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Our case studies of two contemporary Judaisms--neo and ultra-orthodoxy --have already alerted us to a subject that requires more attention, viz., modernity and the Jewish responses to it. All the Judaisms that we shall be examining in the second half of this course need to be fully contextualized as struggles by Jews to respond to that watershed event we have often alluded to in this course, the Enlightenment.

This term--Enlightenment--is shorthand in so many readings you will be doing for a shift from the pre-modern to the modern social and cultural reality in which we ourselves dwell. The French intellectual, Michel Foucault, identified this shift as one that entailed radical transformation and radical discontinuity. The changes brought about by new social and economic conditions he considered total. Their interlocking parts include social relations, social formations and social practices; political arrangements, that is relations of power, hierarchy and subordination; and discourse which includes how knowledge is produced, what constitutes knowledge, and what forms of knowing get privileged.

Our capacity to do what Foucault denominated as an "archaeology" of a pre-modern culture--pre-modern Judaisms, in our case-- demands that we recognize the totality of the changes involved in such a shift. Thus we have been necessarily reflexive about our own categories of understanding so that we can use them self-consciously, bracket them when necessary, and in general negotiate our understanding of earlier Judaism.

As we begin our studies of contemporary Judaism it becomes critical that we sustain this position of scrupulous reflexivity. In so doing we can appreciate how what we take for granted got constructed over the 18th-19th centuries. After one more example of a fully modernized enactment of Judaism (see session #25), we will examine more closely the period when this dramatic cultural shift took place. In so doing we will be able to see how the old, traditional religious regimes and their waning cultural assumptions accommodated themselves to new, emerging cultural values. Seeing the two worlds in clash and in accommodation will allow us to see them both as cultural constructions. This is critical for us for the Enlightenment categories of thought have become so naturalized for us that they have acquired a transparency that often makes them invisible to us.

By sustaining our reflexivity we also will be able to locate historically the very tools that we are using in this course to study Judaisms. Such a reflection on our methods, on the disciplines that we marshal to do our studies, on the ideology that undergirds them, allows us to see how much they are cultural artifacts of the Enlightenment. A reflexive interrogation (see session #28) of our own methods for producing knowledge allows us to see the degree it is a "local" knowledge, one in competition with other knowledges, including the religious knowledges we are studying.

Finally, our reflexivity helps us to see how all forms of contemporary Judaism are saturated with the modern even as they sometimes might attempts to overcome the results of modernization. Thus even the Judaism of the ultra-Orthodox, which might reject "the new as prohibited by the Torah," was, according to Heilman, a counterculture defining itself by what it was not. `

Before we move forward to do all this, we pause to define such terms as modernization. In noting these cultural assumptions we are not claiming that each and every individual in modern society pledges allegiance to them. There are all sorts of possibilities of resistance and accommodation to the modern. What we are uncovering here are the things that generally appear to be self-evident to most modernized persons such that they regard those who do not subscribe to these "truths" as pre-modern, retrogressive in thought, benighted or otherwise not quite up to speed. Identifying our culturally constructed categories makes more visible for us the lens through which we see and might help us from rendering such invalid judgments.

Thus, some of the defining characteristics of modernization/secularization include

a. Ours is a disenchanted world. The term is from the sociologist of religion, Max Weber, and it refers to a world that is no longer experienced as alive and enchanted with magical powers but is regarded as impersonal and cold, regulated by the mechanical relation of cause and effect.

In this disenchanted environment reason and critical thinking eclipse revelation and prophetic or visionary ways of knowing. Traditional religious practices that produce belief and believing are replaced by scientific experimentation, which considers only testable knowledge as valid.

b. Causality is no longer attributed to transcendent and supernatural powers. Historical realities are understood in terms of natural and human social forces not in terms of divine agency.

c. Theology--the knowledge of God's ways--is eclipsed by the modern disciplines of natural and physical sciences, the social sciences, and critical humanistic studies. Knowledge that is verifiable, testable and open to disconfirmation becomes privileged.

d. Humanism--a human centered universe-- liberalism and progressivism replace a theo-centric universe and religious traditionalism. The new becomes more valued than the customary and the old.

e. The authority of religious institutions and religious texts significantly diminish. f. Religion is removed from the civic sphere (especially from the State) and is considered to be something that is private--a confession of ones personal cherished beliefs, a code of personal morality and ethics. Individual religious experience and religious feelings and sentiments (what Prell refers to as "expressive individualism") are considered the evidence of piety. Religious affiliation and religious practices are considered to be entirely voluntary. g. The most important social identity is that of citizen of the state. Religious social identity might continue to play a role in a person's life but it is their national civic identity that dominates.

An Internet mini-assignment: To read a very concise essay of a couple of hundred words on Modernization/Secularization:

go to the Issues page

Scroll down to and click on Encyclopedia Britannica

write secularization in the search window

and then click on Modernization and Industrialization: The nature of modern society: SECULARIZATION AND RATIONALIZATION

The Judaisms in America reflect the ways in which the Jewish religion at once provides continuity with the past and a sustained (social) identity, while at the same time it is itself transformed by the pervasive discourses of modernization and secularization. Prell notes that the third and fourth generation Jews of the Havurah sustained the process of secularization that had begun with their immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents. Those Jews who arrived in America in such great numbers between 1880-1910 might have persisted in sustaining a Jewish identity through their Judaism "even though they dismantled most of its obligations, requirements and theology "(p. 15). As she notes, the obligatory nature of halacha conflicted with the values they were so eager to adopt in America: free choice, and expressive and democratic individualism. Each of the generations traced by Prell was engaged in "creating, retaining, and recreating Judaism," a process of transformation not controlled by halacha but one shaped by secular values. "Their Judaism was more volunteristic and individualistic," Prell observes, "making the self the ultimate integrator of various possibilities" (pp.23-24).

Judaism itself had become just one more possibility, one more choice. The Judaism that emerged was not determined by Jewish law, by Jewish texts, or by traditional beliefs. Rather it was shaped primarily by decorum, that is, by a style of performance, an aesthetics in which the forms of being Jewish dominated over any specific Jewish content. Prell argues that "[d]ecorum engages the individual at the juncture of the sacred and the social. It symbolizes social identity more readily than theological meaning because it emphasizes form and convention. It is enforced socially and not by religious law" (p. 62). The questions became less "What do I believe as a Jew?" or "What are the Jewish laws and customs that I must observe?" and more "How do I act as a Jew?" (p. 63) and "What do I do to be Jewish?" (p. 36) The answers to these questions of an identity Judaism were provided by the ever-changing decorum of the synagogue.

The forging of a Jewish identity is at the heart of Prell's inquiry, but it is not as if these Jews were without beliefs. If belief is that which captures ones deepest convictions, if belief is not merely a doctrinal affirmation of a truth but is rather a completely naturalized, indisputable cultural assumption, then these Jews believed profoundly in modernized, secularized Western principles. Democracy, expressive individualism, choice, freedom--these were the beliefs of all the generations of Jews that that Prell introduces to us. Their task was one that will become familiar to you by the end of this unit: How they would shape their Judaism so that it accommodated these Enlightenment beliefs.

Prell wants to know how these Jews came to believe in their Judaism, how they worked it out so that by the second generation "being a good Jew and being a good American were virtually the same thing" (p. 51). And again, it is synagogue decorum--a stylized aesthetics, an etiquette of acting correctly as a Jew--that reveals how they came to believe in their Judaism:

If the decorum of the new world turned old-world Jews into Americans, the audience for this transformation was other Jews and, most importantly, the self. Like all ritual, etiquette and decorum are actions that necessarily precede belief. As they acted out synagogue decorum, they became convinced of who they were, where they belonged, and what aspirations they might have. Synagogues looked American and sounded American, even those that also echoed the sounds of tradition. In performing a ritual, one rehearsed one's own identity and became convinced of it. Synagogue attendance not only renewed the old but asserted and defined the present (pp. 64-65).

The second and third generation suburban synagogue thus became the major site in which a Judaism was being created and a Jewishness as well. The synagogue became the favored place for the creation of a specific Jewish ethnicity, one that was as much invented as it was inherited (see p. 71). Here a performance of Judaism was conducted so that Jews could discover what it meant to be Jewish. What we have here is not so much a cultural performance in which the Judaism of some traditional utopian text is enacted, but a cultural performance through which Jews would communicate to themselves how to act as Jews:

Through a chosen decorum, those at prayer communicated to themselves and others who the people at prayer were. In a pluralistic, rapidly changing society that fosters mobility, self-presentation was the constant concern of acculturating people. The synagogue was expressive of Americanization and served as a bridge between worlds and a medium for formulating identity in part through decorum. The synagogue also constituted a community, one that represented the Jewish people to themselves (p. 61).

The Havurah generation of the 1970s was ambivalent both about America and the identification of Judaism with suburban America. Even as they distinguished themselves from their parents and grandparents, however, they too relied on changes in decorum to re-invent their own Judaism and Jewishness. Their very deliberate use of ritualized Jewish activity --prayer especially--became the means for them also to believe in their own Judaism and their Jewishness. And a decorum based on such the principles of free choice, egalitarianism, expressive individualism, and self-realization allowed them also to enact at the same time their counter-cultural Americanism.

They did not change the prayers; they altered the aesthetics of prayer by praying differently than mainstream American Jews. Their aesthetics were put into practice and made believable, and real through the performance of prayer. Ritual activity formulated through a generational aesthetic generated their conviction of the authenticity and effectiveness of their prayer and their Judaism.

In the next lecture (which will be posted on the October lecture page under October 29) we will be examining more closely how the aesthetics of praying in the Havurah accomplished all of this.

OCTOBER 31 LECTURE

I want to continue in the reflexive mode of the Wednesday class when we examined the possibilities of the outsider scholar making judgment on the indigenous culture she studies. This lecture will also sustain the reflexivity of the written on-line version of the last lecture in which I set forth the features of modernization/secularization, the discourse within which we operate in the secular university.

As will become clear in this lecture, I will be using this mode of self-assessment, this reflexive position in which we try to understand what we are doing and how we go about doing it, as form of self-judgment. So let us begin with some introductory remarks about the that social science methods Prell employs in order to answer her two central questions concerning the Havurah Minyan: "what allows them to pray and what does it mean to them" (p. 165)

Early on Prell informs us that she, like Heilman in both of his studies, will use an anthropological method of participant observation. She remarks about this method in which one becomes something of an insider in order to perform even better the outsider's task of understanding and description:

Other anthropologists have remarked upon a key step in participant observation: One is resocialized into a new culture. He or she must become a group member to fully understand the new culture. That membership implies both the ability to survive in the culture and to communicate what one learns in the categories of one's culture and the social sciences. The enterprise is one of translation, of comprehending, and communicating. I, too, underwent a resocialization despite the fact that the group immediately "made sense" to me. That resocialization demanded that I distance myself from what was easily comprehensible and relearned the sense they made to themselves. The danger was, of course, that they were not alien enough to allow me to censor my own sense making. The advantage, which for me was considerable, was working in my own language so that as their sense emerged, the subtleties of it were readily graspable (p. 25).

This "resocialization" signifies the ways in which the scholar is changed in some ways by the things that she is examining. Heilman argues that such changes are at the very heart of the learning project. Thus he concludes his book on the ultra-orthodox by quoting the anthropologist Margaret Mead: "The student who as is an anthropologist once fully participated in learning about another culture is an altered instrument." And then he goes on to say:

The anthropologist-ethnographer cannot go home again. The past of my grandfather, as I said at the outset, I did not find. But I did see a world striking in its cultural character. This is not a world for which I share an uncritical affection, nor is it one I am ready to condemn. But having looked at it through the medium of my discipline, I shall never see it the same way again. If I have accomplished anything in these pages, neither will you (Defenders of the Faith, p. 363).

The study of the Other can sometimes be threatening. In the process of coming to understand another culture, in seeing how what at first might appear bizarre is quite intelligible, we become aware that our own meaning-scheme and our own values are much more local than we realize. If our understanding of the Other is negotiated by a true conversation with another culture we begin to understand the world through their intelligibility. Assuming the eyes of the Other, our own world and our own ways in the world might sometimes appear as strange. We are in a position to judge and to self-judge.

It has been said (see Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives, p. 92) that ethnography is "the comprehension of the self by the detour of the other." Our more broadened understanding in such cross-cultural studies often results in a critical understanding of ourselves that is itself a judgment. Bringing back home what we have learned through the Other is called by some anthropologists, "repatriation." And just such repatriation, just the kinds of resocializing Prell mentions is an example of informed self-judgment. It is a process in which we relativize our knowledge and ourselves. In this sense we become less: less convinced of our worldview, less certain about the things we might have considered universal truth, less confident that what we hold to be as normative is normative for everyone. On the other hand we become more: we can complete ourselves, or at least extend ourselves by being modified by what we study.

I agree with those in the last class who shared Caitlin's view that in judging others in responsible informed ways we have the chance to broaden ourselves. And I also feel that in engaging in the kind of self-judgment that can go on through understanding things that are alien to the us and our cultural values we become more not less. It is in this sense also that, along with Geertz, we can say, "we complete…ourselves through culture." That is, in our cultural performances as scholars, including enacting the practices of participant observation and other scholarly habits you are learning, we complete ourselves as we engage the culture of another for the sake of broadened understanding.

The scholarly encounter with the cultural other is complex, rather ambiguous. In the coming readings and lectures we will be seeing how the very scholarly methods we employ in the non-religious study of religion--in this case, the non-Judaic study of Judaism--had their origins in some 18th and 19th century Jewish thinkers who were in the process of trying to change their Judaism. We can say that they had a foot in each camp, the religious one and the secular one, and an agenda that served them in both of the worlds they inhabited.

As we shall see, the Wissenschaft des Judentum, this 19th century scientific study of Judaism, was an attempt to present Judaism as rational and enlightened. It was, among other things, a way of giving intellectual, academic support to those Jewish clergy who were recreating Judaism as an Enlightenment religion. In some sense the origins of the kinds of unJudaized Judaic studies we now practice in the university began as a full-bodied Jewish project, as a Jewish ideology in competition with other Jewish ideologies. As you can see in Prell, Judaism rapidly modernized. Second generation American Jews could say with full faith "To be a good Jew is to be a good American." Jewish scholarship likewise changed from being a Jewish project to an entirely secularized one, and along with other scholars of religion, the Judaic often stands athwart the religious values and meaning-schemes of those within the tradition she studies.

The secular scholar of religion--at least while she is doing the business of the university--stands with both feet planted solidly within one world, that disenchanted in one I described in the last on-line lecture. The scholar of religion might be examining persons whose world is charged and magical, filled with enchantment and mystery. But even as a participant, who might pray along with the others, study with them, engage ritual practices, the scholar is watching, observing, looking out for the rules that govern behavior.

Indeed the theories, those interpretive frameworks that emerge from ethnographic studies, as well as the models and the methods of the social scientist might bring to the studies, are attempts to discover and articulate patterns, regularities, and social laws. And the best of the interpretive theories are the ones that that will describe not just one community in prayer, but things about praying as a practice. While the folks he studies orient themselves to a world alive with mystery, as they might pray themselves into enchantment, the scholar is uncovering fixed laws, or at least statistically interesting re-occurrences.

Now I would maintain that whatever personal and professional stakes the scholar might have in the much more cold, mechanical, rule-governed universe in which she dwells, she should, if real understanding is to occur, be willing to accept the challenge that her own viewpoint is as culturally relative as any other. Indeed, rendering judgment on the limitations of her own worldview allows her to engage more profoundly another knowledge, other ways of knowing, other ways of being. In so doing, the world of the scholar expands. It is in this sense that I agree with Heilman that "we cannot go home again." It is unlikely that we will exchange our worldview for another's. But it is possible that our worldview will become more complex, more complete and broadened by an understanding that can only come when we step out of ourselves and then return to ourselves.

And now, let us examine more carefully some of the methods and models that Prell makes use of in her ethnography. Prell employs in her boo a method that is also one that dominates in this course, one we will call a contextualist approach.

This book is about why men and women prayed, why prayer was a language and ritual with which they formulated identity, history, and values, though it required constant discussion and negotiation. To understand their use of prayer I address a problem introduced to the social-scientific study of religion by Max Weber ([1904] 1958). Why does a religion take the form it does within a particular historical period and within a specific culture? What are the forces that shape religious forms and meanings for a particular era and generation? (p. 25)

Our case study method in this course accepts this Weberian premise that the historical and cultural context of Jews at any given moment and in any given place is absolutely crucial to our understanding of Judaism. Indeed this is why we are studying Judaisms. We do not take Judaism as self-evident but as something we can consider only after examining some selective yet representative Judaisms.

We not only look at the social forces that produce a Judaism, but we look at Judaism--religion in general--as one among a number of social forces that shapes Jewish sociality. The community produces Judaism and Judaism produces the community is a central theme both in Prell and in our course. Thus Judaism is at once shaped by and shapes the social, it at once is determined by historical conditions and itself produces historical realities; Judaism is at once a product of a the wider culture and at the same time it is an agent that effects cultural realities.

In North America, where social change is rapid, Prell notes how generational Judaism is as it is created and recreated to serve the different needs of Jews over three periods. Judaism is always emerging, and what Prell affords us is snapshot of a Judaism in one moment of its unfolding, circa 1972-73. The wider scope of her study includes four generations in which a different synagogue decorum produced different kinds of Jews and differing Judaisms. Here we can see that a community of Jews is not necessarily determined by proximity in space, that is a group of Jews gathering together in one place. Rather a community is as much temporally determined, a cohort of Jews that created a renewed Judaism particular to a generation's needs. Prell notes that "[a]t the core of the Havurah protests was a counter aesthetic, a means for differentiating youth from parents and young Jews from America."

Separations for the sake of social identity can be made in all sorts of spheres, and generational differentiation captures a rapidly transforming. Even in the more narrow framework of a couple of years of the Kenyon Havurah, Prell records the dramatic conflicts between the generation of the founding mothers and fathers and those newcomers who rebelled against them. Indeed one of the things she monitors is the Minyan as " a continually negotiable organization" (p. 143) which attempted to make a plausible Judaism under conditions of constant change.

That quality of Judaism--its ability to recreate itself through re-interpretation of its intertexts--was sorely tested by the members of the Minyan whose "commitment to both normative Judaism and self meant that they had to change or reinterpret prayers, the Bible, and praying" (p. 101). If the haredim are a case in which an arrest of Judaism is attempted by denying the authority of the new in reinterpreting the old, then the Havurah is a case in which the ever-changing new keeps invalidating even the most recent reinterpretation as out-of-date.

What this case study allows us to see is precisely how dynamic and vital Judaism is, and how protean it can be in reinventing itself as a plausibility structure again and again. In some ways we might say that this study seems to suggest that what we might mean by Judaism is an inclination by Jews to achieve a social identity (Jewish) through the kinds of intertexuality and cultural performances that Judaism (the religion) encourages. This capacity in Judaism for revising itself in light of changing circumstances is certainly one of the things that impresses Prell:

The havurot reveal the continuing vitality of American Judaism. Like their parents and grandparents, havurah members continued to create an American Judaism in their protest against America. The process of reinventing and maintaining Judaism is a continuous process only because Judaism or Jewishness remains a core issue of identity. For those who seek a place for a remembered, if unlived, past in the midst of the present, a ritual rehearsal of identity through a transformed tradition is inevitable (p. 109)

It was Weber, as you recall, who in his sociological studies of Protestantism and of modernization gave rise to the term "disenchantment." And thus it should not surprise us that the Weberian method that emerged from such studies, which so shape Prell's approach, allow us also to see how Havurah Judaism is a peculiar mix of the secular and traditional. The Weberian method reveals how saturated a modernized Judaism is with the values of the culture out of which it emerges. Thus, for example, Prell quotes Beth who might be doing something traditional like praying but can say something quite untraditional:

Prayer is first and foremost the most important way I connect myself with the Jewish people. I don't examine if a God is listening or not at the other end, because I don't really care in some sense. Somehow I feel that there is a God only because of the view of God I have (p. 160).

Prell comments: "She chose religious activity, rather than be bound by religious authority that put God at the center of her experience, and she emphasized her individual choices to do and say what she believed, a stance associated with secularism despite her use of traditional prayer" (p. 161).

Elsewhere, Prell notes how the forms of study in the Minyan likewise mixed the traditional with the secular, or we might say made use of a traditional instrument to enact some very secular values. Thus in one of their Torah sessions, so different from what went on in the Heilman circle of "traditioners,

[members of the Minyan ]expressed continuity and discontinuity with the tradition, asserting individualism in interpretation and simultaneously requiring the members to acknowledge the legitimacy of ancient texts. Minyan members understood their discussion to be Jewish "study," occasions for education about sacred texts that united them with the tradition of study as a sacred act (p. 134).

Prell is astute in putting pips around study and noting this is an education "about" sacred texts, for though this has become for them a "sacred act" it is completely different from the forms of ritual study among either the modern or the ultra-orthodox. In Heilman's circles the new question, the new problem, and the novel insights were illegitimate, while all the old questions posed within the text were privileged and were the ones to be re-iterated in study. Here it was the new which displaced the old, and Torah study was the occasion to "articulate doubts, questions, and insights" (p.120).

One has good reason to wonder what precisely is being enacted in these cultural performances in the Minyan. Are these American Jews enacting the culture of secularism at a sacred site? Or are these Jews forging a Judaism within a secular culture by enacting specifically Jewish rituals? Of course the answer is that they were doing both at the same time, one act in which both the secular and the traditional were performed such that the Judaism became a seamless web of both traditional and secular elements.

One can say that the Havurah Jews were enacting social performances that allowed them to believe in their traditional praying even as they were able to affirm their secular beliefs. Let us use the term beliefs not to describe some creed or doctrinal statements, but rather those deeply embedded cultural assumptions that hardly ever have to be written out for they inscribe themselves upon us through the ways that we enact them daily. When we reserve the term belief for the various things people in a culture take for granted, we can see clearly the beliefs of the Havurah members were the ones that emerge out of the 18th century bourgeois revolution that shaped Enlightenment values and was the engine for secularization.

The most central of these beliefs, according to Prell, was expressive individualism, that is, the notion that the self is the most fundamental unit of measure, a self that gets articulated through a variety of actions and in all settings. Prell reports that the "contercultural aesthetic that shaped the Havurah depended on an expressive individualism that featured the activism of all participants. Expressive individualism, in turn, was the product of the American culture that gave rise to the American Judaism and promoted Jewish secularism" (p. 102). This individualism, we note, was not selfishness, for it was part of a community ethos in which the group worked hard at finding a consensus about how they prayed that satisfied each individual self. Here that other crucial American virtue that makes individualism work was always invoked, if not in words than in action: tolerance

The authority of the self reigned supreme in the Kenyon Minyan. Each self had to find satisfaction in the prayers and the praying or the community would consider its Judaism compromised. The expressivity of the individualism, the sense that the Minyan was a place for the unfolding of the self, is well stated in Prell's account of the counter-cultural values that so influenced the community: "The only authority for this new culture was the self. And that self was the product of self-realization, self-fulfillment, and self-gratification…" (p. 106).

The other values of the Havurah are also familiar to us--equality, democracy, egalitarianism, and a healthy dose of American can-doism:

The essential Minyan prayer experience consisted of Jewish prayer conducted in a way that emphasized equality, informality, and beauty within an egalitarian division of labor. The Minyan's decorum, unlike the previous generation's, was not expressed in architecture, its board of directors, or the solemnity of the service. Members sought an egalitarian organization capable of solving any problem a person had about prayer. Decorum resisted the organization of the larger society, and members hoped that decorum would substantially contribute to altering their prayer experience (p. 151).

What makes Prell so interesting is that she allows us to go beyond this analysis of enactments of American values as a Judaism. She wants to uncover not just the deeply sedimented beliefs of the group, but their attempts to "believe in" their Judaism, the Jewish people, their praying and their prayer community.

Prell's notion of believing in has to do with actions and words that have meaning to a persons, words and actions that are meaningful. She wants more out of her social science than "explaining religious behavior as the pursuit of cohesion, apart from understanding the meaning of that cohesion…" For her the question of "how Jews are made Jews and how Jews remain Jews" must go beyond sociology and "can only be answered by studying religious behavior…as meaningful in action" (p. 21). As an anthropologist of religion Prell moves beyond what secularization theorists and Weberian models can provide. She argues

What theorists have overlooked is what religion means to those who participate. If cultures no longer generate cohesive worldviews, how is meaning constituted. What authorizes religious participation when the structural support from society has been withdrawn? (p. 163)

She wishes to understand "the worshipers experience and how it is created within the religious context" (p. 164). To do this requires something more than sociology and secularization theories:

In addition, I look at religious activities, in this case all aspects of prayer, to understand not only how they reflect these social forces, but how these ritual forms in turn affect the experience of the worshiper. I suggest that the analysis of religion in any society--traditional or complex--requires this dual understanding of the broad social/historical context and of the performance of its ritual activities (p. 14).

Prell therefore combines two additional methods, contextualists who attempt to describe the "liturgical field" which is created by the praying community, and performance theorist who examine how words not only mean but do. For the contextualist, the focus is not just a social historical one, but a more local "liturgical field." This "field" is the specific realm in which praying is going on, that ambience created while persons are involved in performing the prayers. The field is something like a collective mood, an invisible energy, a kind of group chemistry, we might even call it a group kavanah that gets produced in the praying. It might be invisible, but it is palpable. When it was not there, that is, when the praying didn't work, the group would try to fix things so that it would. When it was present, all knew it. The prayer acts are felicitous, that is they can be said to work, when this ambience is established, when this collectively produced atmosphere allows each of the individuals in the group to believe in their praying.

The performance theorist is interested in finding how it works, what it means to work, and how this "believing in" gets produced through the ritual performances being enacted. As Prell notes, it's the theorists of this context who are more focused on the activity of praying than on the prayer text. The members of the Havurah might not "believe in" the words of the prayers they are chanting, but they do believe in their praying, or at least want to believe in it.

Belief is not much of an issue here. Indeed almost all of the members' Enlightenment beliefs are in opposition to many of the things said in prayer. Thus Harvey can say "Prayer is important to me, but it is not true." That is, the information messages, the semantic meanings in the prayers are not in line with his beliefs, his cultural assumptions.

There is no need really to change the prayerbook, since its beliefs are not the issue. On the other hand, the gathering of the community, their decorum, the chanting and the fellowship, the doing of the praying is what allows Harvey and the others to "believe in" praying. Thus the disputes in the Havurah were often not about beliefs, that is, cultural assumptions, but about a decorum that might not be allowing one or another person to believe in his or her praying. And this is why they had always to keep adjusting the decorum so that each and all could experience a believing in.

The performance theorist examines carefully exactly how such praying practices produces this believing, how an emotionally satisfying, meaningful state of prayerfulness gets achieve. Thus Prell writes:

Those scholars who look at prayer and ritual on a performative model, or wish to contextualize ritual performance within a social and cultural field, are asking significantly different questions and explaining different phenomena. They try to understand how an experience, whether it is aimed at establishing the sacred or communicating cultural values, is created and maintained and what its constituent elements are. …What these performative theorists have in common is understanding how ritual and prayer shape and create certain attitudes and emotions and the authority or plausibility that generates them….(p. 170-71)

Our task in the next lecture will be to examine how these praying practices produce a believing in. In some ways, it will be useful for you to remember what you had to say on the exam about how a model for becomes a model of through a cultural performance. In the Havurah we might say that the prayerbook is a model for believing and that praying is the social enactment, the performance in which the members of the Havurah experience models of believing. Critical here is to see that what they end up believing in is not the cultural assumptions of the text--a transcendent God, a God who shapes history, a sense that there is a God listening to prayer, and a host of other Rabbinic beliefs--but something quite different. What the praying did when it was felicitously performed is enact the cultural beliefs (expressive individualism, equality, democracy, etc.) and produce a believing in the praying, a believing in the community, in the Jewish people, in the instruments of the tradition, in their own Jewishness and in their Judaism.

In the next lecture our focus will be on what it means when the performance theorist argue that saying is doing, that practice precedes belief, that practice persuades and praying produces conviction, a sense of authenticity, meaning, and meaningfulness all of them the hallmarks of the believing in that Prell is trying to account for.