion" in one of the circles over a difficulty that then gets traditionally resolved by the teacher, and Heilman's comment:

"…the Rav can begin the process of reintegration, a process in which both the meaning of the text and social relations among the members of the circle and himself are brought back into continuity with what existed before the breach" (p.43)

Both worlds--the one in the text and the one enacting the text--depend upon one another, reciprocally effect one another. Heilman completes his section on "fellowship" by concluding:

"Here one sees how profoundly social lernen is. Without fellowship the pages of the Talmud--regardless of their inherent worth--cannot be brought to life. Without the haver with whom one joins to play out the dialogues, debates, and narratives of the text, the Talmud rests in silence, and Judaism and Jewish feeling remain unexpressed. And yet, once the group of lerners come into being, it has the capacity to go beyond the boundaries of its specific tasks. The relationship is a synergistic one. Without the Talmud as the object of study, no khavruse could come into being; and without the khavruse, the Talmud often gathers dust lying on a shelf" (p. 235).

Here we have no better example of what Boyarin and Bruns mean when the see the Talmud, like the Bible, as a deliberately composed intertext whose original authors aim at just such interpretive renewals in a future that they could never imagine but which they hope to be connected to and which they hope to shape.

And in such interpretive social drama as Heilman describes do we see how the one who ritually studies gets to expand his world by dwelling in two domains at once: the modern world and "another world", the utopian world of the Talmud. This is precisely what is possible in such acts of interpretation which Heilman calls "traditioning":

"Traditioning allows the participants to slip into a framework of meaning--an ethos and worldview --of the Talmud, become inhabitants of its temporal realm and subject to its rules of order and logic. Here a group of twentieth-century men seem to sit in the first century academies of Babylonia or at least the primordial yeshivas of Europe and look at the world--past, present, and future--through their windows. If not always a total transformation of consciousness, this kind of performance nevertheless gives the students and the teacher another world in which to live" (p.62).

Like the Rabbis before them, most of whom never saw the rituals of the Temple which are being so minutely described in the pages of the Talmud, even this belated generation, at least during the shiur, is living as fully, sometimes even more passionately and more vitally, in a world that reaches out from the past to speak to the future. For those who display "a willingness to be shaped by [that other] world, the ideas, and the morals of the ancient sacred text," (p. 63) this is not an escape from reality but an expanding of it. The capacity of these traditional yet fully modern Jews to negotiate two worlds--both through traditioning and through contemporization (where the "modern world becomes the cultural context within which the Talmud can be intelligibly discussed and understood….the process by which old meanings are ascribed to new elements or by which new values change the cultural significance of old forms") is actually quite extraordinary, though for them it is completely natural (for it has been "naturalized"), completely taken-for-granted.

Thus Heilman astutely reminds us: "To be sure, the dimensions of the drama are far less monumental and the actors not necessarily aware of the forces underlying it. 'Actual conduct,' as Max Weber once noted, "is carried on in the large part of its manifestation in semiconsciousness or unconsciousness of its intended meaning."' Yet an analytic view of the proceedings cannot help but uncover the lines of cultural change between the lines of dialogue." Here is a case in which the outsider knows something about the insider that is (and in many cases must) remain invisible to the participant in these social dramas. "Caught up in the flux of activity," Heilman notes, "the participants in the Talmud circle are unlikely to look upon what they do as dramatic or to sense that they are drama personae. Asked to explain what they do and what draws them together, most will simply say 'lernen.' "

They cannot see their taken-for-granteds, for such assumptions are the very deeply embedded lenses with which they see, indeed the sentiments, beliefs and ideas through which they are constructing, their social and religious realities. Neither can they see the very processes in which these constructions get naturalized through just such cultural performances and social dramas.

It is the scholar who brings her own categories, her theories and models on understanding to such data, who is in the position to observe these invisibilities. Just as they negotiate their two worlds, so are we obliged tow negotiate two worlds, the one we come from with our academic tools and the one we come to study. Heilman, both an active participant and an academic observer reflects that

"Even as someone seeking to be a careful observer, I did not--precisely because I was a participant--conceive these to episodes and others like them immediately as social dramas. Only later as I analytically reviewed my tapes and notes did I begin to see how this metaphor of social drama would enable me to discover the direction and the development of something which in the heat of action I sensed only intuitively and vaguely" (p. 57).

For those involved the very social aspects of religion are often disguised, for what they see themselves as doing--indeed, what they are doing, are religious actions which have a social consequence. The anthropologist is the one who notes all the social interactions, indeed the social rituals that are being enacted, the process through which the group norms of behavior, belief, and sentiment are sedimented in the mind and life of each individual in the group. For the participants the activity is purely religious, and for the Talmud group what they are doing is study, what they are doing is their Judaism:

"Each man repeats the points by way of which he entered the discussion but in a manner which allows them to be integrated into the argument of Mishna Brura. Throughout one overhears legitimating quotations from Scripture, citations of ritual practices and Jewish customs, or confessions of religious sensibility--in short, many of the things which define the character of religiocultural life. These are distributed into the flow of conversation and implicitly reaffirmed not only as part of sacred order but of the taken-for-granted world. Moreover, as they express their Judaism, so do the men attain it. Hearing themselves declaim the ways of Judaism, they can persuade themselves to follow them. Exegesis becomes praxis and leads toward belief."

Indeed, even to say that they would conceive of themselves as "doing their Judaism" might overstate the matter. As Heilman remarks, "To say that the lerners sometimes come to the shiur to vitalize their religious inclinations is not to suggest that these efforts are always conscious. On the contrary, often the religious message makes its way into the lernen subliminally, carried between the lines of other sorts of conversation." We might add, that if the psychotherapist is one trained to hear with a third ear, as it has been remarked, than the student of religion is trained to read "between the lines." Just as the Kabbalists new that the action was often in the white blanks between the words, the invisible realms, the absences, so too must we learn to make visible that which is invisible and make conscious that which is unconscious to the group.

If the group doesn't see its primary social rituals, if they might even be unaware of their religious doings, it can also be said, along with Heilman, that they don't even see that they are not so much studying, as they are closer to praying. The questions are all ones for which everybody already knows the answers, just as we pointed out that at the seder all gathered know the answer to the four questions posed by the youngest child. And the answers themselves are not pieces of intellectual information, for in so many cases they are not even fully comprehended. In distinguishing university learning of Talmud from the lernen that goes on in these circles, Heilman argues that for " the avocational lerner, the aim is often less intellectual …. [for] these men aim to demonstrate devotion to the text…and not necessarily always to comprehend it" (p.73). And indeed the Talmud text itself discloses this truth: "And Rabbah said: 'A man should always study…even though he knows not [i.e. fails to understand] what he says." About which Heilman observes: "From this point of view, lernen is much closer to ritual than to intellectual activity" (p. 246).

And the ritual here is closest to prayer. Just as we have seen in the prayerbook that study gets embedded in prayer, so too here we have seen that study sessions often begin with a prayer, are sometimes interrupted for payer, and conclude with the kaddish prayer. But even more, we might say that this chanted study, this litany of repetitions and re-iterations, this (often) minyan (prayer quorum) group of students, as in prayer, enacting a talking as doing. Thus Heilman again:

"To a People of the Book for whom prayers and study have come to take the place of daily sacrifices at the Temple, as is the case with the Jewish liturgy, the notion that words can and do take the place of action is quite conceivable: for them talking is doing, as the very exercise of lernen attests: (p. 92).

What the participants are aware of is that they are conducting themselves as Jews, or at least in the ways that they understand Jews are to live, that is, within the "walls of the halakha." If there is another world that they inhabit, it is not so much the bet midrash, the house of study, nor the temple in Jerusalem, nor the academy in ancient Babylonia. They are not living in the past; they are certainly not dwelling in some intradivine world. No, they are living an ordinary, "natural" life as only it can be lived according to their sentiments, within the pathways of the halakha, which literally means a way, a doing as a going. It is here that they encounter the divine who himself has, according to the Talmud "[f]rom the day the Holy temple was destroyed, the Holy one, blessed be he, dwelt only within the structure of the halakha." (See Heilman, p. 240)

Indeed, one might say that in their representations of Biblical figures in the Midrash, the sages not only turned Moses into Moshe Rabennu, Moses our Rabbi, but God also into a Rabbi. God, in accounts that are so sophisticated precisely because they appear so naïve, is presented as studying Torah like a sage, putting on his Talit, his prayershawl , and actually prays prayers that he has, like the rabbis, composed: "May it be my will that my compassion overcome my anger…that I deal with my children according to the attribute of compassion, and that I may not act towards them according to the strict line of justice" (TB, Ber. 7a).

Squarely within the domain of the halakha, this God, in addition to praying, studies Torah, makes judgments, acts out the virtues that the Rabbis teach: mercy, humility, lovingkindness, charity, and feeds the hungry and so forth. One Midrash has it as follows: "The day has twelve hours. In the first three God sits and occupies himself with the study of Torah; in the next three hours He sits and Judges the world, and whenever he sees the whole world guilty, He arises from the throne of justice, and sits on the throne of mercy; in the next three hours He sits and feeds the whole world…. And in the last three hours he sports with leviathan…" (TB, Ab. Zar. 3b)

In his epigraphs to the chapter "Cultural Performance" Heilman cites first Geertz ("We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish themselves through culture…") and the Grunwald ("By lernen…one becomes a complete person…") to the effect that humans are the animals who achieve their humanity through culture. One might say that just as the Bible authors located their God in the web of words of the Biblical narrative, making the unfamiliar, utterly remote God they worshipped familiar and available through metaphors and story, so the Rabbis endowed with all deliberateness their God a comforting familiarity by locating him in the ways of halakha. Here to we might say that the Biblical God was completed through the cultural performances that He too enacted in prayer, in good deeds, and especially in the most cherished of the Rabbinic rituals, study. God and the human both are in an endless process of self-completion: "To speak rabbinic words of wisdom as if they were one's own. We read; we learn; we assimilate; we express, we discuss; and finally we reabsorb and have impressed upon us the lessons of our traditional culture as we listen to ourselves giving them. That is the essence of the cultural performance."

And this is a "we" and "us" and "our" that include not just the human community of Rabbinic Jews, but God himself. Thus it became possible for the ordinary Jew in his very ordinary acts to encounter this rather familiar God in all the familiar places doing all the familiar things: in the house of study and the house of prayer, in the home and the synagogue, and especially in most favored of dwelling places, the walls of the halakha. Just as they could imagine all the Temple rituals they had never seen, so could they vividly imagine and God wearing his talit, his text in front of him praying, studying, and doing all the other mitzvoth spelled out in Mishnah Peah 1.

And no place, we might add, was more real, more solid or more palpable than this protected space of the halakha. The story about the legally correct but too-open sukkah with only three walls (see p. 255-56) is indeed a delicious one. And the Rabbi's didactic gloss is right on target: "But the truth is…according to the halakha there are four walls. But what the law calls a wall is not identical what is called a wall by a contractor! In the halakha, however, this is a real wall. And we believe in this wall more surely than in any real wall. This is the halakha from Moshe on Sinai."