Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Studies in Judaism) 9781433118722, 9781453910443

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SARAH ROSS obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She currently works as a university assistant (post-doc researcher), lecturer, and study counselor at the Department of Musicology as well as at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Berne, Switzerland. She is a winner of the Hadassah-Brandeis-Institute Research Award, Brandeis University/USA (2004). From 2006 to 2009, she obtained a doctoral fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). She has published widely on American Jewish women’s music and other subjects.

Emotion

SOHAM AL-SUADI obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is currently a university assistant (post-doc), lecturer, and researcher at the Institute of Biblical Studies (New Testament) at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Berne. She is in the process of writing her second book on early Christian prophecy.

s t u d i e s i n j u da i s m / 7

Judaism Emotion

AND

Texts, Performance, Experience

AND

GABRIEL LEVY obtained his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the author of Judaic Technologies of the Word: A Cognitive Analysis of Jewish Cultural Formation (2012).

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ROSS, LEVY, AND AL-SUADI, EDS. / Judaism

Judaism and Emotion breaks with stereotypes that, until recently, branded Judaism as a rigid religion of laws and prohibitions. Instead, authors from different fields of research discuss the subject of Judaism and emotion from various scholarly perspectives; they present an understanding of Judaism that does not exclude spirituality and emotions from Jewish thought. In doing so, the contributions account for the relation between the representation of emotion and the actual emotions that living and breathing human beings feel in their everyday lives. While scholars of rabbinic studies and theology take a historical-critical and socio-historical approach to the subject, musicologists and scholars of religious studies focus on the overall research question of how the literary representations of emotion in Judaism are related to ritual and musical performances within Jewish worship. They describe in a more holistic fashion how Judaism serves to integrate various aspects of social life. In doing so, they examine the dynamic interrelationship between Judaism, cognition, and culture.

SA R A H R O SS, GABRIEL LEVY, A N D SO H A M A L-SU A D I EDITED BY

PETER LANG

W W W . PE T E R L A NG . CO M

Levy_Ross_Al-Suadi_dd_Hardcover:Greenberg3art.qxd

4/15/2013

1:01 PM

Page 1

SARAH ROSS obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She currently works as a university assistant (post-doc researcher), lecturer, and study counselor at the Department of Musicology as well as at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Berne, Switzerland. She is a winner of the Hadassah-Brandeis-Institute Research Award, Brandeis University/USA (2004). From 2006 to 2009, she obtained a doctoral fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). She has published widely on American Jewish women’s music and other subjects.

Emotion

SOHAM AL-SUADI obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is currently a university assistant (post-doc), lecturer, and researcher at the Institute of Biblical Studies (New Testament) at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Berne. She is in the process of writing her second book on early Christian prophecy.

s t u d i e s i n j u da i s m / 7

Judaism Emotion

AND

Texts, Performance, Experience

AND

GABRIEL LEVY obtained his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the author of Judaic Technologies of the Word: A Cognitive Analysis of Jewish Cultural Formation (2012).

7

ROSS, LEVY, AND AL-SUADI, EDS. / Judaism

Judaism and Emotion breaks with stereotypes that, until recently, branded Judaism as a rigid religion of laws and prohibitions. Instead, authors from different fields of research discuss the subject of Judaism and emotion from various scholarly perspectives; they present an understanding of Judaism that does not exclude spirituality and emotions from Jewish thought. In doing so, the contributions account for the relation between the representation of emotion and the actual emotions that living and breathing human beings feel in their everyday lives. While scholars of rabbinic studies and theology take a historical-critical and socio-historical approach to the subject, musicologists and scholars of religious studies focus on the overall research question of how the literary representations of emotion in Judaism are related to ritual and musical performances within Jewish worship. They describe in a more holistic fashion how Judaism serves to integrate various aspects of social life. In doing so, they examine the dynamic interrelationship between Judaism, cognition, and culture.

SA R A H R O SS, GABRIEL LEVY, A N D SO H A M A L-SU A D I EDITED BY

PETER LANG

W W W . PE T E R L A NG . CO M

Judaism AND Emotion

Studies in Judaism

Yudit Kornberg Greenberg General Editor Vol. 7

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Judaism

AND

Emotion

Texts, Performance, Experience

EDITED BY

SARAH ROSS, GABRIEL LEVY, AND SOHAM AL-SUADI

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Judaism and emotion: texts, performance, experience / edited by Sarah Ross, Gabriel Levy, Soham Al-Suadi. pages cm — (Studies in Judaism; v. 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Emotions—Religious aspects—Judaism. I. Levy, Gabriel. II. Ross, Sarah. III. Al-Suadi, Soham. BM645.E46J83 296.01’9—dc23 2012039908 ISBN 978-1-4331-1872-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4539-1044-3 (e-book) ISSN 1086-5403

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Front cover photo: Simeon Solomon (1840–1905) “Rabbi holding the Torah” (Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries www.leicestergalleries.com) The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2013 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

Contents Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. vii Foreword ............................................................................................................. ix René Bloch General Introduction: Reflections on Judaism and Emotion............................ 1 Sarah Ross Part One: Texts Introduction to Texts Section............................................................................ 17 Soham Al-Suadi Dining Social Alternatives: Paul’s Dealing with the Emotional Diversity of the Hellenistic Meal....................................................................................... 21 Soham Al-Suadi Matters of the Heart: The Metamorphosis of the Monolithic in the Bible to the Fragmented in Rabbinic Thought .......................................................... 43 Reuven Kiperwasser Part Two: Performance Introduction to Performance Section ............................................................... 63 Sarah Ross Singing Their Heart Out: Emotional Excitement in Cantorial Recitatives and Carlebach Nusach....................................................................................... 67 Amit Klein Emotional and Cognitive Rhythms in Jewish Ritual Music............................. 99 Gabriel Levy and Sarah Ross Part Three: Experience Introduction to Experience Section ................................................................ 121 Gabriel Levy

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When Judaism Became Boring: The McCauley-Lawson Theory, Emotions and Judaism..................................................................................... 123 Tamas Biro A New Method for Analyzing Emotions in Jewish Texts ............................... 153 Gabriel Levy Index.................................................................................................................163

SARAH ROSS, GABRIEL LEVY & SOHAM AL-SUADI

Acknowledgments

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ur sincere thanks go first to the “Mittelbauvereinigung der Universität Bern” (MVUB). Without the generous funding granted to the editors, we would not have been able to organize the thought provoking conference on “Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience” at the University of Berne, Switzerland, which preceded the publication of this book. Regarding this, we would like to express our particular thanks to Prof. Dr. René Bloch, head of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Berne, who from the beginning supported the idea and organization of the conference. The “Interfakultäre Forschungsstelle für Judaistik” at the University of Berne funded the publication of the book at hand. We would also like to thank Asbjørn Dyrendal and the Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for their generous support to cover our last-minute formatting costs. Bern & Trondheim

RENÉ BLOCH

Foreword

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udaism and Emotion may be a surprising book title. It certainly breaks with stereotypes which until not long ago branded Judaism as a rigid “Gesetzesreligion”, a religion of laws and prohibitions. Such an understanding of Judaism (which, I am afraid, has not totally vanished even today) often excluded spirituality and emotions from Jewish thought. But Judaism and emotion is, of course, not an oxymoron at all. While the Mosaic law and its later interpretations by the rabbis are of great importance, emotions are very much part of Judaism as well. As a matter of fact, law and emotion are often intertwined. Samuel A. Horodezky, the author of a series of important studies on chassidism (including his 1912 University of Bern dissertation on Mystisch-religiöse Strömungen unter den Juden in Polen im 16.–18. Jahrhundert) went so far as to call the Jews “the people of emotion” (“Volk des Gefühls”) instead of “the people of the book”. Referring to the prophets and the kabbalah, but also to the Torah, Horodezky rightly, if apologetically, stresses the natural connectivity between emotion and law and the general ubiquity of emotions as an underlying theme in Judaism.1 A Jewish author from antiquity in whose work emotions are a recurrent theme is the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (1st century CE). Philo is influenced by the Stoics and his understanding of emotions (pathē), especially in the context of virtuous men, is ambiguous. The virtuous are free of ordinary emotions. On the other hand, according to Philo an emotion such as unmixed joy is something divine and if experienced by a human considered something very special. Thus, Philo makes the following comments to the passage where Sarah laughs upon learning that at her age she would give birth to a son. She later denies that she laughed, but is being corrected by God (Gen. 18.15: “yes, you did laugh”): Appropriately this happened to a pious character, who saw the greatness of God (…). For where does (Scripture) say that she is able to rejoice wholly with most radiant and unmixed joy, when she is involved in sorrow and fear and in many other misfortunes? But may it not be that rejoicing is peculiar to the divine nature alone, from the territory of Whose kingdom and from its borders are kept out and banished sorrow and fear? And so, when the soul laughs and seems to rejoice, it takes hold of itself, fearing that perchance through too great ignorance or reckless confidence it may drive

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•R E N É B L O C H • away something of the divine, to Whom alone is given the portion of a happy nature. Wherefore, accepting in a gracious, affectionate and benevolent manner the mind’s modest humility of prayerfulness and reverence, He says to it, “Do not be afraid, for the matter does not call for fear, that thou shouldst make denial. Accordingly, thou hast laughed and wast filled with joy, for I am about to give thee (cause) for rejoicing, like a stream rushing from a spring, or a form of the archetype, or a mixture of unmixed, pure and whole (wine)—like these (shall be thy joy), for the generation of children is by a double number.”2

Sarah, Philo argues, had no reason to be in denial of having laughed. She rightly and deservedly did so. This is indeed a telling interpretation by an author who is a keen observer of the variety of emotional responses. One passage where Philo’s interest in emotions is particularly tangible is his detailed description of people’s emotions in the theatre (a Jewish voice from antiquity on performance and emotion!): For example, I have often when I chanced to be in the theatre noticed the effect produced by some single tune sung by the actors on the stage or played by the musicians. Some of the audience are so moved, that in their excitement they cannot help raising their voices in a chorus of acclamation. Others are so unstirred that, as far as this is concerned, you might suppose them on a level of feeling with the senseless benches on which they sit. Others, again, are so repelled that they are off and away from the performance, and indeed, as they go, block their ears with both hands for fear that some echo of the music should remain to haunt them and produce a sense of discomfort to irritate and pain their souls.3

“Judaism and emotion” is a wide field and I was very pleased when a few years ago Sarah Ross mentioned to me that together with Gabriel Levy she was considering organizing a small conference on “Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience” at the University of Bern. On October 7, 2010, the Institute of Musicology and the Institute of Jewish Studies co-hosted a stimulating and thought provoking conference, bringing together an international group of young as well as more established scholars. The organizers of the conference, Soham Al-Suadi, Gabriel Levy and Sarah Ross, all young scholars, have compiled the revised papers of the conference and brought them together in this book. As Sarah Ross rightly points out in her introduction, the topic of this book has by no means been treated exhaustively in earlier research. I am sure that this book is an important contribution to the topic and hope that it will strengthen the interest in “Judaism and Emotion”.

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Notes 1

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S.A. Horodezky, Religiöse Strömungen im Judentum. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Chassidismus, Bern/Leipzig 1920, 2-3: “In der Tat ist das jüdische Volk kein “Volk des Buches”, des religiösen Buches und der religiösen Gesetze, wie es von verschiedenen Seiten behauptet wurde; es ist vielmehr ein Volk des Gefühls. Ein Volk, bei dem die Mystik sein ganzes Dasein umfasst und das sein Schaffen der Mysterien niemals eingestellt hat: im Buche Moses, bei den Propheten, in den Apokalyptischen Büchern, in den Agaden, in der Kabbala und im Chassidismus; ein Volk, das das Prophetentum erzeugt und den Messiasgedanken entwickelt hat—ein solches Volk kann kein “Volk des Buches” genannt werden, des längst zurecht gelegten Buches, in dem religiöse Gesetze für jede Einzelheit des Lebens, des Denkens und des Glaubens im Voraus bestimmt sind. Die Religion eines solches Volkes ist vielmehr in ihrem innersten Kerne frei, denn sie kommt aus dem Herzen und hat ihre Begründung im Gefühl. Die ganze Geschichte Israels bewegt sich fast nur um diesen einen Zentralpunkt: Hervorragende Männer der Nation kämpfen im Namen des Gefühls und der Freiheit des Herzens gegen alles Bestehende, gegen alles Angenommene und Zurechtgelegte.” Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis 4.19 (transl. by R. Marcus, The Loeb Classical Library, Philo. Supplement I, Cambridge, Mass./London 1953). Cf. M. Graver, “Philo of Alexandria and the Origins of the Stoic ΠΡΟΠΑΘΕΙΑΙ.” In F. Alesse (ed.), Philo of Alexandria and the Post-Aristotelian Philosophical Schools, Leiden/Boston 2008, 197-221. Philo, On Drunkenness 177 (transl. by F.H. Colson/G.H. Whitaker, The Loeb Classical Library, Philo vol. III, Cambridge, Mass./London 1930).

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General Introduction: Reflections on Judaism and Emotion A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. (Albert Einstein—The World as I See It, 1931)1

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n his book Ideas and Opinions ([1954] 1982), the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein introduced (in his article on “Religion and Science”, ibid., 36— 40) the concept of ‘cosmic religion’. It refers to a belief system that rejects a contradiction between science and religion (ibid., 41–52) and advocates the importance of sentiment for scientific research. In the same article, Einstein differentiates between three factors that increase religious faith, namely fear, social morality, and a cosmic religious feeling. In doing so, he allusively points to the centrality of emotions to religion and takes up the question of what kinds of feelings are mandatory in the formation and manifestation of religious beliefs, in other words, why “people adopt religious beliefs that fit their emotional needs as well as their other beliefs”, as Paul Thagard puts it (Thagard 2005, 58). Thoughts and questions like these still matter in contemporary studies on emotion and religion (see below). While pointing to Jewish scriptures, which “admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion” (Einstein [1954] 1982, 37), Einstein emphasizes man’s inherent desire for guidance as well as for regulation principals and social impulses in life, such as fear and morality. These feelings sooner or later become the motive force in the social and moral conception of religion and God, respectively. Einstein thus refers to the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer’s outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social and moral conception of God (ibid., 37).

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Einstein denies that there is anything divine about fear and morality, he clears the way for the idea of cosmic religious feelings as another important and elementary part of religion. Thus, he moves the discussion away from a few dominant and intimidating feelings that preserve religious belief systems and their dogmata, and puts the focus on various kinds of emotions (which are not bound by fear, morality, and guilt) that constitute religions and faith. In this sense, he directs his attention to the function of religion in contrast to science. On the one hand, science, with respect to objective knowledge, “can only ascertain what is, but not what should be” the goal of human aspiration (ibid., 42, italics in original). Science only provides people with effective instruments by which certain ends, not the ultimate goal of life as well as the longing to reach this goal, can be achieved. That is why science faces the limits of the merely rational conception of man’s existence. Religion, on the other hand, deals with these evaluations of human thought and action, but is not able to speak of facts and the interconnectedness of these facts. Accordingly, Einstein states: “To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man” (ibid., 45). Einstein’s concept of religion, and moreover his idea of “cosmic religious feelings”, comes close to John Corrigan, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2008), who understands religion “as a human activity that is embedded in everyday life in the felt relations individuals experience with other persons, nature, and the holy personages to whom they are devoted” (Corrigan 2008, 8). This concept of religion has implications for understanding the role and function of emotion within religion, and thus on the study of emotions in religion. Einstein’s cosmic religious feelings are a set of emotions that transcend a personal God and avoid any kind of dogma and theology, but cover, at the same time, the experience and understanding of all things, natural and spiritual, as an insightful unity (Einstein [1954] 1982, 38). Moreover, he sees the beginnings of cosmic religious feelings appearing already at an early stage of development, such as in the Psalms of David as well as in some of the Prophets (ibid.). With his concept of “cosmic religion” Einstein offers an interesting theoretical model for the study of religion and emotion in general, and emotion and Judaism in particular, in which art as well as science have the important function of communicating the indefinable existence of God and theology among people. Likewise, science and art have the power to awake and keep alive these cosmic religious feelings among those who are receptive to it (ibid., 38). In doing so, he acknowledges, in the broadest sense, the close

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relationship between intellectual and experienced religious feelings, and thus recognizes the fundamental role emotions play in religion. Long before the perception and study of emotion underwent a crucial change in response to cognitive science, neuropsychological, and other research, Einstein already identified the all-encompassing and intense presence of emotion in human life on the one hand, and within the context of performing religion, on the other (cp. Nisan 2010, 17). That is why he might be seen as a harbinger for the new (today’s) study of emotions and religion, which crosses different fields of research. Similarly, the authors of the present volume approach Judaism through the focus on the role and function of emotion in its texts, rituals, music, and other Jewish traditions. Nowadays, the relationship between religion and emotion is widely acknowledged to be an important one, as is apparent in John Corrigan’s The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2008) and the comprehensive bibliography Emotion and Religion (2000) published by John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos. The latter encompasses relevant studies dealing with the meaning of emotions in different world religions and areas of religious life that have been undertaken in various fields of research. And yet the literature on this topic still remains modest in scope and under-researched, particularly with regard to Judaism, which calls for a closer look on this subject. Thus, the idea of this book was born from an interdisciplinary conference entitled “Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience” held on October 7th, 2010 at the University of Berne, Switzerland, organized by the editors of this book. The conference theme itself, however, emerged from a pilot study of Gabriel Levy and Sarah Ross on “Emotions in Rabbinic Texts, Jewish Liturgy and Music”,2 which revealed a lacuna in the study of emotions in Judaism, and which the present volume seeks to fill. On Religion and Emotion3 Aside from Albert Einstein, the importance of emotion to religious thought and cognition has long been examined and discussed in more detail by various scholars, such as psychologist and philosopher William James (1948), who remarked that “feeling is the deeper source of religion” (314). On the one hand, almost simultaneously with the Danish psychologist Carl Georg Lange, James declared in his theory of emotion that emotions are only accessory phenomena of bodily incidents. On the other hand, Lange acts on the assumption that bodily changes are the reason for the experience of emotions, which means that physiological reactions precede emotional responses toward outer conditions and influences. James and Lange’s discussions about the

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origin and nature of emotions became known as the James-Lange-Theory, which is the earliest theory of emotions developed in the 19th century, and which manifested itself in a joint publication of William James and Carl Georg Lange, entitled The Emotions (1922). However, at the turn of the century, and then throughout the 20th century, most writings on religious feelings and sentiments were focused on the attempt to characterize the fundamental role of emotion in religion and its power to bind social collectives, rather than defining the central research subject, namely emotion itself (Corrigan 2008, 7). The approach of emotions in religion changed, however, with the emergence and break through of cognitive science theories, the research field of ‘cognitive science of religion’ in particular. Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, to name just a few, describe in their seminal book Bringing Ritual to Mind (2002) how religious rituals liven up our emotions. Studies like these demonstrate how the cognition of emotion “derived from brain structures, makes persons susceptible to religion” (Corrigan 2008, 5), or why psychological and social mechanisms of emotional cognition are important to explaining the acquisition and maintenance of religious beliefs. Moreover, these works shed new light on practices such as prayer, religious music and other rituals, which are based on religious texts that are in turn, to a great part, highly emotional, and which contain many emotional concepts, such as fear, love, shame, faith, hope, consolation and others (see Thargard 2005). Thus, religion not only produces emotions, religion is in itself emotional (ibid., 59). Despite a persistent interest by the humanities and social sciences in the study of emotions, research and literature on religion and emotion has stumbled in trying to account for the relation between the representation of emotion and the actual emotions that living and breathing human beings feel in their everyday lives. Similarly, studies about the role of emotions within Judaism mainly take a look at the subject’s historical roots within the context of Jewish philosophy, theology and religious traditions (see Corrigan 2008, 11). As a result, in comparison to the study of other religions, there is a vital lack of research on the dimensions of religious feelings and emotions within the context of daily Jewish life. Judaism Just as emotions are difficult to comprehend and to define, so are works published on Judaism and emotion. Although emotions have been an important element of Jewish life and thought throughout the ages, the topic hardly reveals itself through the titles of studies dealing with the subject in

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question. Furthermore, there are not any investigations of collective emotion in Jewish contexts. The only sources that serve as a starting point when studying emotions in Judaism are John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos’ thirteen-year-old bibliography (2000), mentioned above, as well as Joel Gereboff’s article on “Judaism” published in Corrigan’s The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2008, 95–110). The latter is, as of now, the only synopsis of relevant publications on the study of emotions in Judaism. While reading and comparing Corrigan et al. and Gereboff’s findings, it is obvious that there is an irony to the study of emotion within the study of Judaism. Although the investigation of emotions in Judaism is located within different fields of research, there is prevalence of historical approaches to the subject. Furthermore, both authors primarily represent scholars who focus on literary representations of emotions in Judaism. It lacks a review of academic contributions of other methodologies, such as anthropological, ethnographic, sociological, psychological, or (ethno-)musicological accounts of the subject, as well as studies from the field of the cognitive science of religion. In other words, studies that get to the heart of the issue—in terms of real human beings feeling emotions in the context of Jewish life—are under-represented. Thus, within the studies mentioned by Corrigan et al. and Gereboff, emotions are a by-product of other discussions rather than the centerpiece of scientific investigations of Judaism. However, Joel Gereboff clearly outlines the reasons why, until recently, academic scholarship on Judaism and emotion has been rather limited in comparison to investigations of emotion in other religions. Only since the growing interest by academics of different disciplines in the general relation between emotion and religion, have scholars of Judaism concentrated their attention to this field (Gereboff 2008, 95). As he further argues, there have been some reasons that account for the earlier lack of research on Judaism and emotion and the recent rediscovery of this subject. One of these reasons is that until the Middle Ages Jewish philosophy did not develop a systematic psychology, nor did it broach the issue of emotions as a subject of formal analysis. And even until the 19th century, “the emotions” as a distinct psychological category, which replaced existing psychologically related terms, such as desire, sentiment, passion and affection, did not exist (ibid., 96). By the 19th and early 20th century then, scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, as well as other Jewish leaders, still discussed the way of “Judaic reflections on the inner life” only on the margins of their scholarly works. Particularly under Kantian and Neo-Kantian influence, scholars were inclined to characterize Judaism as “ethical-monotheism” and discussed how Jewish practices advanced

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a “sense of the morally right rather than how Judaic views fostered the virtues and the emotions” (ibid.). Similarly, ritual practice was only explained and examined in order to prove how it expressed and communicated great Jewish thoughts, and not how it stimulated and enthused the emotions of those who practiced Judaism. Another important factor here is that Jewish mysticism, with its emphasis on the emotive experience of Judaism, was not considered as a serious subject of investigation until Gershom Scholem, such as in his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1946), took up this matter in the 20th century (ibid.). Recent interest in the study of Judaism and the emotions is first of all a result of an explosion of reports on emotions in fields of research that investigate the social and cultural aspect of sensory concepts in world cultures and religions from various theoretical perspectives (e.g. from the perspective of cultural anthropology, phenomenology, psychology, etc.). In addition, a revived interest in the topic of virtue ethics in general influenced the study of Jewish ethics and led to discussions of the connections between emotions and the moral life. Important philosophical works to be named in this context are the studies of Martha Nussbaum. In her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) she offers a theory of the nature and moral value of the emotions that is, to a great extent, based on the ethics of virtue. Moreover, she attempts to define the relationships between cognition and emotion (see Cates 2003; Corrigan 2008, 5). Another study that has to be mentioned here, is Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s work Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge and Well-Being (2003). Drawing on literary sources such as the Hebrew bible, rabbinic scriptures, and medieval philosophical writings as well as kabalistic sources, Tirosh-Samuelson demonstrates the importance of emotion in order to get a broader understanding of Judaism (see Gereboff 2008, 98–99). In this context, redefined methodological approaches to classical and medieval texts, which recognized the importance of not over-generalizing from a given source, contributed to this trend and spurred the academic interest in Judaism and emotion (ibid., 96). Aside from philosophical and theological accounts of rabbinic and medieval writings on the virtues and other mystical treatises focusing on the inner life of Jews, Gereboff refers to biblical narratives and images of a “God of pathos” as one important set of sources expressing Jewish thoughts about the emotions (see Gereboff 2008, 95). One of the most seminal studies in this respect is Abraham Joshua Heschel’s work The Prophets ([1962] 2001), in which

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he conceptualizes God (as described in the books of the prophets in the Hebrew bible) as being sensitive, and not as being distant or being unconcerned about human experience. Heschel understands the divine as a God of pathos and of emotions (cp. Gereboff 2008, 100). Jewish tradition has always been concerned, in a positive way, with human emotions as portrayed and discussed in the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and other Jewish philosophical and mystic sources. Thus most of the historical investigations concerned with the study of emotion in Judaism are concentrated on the representation of specific emotive expressions, such as anger, fear, shame and guilt, joy and ecstasy, love, jealousy, and mourning. Studies like these give insight into historical Jewish cultures and communities, by addressing—through the focus on emotions—prescribed ways of social interactions. Thus, e.g. Gary A. Anderson describes in his work on A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in the Israelite Religion (1991) how “the experience of joy is associated with the movement from profane to sacred space in ritual”, while ritual itself expresses as well as stimulates the emotions. Joy, in this context, is understood as a symbol of cleanness, while mourning recognizes impurity (Corrigan et al. 2000, 21). Another study focusing on ritual, and emotions related to it, is Adriana Destor’s study, The Law of Jealousy: Anthropology of Sotah (1989), in which she demonstrates how jealousy is related to the handling of ancient Jewish rites to which suspected adulteresses had to submit (Corrigan et al. 2000, 23). Aside from historical studies, further discussions of specific rituals and feelings related to them, can be found in (a few) psychological studies, such as Saul Scheidlinger’s The Minyan as the Psychological System (1997), in which he demonstrates how praying in a minyan alleviates the feeling of loneliness. Crucial research trends in scholarship coming out of social and behavioral sciences, as well as cognitive sciences, dealing with the science of emotion and embodiment have only been partly, if at all, translated to the study of Judaism. Thus, Corrigan et al. hardly mentions studies that give insight into how observing Jews act (with regard to the divine) in ritual performances, as well as how God is experienced by the individual Jewish worshipper. Existing anthropological and sociological investigations addressing these issues (such as Colin Murray Parkes, Pittu Laungani, and Bill Young’s book on Death and Bereavement Across Cultures, 1997) make references to Judaism, or include surveys among Jewish communities, but are not primarily focused on the emotional dimensions of Jewish ritual practices. Accordingly, Joel Gereboff is right by stating that “much remains to be done in the study of Judaic materials” (2008, 106).

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When it comes to the study of feelings and sensations that are raised in people by the experience of various religious states, the biggest challenge might not be the understanding of a certain religion itself, in this case Judaism, but the concreteness and conceivability of what we call “emotion”. The ‘obscure knowledge’ or ‘unreasoning sentiment’, which, according to the ancient Stoics, is preposterous to nature (cp. Graver 2007), has long been broken down by philosophers into two basic affects in mental experience, namely delight and aversion. Later on, these affects have been completed by further basic emotions, such as love, hate, desire, joy, sadness and admiration. Today, the definition and conceptualization of the term “emotion” is much more differentiated. When we talk about emotions, we talk about a multifaceted psychological and physiological experience of an individual’s state of mind, which interacts with both biochemical and environmental influences (Myers 2004, 500). In other words, emotions are based in or tied to our internal (physical) and external (social) sensory feelings, whereby emotions represent the realm where thought and physiology are inextricably entwined. The term thus refers to a quite brief but intense affective reaction that usually involves a number of subcomponents, such as subjective feelings (subjective feelings are an internal sensation and reflection of all changes in components during an emotion episode), physiological arousal (e.g. changes in temperature sensation, etc.), motor expression (facial and vocal expressions, gestures), expressive behavior/behavior preparation (a motivational function of emotional responses in the form of action tendencies) and cognitive processes/conscious experience (this component consists of the appraisal processes that drive the coordinated changes in the components described above) (see Scherer 2004, 240–241). These components are more or less ‘synchronized’. Accordingly, emotions further represent a realm where our “‘self’ is inseparable from our individual perceptions of value and judgment toward ourselves and toward others in our emotional space.”4 However, there is no empirical support for any generalization on the understanding and concept of emotion, which means that the examination and discussion of emotional behavior merits careful study. Much of what can be said about emotions, as well as the history of what has been said about them, is conditioned by culture and even politics, as becomes apparent not only in the many theories of emotion, but moreover within the research field of the sociology of emotions. Diverse theoretical (such as somatic, neurobiological or cognitive theories) as well as disciplinary approaches to the emotions (e.g. philosophy, human and social sciences, economics etc.) are

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often mutually exclusive rather than inclusive. By comparison, the sociology of emotion recognizes “that emotions are influenced and constrained by cultural norms, values, beliefs, and vocabularies,” that the substance of emotion differs across various societies, and moreover that the biology of emotions has to be considered “as a critical element in understanding how they operate” (Turner and Stets 2005, 3). The mutual relationship between socio-cultural, or religious, processes and the neurology and biology of emotions—as suggested by the sociology of emotions—very well describes the approach to the study of emotion in Judaism presented in the following contributions. Against this background, we can state that the importance of the emotions within Jewish thought, text and religious practice develops out of the close interconnections between biology, cultural and religious construction, and cognition in Jewish life. No one of these elements is solely responsible for how emotions in Judaism are expressed and experienced (cp. Turner and Stets 2005, 10). Thus, studies on the ways in which Jews actually participate in prayer as well as how liturgies, ritual objects and spaces or even musical traditions are constructed, invented and reinvigorated, in order to make Judaism emotionally meaningful, give evidence of the emotional texture of the lives of Jews. Studying Emotions in Judaism Although certain emotions are shared by all people worldwide, the way they express their emotions can be quite different. In other words: feelings are not necessarily identical with the emotion itself. This emphasizes the inwardness of feelings in contrast to the observable expression of emotions (such as facial expressions or gestures), which is to an important extent influenced by cultural and social norms (cp. Scherer 2004, 239, Turner and Stets 2005, 10). Against this background, the study of emotions within religious contexts becomes even more complicated, notwithstanding the fact that researchers face the general problem of analyzing emotional behavior, and of conceptualizing and representing their data in a proper way. Thus, and with regards to the layout of this book, uniting researchers of different academic fields, it might be useful to think of “emotion” as form of knowledge. Generally speaking, and without making a claim to be complete, it can be argued that emotions, as a form of knowledge, are in some way physically manifested: namely in a verbal form (including both conscious elements of knowledge that can be verbalized and unconscious elements of knowledge that cannot be verbalized), as well as in iconic (visual representation, graphics, sculptures etc.), acoustic (auditory representation) or cognitive forms. Furthermore, emotions can be conceptualized in terms of cognition, perception,

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understanding, experience, or memory. Finally, they can be analyzed with known research methods and techniques, such as the analysis of commentaries, biographies, visual documents and sound references, as well as of other empirical data collected through interviews and participant observations. Thus, the aim of the book is to illustrate and analyze emotions in Judaism with reference to a limited number of forms in which they appear, namely in textual, musical or cognitive forms, rather than to comprehensively survey them (cp. Corrigan 2008, 11). This further constitutes the tripartite structure of the book, which is divided into a “text section”, a section on “performance” and one on “experience”. Each of these sections represents a different way of thinking about emotion as a form of knowledge, and thus diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives on the subject of the book. Accordingly, each chapter simultaneously represents in some way a particular form of the physical manifestation of the emotions, and thus draws on different sets of sources and data that are available when studying the emotions in Judaism. Within the text section Soham Al-Suadi and Reuven Kiperwasser take a historical-critical and socio-historical approach to the subject, while examining verbalized thoughts and literary representations of emotions in Judaism, such as in biblical and rabbinical texts. In her contribution, “Dining Social Alternatives—Paul’s Dealing with the emotional diversity of the Hellenistic Meal,” Al-Suadi examines the Hellenistic meal as a semiprivate social act, which allowed the participants to experiment with social variables in order to put new social alternatives into practice. Knowing that the discussion of social alternatives raises questions of the social value of these alternatives, she examines these values, which are expressed through community (koinonia), equality and friendship (isonomia and philia) and grace/generosity/beauty (charis). In her contribution, Al-Suadi focuses on Paul’s letters to the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians and shows how Paul describes and influences the emotional flexibility of the participants to express the utopian identity of Christ-believers. Reuven Kiperwasser studies in his chapter, “Matters of the Heart—the metamorphosis of the monolithic in the Bible to the fragmented in rabbinic thought,” the process of the formation of an important anthropological concept in Rabbinic Literature: the concept of Heart. Heart in Rabbinic literature, as in the Bible, is not only an anatomical organ, but the representation point of the human being and the center of his emotions. The purpose is to check the processes of continuity and change in the acceptance of the specific concept and to investigate the features of metamorphoses in comparison with the same concept in biblical and in rabbinic literature.

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Amit Klein, in his article, and Gabriel Levy and Sarah Ross, in ours, deal with auditory representations of religious feelings and discuss, within the performance section, how Jewish ideas about emotions are manifested in and related to Jewish liturgical music and spiritual melodies. Thus, Amit Klein’s chapter, “Singing their Heart Out: Emotional Excitement in Cantorial Recitatives and Carlebach Nusach” discusses Ashkenazic synagogue music as a unique case of expressing emotions in prayer, which Klein demonstrates in two distinct musical frameworks that emerged in Ashkenazic synagogue song in the past two centuries: the Cantorial Reciative and the Carelbach Nusach. These genres generate emotions in two ways: they both employ mechanisms that generate a certain mood and they both employ an intensification process that generates high emotional arousal. In the cantorial recitative the cantor conveys a mood of supplication by musically imitating the weeping and crying of a person pleading to God. Additionally, the cantor also generates a musically sophisticated mechanism of intensification in which emotional excitement is systematically built up by gradually increasing various musical attributes (pitch height and pitch density). The Carlebach music, by contrast, generates a radically different mood, one of happiness and joy. It also utilizes an intensification process—albeit of a different kind—based on music speed and volume. The different design of musical style, which is meant to generate different emotions, is related to broader themes that create the meaning of the prayer as a religious cultural event. Closely related to that, Gabriel Levy and Sarah Ross argue in their chapter “Emotional and Cognitive Rhythms in Jewish Ritual Music” that there is a physiological and emotional rhythm to the 24 hour Shabbat cycle that is determined in part by the oscillation between the major and minor modes in the liturgy. While first exploring the role of timing and rhythm in the rabbinical attitudes towards Shabbat, the authors provide some background information about the musical aspects of the Shabbat liturgy. A description of a paradigmatic Shabbat service follows that illustrates the oscillation between major and minor modes. On this basis, Levy and Ross discuss the consequences of their argument in general, and for the study of Judaism in particular. Most studies on religion and emotion are based on the verbal reports of the consciously experienced emotion, in other words on the subjective feeling component. Other components of emotion, such as cognitive processes, are mostly ignored or under-represented in such studies. That is why Tamas Biro and Gabriel Levy, whose articles form the third section of the book on “experience”, focus on methods of cognitive sciences, in order to examine the

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dynamic interrelationship between Judaism, cognition and culture. Thus, in his chapter, “When Judaism Became Boring: The McCauley-Lawson Theory,Emotions and Judaism,” Biro applies Lawson and McCauley’s model of the structure of religious rituals, which distinguishes two types of rituals, to Judaism. Later on, this model became the basis of their theory of the dynamics of ritual systems. Only if the two ritual types are in balance will a ritual system be stable. Namely, ‘special agent rituals’ are associated with a higher level of emotional arousal than ‘special patient/special instrument rituals’, and the two must complement each other to yield a transmittable system. If ‘special agent rituals’ are lacking, then a ‘tedium effect’ is predicted to emerge, paving the way to ‘imagistic’ splinter group outbursts. The article summarizes the McCauley-Lawson model. After pointing to some details that need reformulation in light of Judaism, Biro asks how much of Jewish history can be analyzed in this framework. He concludes that the cognitive perspective has the potential to complement the more traditional (historical, socio-economic) perspectives in Jewish studies. Gabriel Levy writes about “A New Method for Analyzing Emotions in Jewish Texts.” In the first part of his article, he presents a methodological argument that the methods of the cognitive science of religion and other forms of religious study such as history, sociology, or psychology, are not that disparate. He then places the reticence of humanists in general and Jewish studies scholars in particular to take up cognitive science as a discipline and offer a “two-way street” model for the proper interaction between science and humanities. In this model a humanistic mode of the cognitive science of religion is presented as a hybrid discipline that uses state of the art science to help us understand, not necessarily explain, Jewish religion and culture. The second part of the paper delves more closely into the issue of emotion, presenting a general framework for understanding it from a bio-physiological perspective. He uses examples from Jewish texts and history throughout as illustrations of his integrationist argument. As it will become apparent in the different chapters presented in this book, there exists a close interconnectedness between the different forms of the physical manifestation of emotions and the different concepts of emotions in Judaism, and thus of text, performance, and experience. Taken together, all these essays provide a preliminary basis on which further studies of Judaism and emotion can built. The chapters in this book are thus meant to find and further define this area of investigation, as well as to provoke new approaches and interpretations to the study of emotion in the study of Judaism.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

See Albert Einstein’s article “The World As I See It” as published in Ideas and Opinions ([1954] 1982), p. 11. Dr. Gabriel Levy and I carried out the pilot study mentioned here in spring 2010. For detailed information and first research results, please see the chapter entitled “Emotional and Cognitive Rhythms in Jewish Ritual Music” in this book. For a detailed discussion on the state of research on religion and emotion in general, see John Corrigan (2008). http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Passion-%28emotion%29, accessed March 24th, 2012.

Bibliography Cates, Diana Fritz.2003. “Conceiving Emotions: Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Upheavals of Thought.” The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 31, No. 2, 325–341. Corrigan, John, Eric Crump, and John Kloos. 2000. Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Corrigan, John. 2008. Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Corrigan, John, Ed. 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Einstein, Albert. [1954] 1982. Ideas and Opinion. New York: Three Rivers Press. Friedmann, Jonathan L., Ed. 2012. Emotion in Jewish Music: Personal and Scholarly Reflections. Lanham et al: University Press of America. Gereboff, Joel. 2008. “Judaism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, edited by John Corrigan. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 95–110. Graver, Margaret R. 2007. Stoicism & Emotion. Cicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. [1962] 2001. The Prophets. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. James, William. 1948. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor. McCauley, Robert N. and E. Thomas Lawson. 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind; Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myers, David G. 2004. “Theories of Emotion.” Psychology, Seventh Edition. New York: Worth Publishers, 500–513. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scherer, Klaus R. 2004. "Which Emotions Can be Induced by Music? What Are the Underlying Mechanisms? And How Can We Measuer Them?" Journal of New Music Research, Vol. 33, No. 3, 239–251. Thagard, Paul. 2005. “The Emotional Coherence of Religion.” Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5.1–2, 58–74. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. 2003. Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being. Hebrew Union College Press. Turner, Jonathan H. and Jan E. Stets. 2005. The Sociology of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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he discussion of emotional states of mind or references to emotions within religious texts is obviously not limited to the 21st century. Nonetheless texts originating in Antiquity might not be the first source of interest. Cognitive science of religion and biblical studies have only recently been engaged in this multidisciplinary field and have gained increasing interests since the 1990s. Scholars articulated the need to discuss whether an understanding of “religion” based on ordinary cognitive processes that also support non-religious behavior can be in dialogue with an understanding of “religion” understood as a cultural construction that can be studied within a historical framework.1 This effort has been rewarding because the cognitive science of religion and the historical study of religions complemented one another with their particular assets. Cognitive science concepts, perspectives, and theories that have not been part of biblical interpretations so far have enriched the discourse. Social-scientific studies were able to focus on a broader variety of phenomena and biblical exegesis has used cognitive psychology to understand identification processes in early Christianity (Luomanen 2007: 1f.). This section on ancient texts that describe or evoke the reader’s emotions, is interested in social processes that are relevant for a personal or communal reception of religious identifications through emotions. The focus lies on texts that originated in Antiquity to highlight the interrelation between emotional evocations and historical affirmations. Soham Al-Suadi and Reuven Kiperwasser, as a New Testament scholar and a scholar of Rabbinic Judaism, contribute chapters that are not self-evidently within the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science and biblical studies. Without overestimating texts and text productions it is fair to say that the medium of the written word is central to the social, political, and religious development of Christian origins and Rabbinic Judaism. The textual relevance within these religious systems is reflected in theory and in practice by a long history of textual interpretations. The two articles that are presented in this section reflect textual interpretation in Antiquity as well as in the 21st century. Both scholars deal with texts that are filled with symbolic meaning to embody religious values and communal concepts for antique communities. They are discussing Jewish textual productions that were interpretations of daily Jewish life and they highlight

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the importance of texts that did not only describe cultural performance but shaped them. They use historical-critical and socio-historical approaches to the subject and examine the representations und usages of emotions in the New Testament and Rabbinic sources. The chronological origin of the texts chosen by Soham Al-Suadi and Reuven Kiperwasser is also close. Both authors are discussing texts written in Antiquity, which are part of the larger culture of Judaism. Therefore the New Testament letters of Paul and the treaties of Rabbinic Judaism are both texts depended on biblical thought, and both are interested in a distinguished religious identification within Judaism. This asks the interpreter to value texts related to Christian origins as well as texts within the Rabbinic culture for their particular meaning. The thematic similarity is also apparent. Both scholars highlight the emotional significance that is given through either cultural performance of a community or the discussion of the relevance of the heart. Regarding the chronological and thematic setting the papers give insight into a rich variety of Jewish traditions (see also Tamas Biro’s chapter in this book). Soham Al-Suadi takes us into the common meal practice that was not only performed but also written about in the Hellenistic Mediterranean world. Her article: “Dining Social Alternatives: Paul’s Dealing with the Emotional Variety of the Hellenistic Meal” introduces an analysis on Paul’s letters to his community about this meal practice. Hence in Antiquity the Hellenistic meal was composed of several ritual actions that affected changes in status, affiliation, and social identity, the festive meals of communities were part of a highly developed cultural performance, which allowed the simultaneous affirmation and transformation of shared values. Representative of the history of research of New Testament studies she notes that only after M. Klinghardt’s and D. Smith’s studies on the Hellenistic meal in the 1990s was New Testament research done within the sociohistorical method. Ritual theory was recently used to analyze the New Testament in its ritual world (R. DeMaris) and to place the Lord’s Supper within the Hellenistic meal (H. Taussig). Considering that the beginnings of Christianity can be found within this social practice (H. Taussig), scholars examine how ritual actions operate and influence participants' political, social, and religious collective identities. This chapter examines the Hellenistic meal as a semiprivate social act that allowed the participants to experiment with social variables in order to put new social alternatives into practice. Knowing that the discussion of social alternatives raises questions of the social value of these alternatives, the chapter examines these values, which are expressed through community (koinonia), equality and friendship (isonomia and philia) and grace/generosity/beauty (charis). It focuses on Paul’s letters to the

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Corinthians and shows how Paul describes and influences the emotions of the participants to express the utopian identity of Christ-believers. Reuven Kiperwasser highlights Rabbinic thought about the metaphor of the heart, which was present in Rabbinic scriptures but also representative of peoples’ perception of emotional qualities. His chapter, “Matters of the Heart: The Metamorphosis of the Monolithic in the Bible to the Fragmented in Rabbinic Thought,” studies the process of the formation of an important anthropological concept in Rabbinic literature: the concept of heart. He highlights that heart in Rabbinic literature, as in the Bible, is not only an anatomical organ but the representation point of the human being and the center of his emotions. The purpose of his research is to check the processes of continuity and change in the acceptance of the specific concept and to investigate the features of metamorphoses in comparison with the same concept in Biblical literature and in Rabbinic literature. Inasmuch as the antique texts are discussed within their cultural setting, reflect the perspectives of the authors and are characteristic for the author’s audience, this volume exemplifies that texts reflecting Christian origins and text which are part of Rabbinic Judaism are both interested in their emotional “embodiment”. Whether feasting communities were invited to embody as the body of Christ or Rabbis read the body as a text, the ancient authors used the emotions to foster the community’s identity. By choosing texts that were written within Jewish settings of the first centuries, this volume merges a divisionary scholarly habitus of Jewish- and New Testament Studies that divides texts categorically between Judaism and Christianity. The authors of this section take the fluidity between early Christian and Jewish literature seriously and foster an understanding of Christian origins and Rabbinic Judaism, which are both interested in a specific identification process through emotions. Notes 1

The published conference paper on “Explaining Christian origins and early Judaism: contributions from cognitive and social science,” edited by Petri Luomanen (2007), marked the beginning of a shared interest by religious scholars in cognitive and social science.

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Dining Social Alternatives: Paul’s Dealing with the Emotional Diversity of the Hellenistic Meal1 1Cor 1:17 Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse.

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he New Testament contains many stories that imply early Christian identification with Jesus Christ and the formation of a communal identity as Christ-believers by evoking the reader’s emotions. It does not take much effort to find the description of emotions or emotional behavior within the New Testament. 2 Although emotions are a relevant factor of the New Testament texts, the connection between religious identification and emotional experience is not at all self evident and has been underestimated by New Testament scholars. Evidently, the authors of Hellenistic-Jewish texts described emotions and evoked an emotional reaction by the implicit or explicit reader, although they did not reflect on such intentions. Taking into consideration that religious beliefs influence the emotional reaction of people, one can observe that religious experience induces the emotional expression of people, too. This leads to the interpretation that religious experience can be used as parameters for an emotional understanding of a person’s life (McIntosh 2008, 1259). Religious experience relies heavily on an emotional understanding of personal experience, and personal subjectivity is influenced by religious beliefs, psychological processes, and cultural categories (McIntosh 2008, 1259). The transfer of knowledge about the variety of emotional responses to emotional experiences takes place in commonly shared practices. A suitable example for a practice where religious, social and political experiences are shared and experimented with is the Hellenistic meal practice in Antiquity.3 In the Mediterranean world of the first centuries the Hellenistic meal was composed of several ritual actions that affected changes in status, affiliation, and social identity. The festive meals of communities were part of a highly developed cultural performance, which allowed affirmation and transformation of shared values at the same time. As a semi-private cultural

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practice, which was known by the public but held in private houses, the Hellenistic meal was held throughout the Mediterranean world and served as a display of a variety of social, political and religious values.4 The authors of the New Testament's texts participated, as HellenisticJewish writers, in Hellenistic meals and are therefore part of a cultural debate about sociological identification; such identification was not only expressed through cultural performances but also through the texts that were written about and read during these festive meals. This means that the authors were participants and creators of the social setting at the same time. Regarding the fact that an author like Paul was not necessarily present at the gatherings he was writing for, he was still able to picture the ritual sequence of the meal gathering. He consequently evoked emotional responses to his letters, which were “designed” through his knowledge about the variety of emotional responses he could expect. Obviously the literary production of texts involves this kind of emotional “handling.” Hence emotions are described and expressed at the same time because the social setting was an established cultural performance, which lead to experimentation and exploration of communal values. This chapter is based on the observation that New Testament texts about meals, which were read, sung, and/or performed during the Hellenistic meal, deal with an outstanding variety of emotions. Considering that the authors of the texts, in this case Paul, knew about the social, political, and religious variety that was displayed by the meal participants, leads to the thesis that the authors evoked emotional reaction on purpose and made use of them for their own dedications. Paul’s purpose in writing to the communities in Asia Minor and Rome differ from each other but they have his aim of a shared identification in Christ in common. The following remarks start with a description of the Hellenistic meal as cultural common sense, followed by a ritual analysis of the festive meal practice. The chapter focuses on Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and discusses 1Cor 11:17–26 in particular. It outlines the dominant New Testament interpretation and offers a new understanding including the observation about the emotional capital dealt with by Paul. The Hellenistic Meal Implies the Experimentation with Social Alternatives In order to understand Pauline texts about dining, New Testament scholars introduced socio-historical methods (Ekkehard W. and Wolfgang Stegemann)5 and combined them with archeological or anthropological data. Richard

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DeMaris analyzed the New Testament with ritual theories 6 and the GrecoRoman Meals group of the Society of Biblical Literature placed the Lord’s Supper within the Hellenistic meal performance.7 Hal Taussig focused on the thesis, that the beginnings of Christianity can be found within this social practice. Hence scholars examine how ritual actions operate and influence participants’ political, social, and religious collective identities. Matthias Klinghardt and Dennis Smith look at the structure of Hellenistic meals to show that the ritual, as described by Paul, matches this overall social practice.8 The overall present features of the meal allow us to conclude, with Klinghardt and D. Smith, that there were no differences between Jewish and Hellenistic-pagan meals (Klinghardt 1996, 11). This conclusion is even more reliable when one considers that, “both Jews and Christians, too, identified their groups using common terminology for associations” (Harland 2003, 212). H. Taussig identifies five clear characteristics of the Hellenistic meal: 1. The reclining of (more or less) all participants while eating and drinking together for several hours in the evening; 2. The order of a supper (deipnon) of eating, followed by an extended time (symposion) of drinking, conversation, and/or performance; 3. Marking the transition from deipnon to symposion with a ceremonial libation, almost always of wine; 4. Leadership by a “president” (symposiarch) of the meal, a sometimes contingent or disputed role. 5. A variety of marginal personages, often including servants, uninvited guests, “entertainers,” and dogs.9 Each of these points is significantly loaded with meaning and likely to be conflicted. H. Taussig describes that: […] it was not just the speeches at the meals praising the meal for its value of love and peace among its participants. Rather, the behavior of the participants itself symbolized a perfect world. This, of course, was remarkable, since meals—especially during the wine-dominated symposium—were often occasions for rowdiness and disputes (Taussig 2009: 28).

The ambivalance that comes with the symbolic overload of peace and harmony on one side and the communities reality on the other can be detected in Paul’s letters to the comminuties. Paul makes use of the fact that the meal was as much a part of religion as a part of the activity of daily life. This means that there was no difference between private and religious meals and Paul was able to make use of both paradigms for his argumentation. He

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understood the meal as part of the cultural code of antiquity, which allowed the participants to experiment with social variables so that they could put new social alternatives into practice. In 1Cor 11 we will examine how Paul is addressing the communities confusion and offers an alternative that is not only supported by the meal practice but also by his meaning-making of emotional diversity. His discussion of social alternatives raises questions about the social value of the alternatives, which are constantly backed up by his emotional reinsurance. Commonly these values are expressed through community (koinonia), equality and friendship (isonomia and philia), and grace/generosity/beauty (charis) (Taussig 2009, 26–29; Klinghardt 1996, 153– 173). Summing up: In Antiquity the Hellenistic meal was composed of several ritual actions that effected changes in status, affiliation, and social identity. The festive meals of communities were part of a highly developed cultural performance, which allowed affirmation and transformation of shared values at the same time. After looking at dominant interpretations that regard the Eucharist as the highly developed theological outcome of the Pauline intervention in 1Cor 11, we will then discuss shortly how Paul made use of the emotional understanding of the shared values of his audience. Eucharistic vs. Socio-Historical Interpretations Modern scholars commonly interpret 1Cor 11:17–26 as the central passage for the understanding of the Eucharist. They regard the Lord’s Supper as a terminus technicus for the Eucharist, which aimed to foster Christian identity as a sacrament directed to the Christians. This interpretation is continuously updated because the Lord’s Supper (kuriakon deipnon) is a Hapaxlogomenon of extraordinary significance for Christian theology and identification.10 Before studying a new approach to interpret 1Cor 11:17–26 on the basis of the Hellenistic meal and Paul’s ability to make use of the involved emotions, it is necessary to understand the dominant lines of interpretation. Hans Joachim Stein has given an excellent description of these different interpretations. He classifies them as liturgical, socio-historical, and theological studies (Stein 2008, 4). In his study, Hans Lietzmann stands paradigmatically for liturgical interpretations. In 1926, Hans Lietzmann published his study Messe und Herrenmahl (Mass and Lord’s Supper), in which he established a twotype distinction of liturgical meal practices (Lietzmann 1926). He identified an eschatological meal and a memorial meal, which developed into the sacramental Agape meal and the sacramental Eucharist in later antiquity. Lietzmann traced the sacramental Agape meal back to the Eastern liturgy of

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Serapion (Egypt, 4th century), which was rooted in a Jerusalem liturgy; he traced the sacramental Eucharist to the Western liturgy of Hippolytus (Rom, 3rd century), which in turn was rooted in the Hellenistic-Pauline tradition (Lietzmann 1926, 174–197). The two meal practices are distinguished by their understanding of the sacrament and by the liturgical function of the sayings of Jesus. Because the Agape meal was rooted in the daily meal practice of Jesus and his disciples in Jerusalem, and was clearly understood as an act of joy and friendship, the Agape meals did not relate the offering to the death of Jesus. In contrast, the Eucharistic meal stood in the post-Eastern tradition in the influence of the Hellenistic-Pauline tradition. The remembrance of the death of Jesus was central to this meal practice (Lietzmann 1926, 249–255). This means consequently that the historical Jesus did not reveal himself as “Lord” but ate with his disciples during the night he was handed over to the Romans. According to Lietzmann, it was not Jesus who gave his disciples—who were later known as the Christians—their distinct identity, but Paul, because he was the first who understood Christ’s both human and divine nature through this special meal. Lietzmann considers that eating bread and drinking wine became a sacrament only with Paul, because these were linked to the death and resurrection of Christ. In other words, for Lietzmann it is not possible to relate the Jerusalem tradition with the speaking over bread and wine of the Hellenistic-Pauline tradition (Lietzmann 1926, 253). Within the HellenisticPauline tradition, of course, only fellow Christians understood this divine power. Interestingly, at the same time the Christians went against their Jewish traditions because they were no longer participating in the daily Jerusalem meal but in their own meal, the Lord’s Supper. Very quickly, theologians like Lietzmann began to picture Jesus and Christianity participating in the Last Supper as the Eucharist on one side, as opposed to the Jews and Judaism celebrating Passover on the other. Very different from Lietzmann is Hans-Josef Klauck’s interpretation Herrenmahl und Hellenistischer Kult (The Lord’s Supper and the Hellenistic Cult) (Klauck 1982). He concludes that the early Christian meals were able to give their meal a distinct identity because they were influenced by mystery cults. It is obvious for him that the sacramental character of the Lord’s Supper was not able to emerge without the religious influence of the Pagan and Jewish mystery cults (Klauck 1982, 172). Klauck therefore pictures the pure cult which was enabled by the religious context of the New Testament but which is represented in the bread and wine as the body and blood of Jesus. In this sense Klauck focuses on the presence of the divine, which separates the common from the Christian.

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Another study, which is eager to name the development from Jewish to Christian meals, is Bruce Chiltons work A Feast of Meanings (Chilton 1994). In his socio-theological work he constructs six steps of the Eucharistic development of the meal practice: 1) Jesus’ meal practice is an anticipation of the kingdom of God; 2) Jesus’ critique of the temple was realized in a meal that functioned as a substitute for the Jewish cult; 3) the post-Eastern communities around Peter deepened the temple critical approach of the meal in Jerusalem and allowed Gentiles to participate; 4) whereas the followers of James understood the meal as a Passahmeal and did not allow Gentiles to participate; 5) Paul and the Synoptics related the meal to the salvation and to the betrayal; and 6) the Johannine community left the Jewish tradition by identifying bread and wine as blood and body of Christ, giving it supernatural meaning (Chilton 1994, 146–158). The problem with this interpretation is that it promotes an understanding of Christian origins that begins with the historical Jesus and ends with the Eucharist—all taking place within the first two centuries CE. This contradicts the understanding that neither Jesus, nor Paul, nor the Johannine community founded Christianity and neglects that neither normative Judaism nor Christianity existed in the first century CE. It is also problematic in that it fails to take the problems of anti-Semitism and Christian universalism into account. With Krister Stendahl’s work Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Stendahl 1976) New Testament scholars began to reflect upon the relationship between Judeans and Gentiles in the Mediterranean, realizing that debates about the historical Jesus have taught us that early Christianity was a diverse social movement within Judaism. Thus the ancient meanings of baptism and communal meals differ greatly from those of the later church history, which influenced our interpretation. With H. Taussig and others, I am relieved that the historical Jesus debates have taught us that early Christianity is a diverse social movement within Judaism and that the ancient meanings of baptism and communal meals differ a lot from those of the later church history. Regarding the interests of the present volume it is important to realize that the Eucharistic interpretations separate the meal practice of the communities in Antiquity from the sacrament of the church. This implies also that within the framework of the sacrament, social and emotional challenges and changes cannot be examined. The history of scholarship reveals that an interpretation is needed that values Paul as an contextualized author who makes use of shared communal experience with his communities. It is necessary to include the context of the

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texts as well as the context of the author and the community in the interpretation. The Hellenistic meal, understood as a ritual that was practiced all over the Mediterranean, is a valuable context for the utilitarian use of the text and the common experience of the author and his recipients. Emotional Variety in 1 Corinthians 11 Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is a key text for the discussion of social values within communities in Antiquity and tells us a lot about the variety of emotions present at a festive meal. Frequently discussed is 1Cor 11:17–-26 because Paul’s theological discourse about the community’s well being is based on his argumentation regarding the common meal practice. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:17–23 that when the community comes together it is not for the better but for the worse (17). Paul believes that there are divisions among them (18) and that the community does not really eat the “Lord’s supper” (20). He criticizes that each of them goes ahead with their own supper idion deipnon (21) and blames them for not eating and drinking in their homes (22). Instead of having their own supper Paul reminds them that they are participating in the “Lord’s Supper” kuriakon deipnon, that he received from the Lord. In 1 Corinthians 11:22, after Paul warns the community about their divisions and factions, he introduces the Lord Jesus as the symposiarch of the meal (Al-Suadi 2011, 176–193). In 1Cor 11 it is important to recognize that the Jesus is described as the symposiarch: he takes the bread, he gives thanks, he breaks it and he talks to the community (11:23). He deals with the wine in the same way before he talks to the community (11:25). Paul is giving the Lord Jesus some kind of control, which is better understood when we examine the emotional roller coaster that is displayed in the previous verses. 1Cor. 11: 17 Tou~to de\ paragge/llwn ou)k e0painw~ o#ti ou)k ei0j to_ krei=sson a)lla_ ei0j to_ h{sson sune/rxesqe. 1Cor. 11,17 Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse.11 Verse 11:17 begins with an outstanding comparison. “Ei0j to_ krei=sson a)lla_ ei0j to_ h{sson” is used only once in the NT and might only be paralleled with “ei0 perissote/rwj u(ma~j a)gapw~n, h{sson a)gapw~mai“ in 2Cor 12:15. Paul is using the comparison as a simplification and matches the overall linguistic practice as discussed in Blass’, Debrunner’s, and Rehkopf’s grammar of the NT Greek:

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This semantically special instance supports the impression that, since in classical Greek the superlative can also be used absolutely = ‘very …’ (the elative), and the comparative is also used with a slight elative nuance, almost the equivalent of an English positive […] so the comparative in the NT is often ambiguous.13

The ambiguity is also supported by the beginning and the end of the verse. In the beginning Paul makes clear that he is not writing the following to command the community but at the end he blames his recipients that they come together for the worse. Hence the comparative supports the ambivalent atmosphere into which Paul is leading the reader. In the sentence he states that he is not commanding them, he is blaming them for turning the gathering for the worse. 1Cor 11:18–19 carries on with the ambivalence: 1Cor. 11:18 prw~ton me\n ga_r sunerxome/nwn u(mw~n e0n e0kklhsi/a| a)kou&w sxi/smata e0n u(mi=n u(pa&rxein kai\ me/roj ti pisteu&w. 19 dei= ga_r kai\ ai9re/seij e0n u(mi=n ei]nai, i3na kai\ oi9 do&kimoi faneroi\ ge/nwntai e0n u(mi=n. 1Cor. 11:18 For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. [19] Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. Sxi/smata are very serious accusations and imply that the community is deeply disturbed. The direct connection between sunerxome/nwn u(mw~n and sxi/smata e0n u(mi=n indicate a conditional connection. Hence it is more accurate to translate: “When you come together … then there are divisions among you” (Al-Suadi 2011, 292). There is no obvious statement that clarifies where the separation originated. Whether the fractions are cause within or outside of the community is not specified. But the outcome of the fractions are clear: the community is divided and is representing the sxi/sma in itself.14 Verse 18 and 19 function on another level together, too. The terms sxi/sma and ai3resij are terms of separation in a socio-religious meaning and refer both to differences in understanding and performing of cultural meaning.15 The two verses also give the reader an understanding of Pauline argumentation. He is aware that

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the community is coming together for the worse and proves his knowledge with the hearsay about the divisions. Verse 19b corresponds to Verse 17b, 18a, and 19a because the division separates the genuine from the conflicted. 1Cor. 11:20 Sunerxome/nwn ou}n u(mw~n e0pi\ to_ au)to_ ou)k e1stin 21 e3kastoj ga_r to_ i1dion dei=pnon kuriako_n dei=pnon fagei=n: prolamba&nei e0n tw|~ fagei=n, kai\ o$j me\n peina|~ o$j de\ mequ&ei. 1Cor. 11:20 When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. [21] For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. The emotional involvement of Paul becomes very clear when the audience is confronted with Paul’s final resolution about the community. For him it is obviously impossible to associate the community with the Lord and his meal ritual. Ou)k e1stin kuriako_n dei=pnon fagei=n specifies, on one hand, Verse 17 and introduces, on the other hand, another level of personal despair. The adjective kuriako&j designates the meal not only to the Lord but differentiates the meal also from other meals the community is practicing. Idion, as one’s own, the private is named as the opposite of the Lord’s meal in verse 21. Here, “what does not belong to God” is rhetorically set against kuriako&j, which clearly expresses belonging to some kind of imperial leadership. The idion deipnon becomes the image of a devastated social constitution of the community in which members concentrate on their own needs, remaining separate from one another (Schrage 1999, 23). Instead of the idion deipnon Paul favors the practice of the “Lord’s Supper.” As an adjective lordly can describe things as well as people. It is used in an expression for regular conventions, whereas a person is associated with ruling power. Someone who has power over himself is described with the adjective lordly (kurios) as well as someone in the position of the highest military leader (Gemoll 2006, 460). Kuriakos, which is used in the term “Lord’s Supper” (kuriakon deipnon), is a form of the adjective lordly (kurios) and has the same meaning. In non-biblical contexts kuriakos is found in the decree of the prefect of Egypt Ti. Julius Alexander who finished his decree with “this is spoken by the Lord” (kuriakon logon) in 68 A.D. (Deissmann 1897, 44; Hatch 1908, 38). Other inscriptions and papyri show that kuriakon can refer to the emperor as well (Deissmann 1897, 44–45). In biblical sources kuriakon is found only in Rev 1:10 as the adjective for “the day.”16

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With regard to our question about the emotional involvement, it makes sense to emphasize kuriakon as an expression for the belonging of something to some kind of imperial leadership. In 1 Corinthians 11 it is important to note that kuriakon functions as an attribute of the meal and the people at the same time. This means that the meal and the people belong to some kind of imperial leadership and are socially responsible towards it. The social responsibility is assured through a community that is genuine, without fractions and divisions and therefore relatable to the Lord. This would not be surprising at all if Paul would not be invested in the description of a counter community. His emotional stress is building up against the community that failed to mirror the ideal of the Lord’s gathering. So far the audience understands that Paul is emotionally invested and reaches even further out into the local organization of the communities gathering. Verse 22 extends his investment to the fundamental function of the meal. 1Cor. 11:22 mh_ ga_r oi0ki/aj ou)k e1xete ei0j to_ e0sqi/ein kai\ pi/nein; h@ th~j e0kklhsi/aj tou~ qeou~ katafronei=te, kai\ kataisxu&nete tou_j mh_ e1xontaj; ti/ ei1pw u(mi=n; e0paine/sw u(ma~j; e0n tou&tw| ou)k e0painw~. 1Cor. 11:22 What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you! Verse 21 makes clear that the Lord’s meal is not meant to be associated with the hungry and the drunk. This is topped by his vision of people eating and drinking at their homes. Commonly, verse 22 is understood as a proclamation for the poor because they ought not to be humiliated by the ones who have enough to eat and to drink. This leads the scholars to the assumption that a satiable meal was held before a non-satiable meal, which is loaded with sacramental meaning. Considering that the community was assembled by people from different social backgrounds and is pictured during a religious transformation process, this interpretation seems reliable. But the sequential arrangement of meals is not necessarily true for the social practice and the social obligation towards each other is not solely defined by financial sharing. Exegetically the “sequential” interpretation values prolamba&nei in verse 11:21, in its temporal character, and highlights that the Corinthians did not share the same meal at the same time. But prolamba&nei can also be used simply to describe the taking of the meal.17 This leads consequently to the assumption that temporal

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differences were not the only reason Paul put so much effort into his argument. The answers to his questions in verse 22 are obvious. As much as the people have homes to eat and to drink as much does not anyone want to humiliate those who have nothing. The answer to the difficulties with the meal is not simply to eat and drink at home and/or to share with those who are socially unfortunate. The meal that is supposed to be for and with the Lord has to be socially reliable for the sake of the religious identity of the group. 18 Religious identification is not only conveyed by social stability. It needs a ritual, that is giving the participants emotional reassurance. In regard to the performance of the ritual this reassurance is needed for temporal, spatial, and social stability. In this sense, Paul’s acclamations of verses 17 and 22 are true: he does not commend them. But he wants them to establish an equipoise of ritual performances. What it means to be part of a communal ritual performance that is stabilizing the emotional atmosphere, and therefore allows the community to experience one another as the body of Christ, is described in the following verses: 1Cor. 11:23 0Egw_ ga_r pare/labon a)po_ tou~ kuri/ou, o$ kai\ pare/dwka u(mi=n, o#ti o( ku&rioj 0Ihsou~j e0n th|~ nukti\ h|{ paredi/deto e1laben a!rton 24 kai\ eu)xaristh&saj e1klasen kai\ ei]pen: tou~to& mou& e0stin to_ sw~ma to_ u(pe\r u(mw~n: tou~to poiei=te ei0j th_n e0mh_n a)na&mnhsin. 25 w(sau&twj kai\ to_ poth&rion meta_ to_ deipnh~sai le/gwn: tou~to to_ poth&rion h( kainh_ diaqh&kh e0sti\n e0n tw|~ e0mw|~ ai3mati: tou~to poiei=te, o(sa&kij e0a_n pi/nhte, ei0j th_n e0mh_n a)na&mnhsin. 1Cor. 11:23 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, [24] and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” [25] In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” Verses 23–25 introduce the community to a ritual performance that is verified by Paul and even more importantly by the Lord Jesus. Additionally to the authentication that is given by Paul, the verses refer to a known cultural performance. The beginning of the meal is marked by a meal prayer that functions as an opening for the whole meal practice. 19 The benediction is followed by a satiable meal for all Corinthians, which is followed by a libation (Klinghardt 1996, 287). So far Paul follows the traditional setting and repeats

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the ritual acts that are pictured as acts by Jesus. He took a loaf of bread, he gave thanks, he broke it, he took the cup and shared it. The emotional experience that is related to these actions are mentioned on another level. Paul’s discussion of the key-terms: sw~ma,  a!rtoj  and  ai[ma.  The term  sw~ma  (1Cor 11:24.27.29) and a!rtoj (1Cor 11:23.26–29) are textually interconnected and together with ai[ma (1Cor 11:25.27) they establish an emotional framework for the religious identification on the group. This succeeds mainly because the materialistic and functional description of what Jesus does is transformed metaphorically in the following verses: verse 26 explains that the actions are transmitting knowledge about the death of the Lord. 1Cor. 11:26 o(sa&kij ga_r e0a_n e0sqi/hte to_n a!rton tou~ton kai\ to_ poth&rion pi/nhte, to_n qa&naton tou~ kuri/ou katagge/llete a!xri ou{ e1lqh|. 1Cor. 11:26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Verse 27 summarizes the Pauline argumentation logically and relates it to the well being of the community that is already understood as the body and blood of the Lord. 1Cor. 11:27 3Wste o$j a@n e0sqi/h| to_n a!rton h@ pi/nh| to_ poth&rion tou~ kuri/ou a)naci/wj, e1noxoj e1stai tou~ sw&matoj kai\ tou~ ai3matoj tou~ kuri/ou. 1Cor. 11:27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Another important emotional factor is introduced by the term ai[ma.  Verse 25 and 27 illustrate that the wine and blood are not meant to be understood as the fluids that are in the cup—but as the cup itself (Al-Suadi 2011, 142 and Klinghardt 1996, 316f). Paul is ensuring therefore that the commonly shared cup and not the wine symbolically highlights the community of Christbelievers. So far, we have seen that the Pauline emphasis leads socially to an alternative, which is standing against the divisions and factions diagnosed by Paul. He makes use of a well known ritual performance and introduces another level of emotional reassurance that is leading toward a religiously identified community as the body of Christ. Although the “social grammar” is the performance of the whole group and leads to the identification of the

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group as the body of Christ, the actions of Jesus play a major role in Paul’s argumentation. We identified Jesus’ action as those of the symposiarch. Taking into consideration that the role of the symposiarch was very flexible, if not ambiguous, draws attention to the fact that Paul does not hesitate to intertwine the social performance and the emotional instability of a group that is struggling with its identity. The Symposiarch and His Very Special Duties So far we established the following grounds for further study of social and emotional affirmation and transformation of shared ritual experiences: This chapter made an attempt to demonstrate that the "Lord’s Supper" was not a terminus technicus for the Eucharist, which aimed to foster Christian identity as a sacrament and was directed to the Christians. Rather, the "Lord’s Supper" was a terminus technicus for a ritual, the Hellenistic meal, which allowed affirmation and transformation of shared values and emotions at the same time. This means that the Hellenistic meal was a dominant cultural code in Antiquity; it was well understood but varied enough to give room for diverse social, political, and religious identifications. We have seen that Paul’s writings were presented within the sociohistorical context of the Hellenistic meal and it was shown that the ritual, as described by Paul, matches the overall social practice of communal meals. In order to allow multiple understandings for the meal participants of what it meant to identifiy as the body of Christ during and after the meal, Paul counted on the fact that the meal was as much a part of religion as a part of the activity of daily life. Hence, the semi-private character of the social act allowed the participants to experiment with social variables and to put new social alternatives into practice that were not limited to the meal practice as such. The analysis so far has shown that the Hellenistic meal functioned as a social code that allowed Paul to address religious identification processes on the basis of the Hellenistic meal practice. The structure of the meal operated as a “social grammar” (Judith Lipy) of the community and stood for much more that the repletion of people. This leads this analysis to the features of the Hellenistic meal that were able to lead to social alternatives that were emotionally reassuring. It will not be possible to elaborate all features of the meal that cumulated these aspects. Hence we will look at the role of the symposiarch. For Paul the responsibilities that arise for the community when Jesus is the symposiarch were in the center of his interest. From there we can

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describe how a distinct responsibility for the emotional setting during the Hellenistic Meal was shared by the group. Sometimes the symposiarch was announced right before the meal (Taussig 2009, 79), which means that the symposiarch was not necessarily the host. His duty was to decide on the arrangement of the seats, on the mixture of water and wine (Sandnes 2002, 80), and to make decisions regarding the order of the meal. He made at least one libation and was responsible for the tone of the meal, which was always in danger of disturbance by guests who were not happy with his decisions (D.E. Smith 2003, 30), uninvited guests, and interactions between guests (Taussig 2009, 45). The responsibilities of the symposiarch show that meals were the place where social interaction was regulated, controlled, and balanced. 20 Although the symposiarch had these duties, one cannot say that his personal interest dominated the scene. It was not a matter of his personal qualifications that was central. Rather, I consider him the administrator of the ritual because he had to live up to the expectations of the group, which were the expressions of the cultural code. The symposiarch had a limited role within the meal practice because the course of the meal was defined by the common culture and was not defined by his individual leadership. The familiarity with the symposiarch allows us to discuss Paul’s rhetoric on another level. First, he chose to embed his theological and social advice to the community into the Hellenistic meal practice. Second, he secured his authority with a reference to Jesus from whom he received the knowledge about the appropriate meal behavior (1Cor 11:23).21 Third, he used the ritual performance of the symposiarch, which is debatable, and the strong indication to follow what Jesus was doing, to enable the community to take responsibility for their actions. When we examine this argumentation in regard to the emotional diversity Paul is able to address, we have a clear indication that Paul is establishing an emotional meta-discourse. On one side he is using his judgment on the community’s situation to degrade them socially and theologically and on the other he is fostering a fellowship that is built upon an emotional variety. So far we have not looked into the ritual dynamics that allow the two-faced emotional argumentation. In other word we have to examine the emotional “worlds” that Paul is describing so intensely. Social Counter Settings: Idion and kuriakon deipnon The powerful difference Paul made between a person’s own meal and the meal of the Lord (idion vs. kuriakon deipnon) is also described by the ritual analysis of

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the meal. Considering Burton Mack’s notion of the early Jesus movements as “arenas for social experimentation” (Mack 1995, 18–19), we can imagine that experimentation did not necessarily mean happy, peaceful communities who agreed harmoniously on changes to their cultural codes. Instead, I assume that experimentations are a matter of power struggles, disagreements, separation, as well as heard and unheard voices that continue until common agreements are or are not found. Catherine Bell locates power struggles in her discussion of the body’s interaction with its environment (Bell 1992, 99). To underline the cultural practice of ritual, Bell shifts from talking about “ritual” to “ritualization.” Ritualizing schemes invoke a series of privileged oppositions that, when acted in space and time through a series of movements, gestures, and sounds, effectively structure and nuance an environment. […] This environment constructed and reconstructed by the actions of social agents within it, provides an experience of the objective reality (Bell 1992, 140–141).

She assumes that the body interacts with its environment in a circular movement. The bodies then project pictures of structures into space and time and absorb, simultaneously, the order as natural order. The strategies of ritualization are particularly rooted in the body, specifically, the interaction of the social body within a symbolically constituted spatial and temporal environment. […] Ritualization is embedded within the dynamics of the body and defined within the symbolically structured environment (Bell 1992, 93).

In this way orders are transformed into instinctive automations of bodies and generate implicit strategies to change power relationships (Bell 1992, 99), meaning that “the environment appears to be the source of the schemes and their values” (Bell 1992, 140). Pierre Bourdieu already named the interdependence between space and body in 1977. He wrote: All the symbolic manipulations of body experience, starting with displacement within a mythically structured space, e.g. the movements of going in and coming out, tend to impose the integration of the body space with cosmic space by grasping in terms of the same concepts (and naturally at the price of great laxity in logic) the relationship between man and the natural world (Bourdieu 1977, 91).

Bourdieu looked at the practical operators, which function in their practical state in gesture or utterance to reproduce in a transformed form. He placed the operators into the structure of a system of symbolic relations to organize oppositions and hierarchies that actually organize social groups (Bourdieu 1977, 97).

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Indeed, it is not difficult to find the organization of social groups and the embodiment of power struggles and disagreements in 1 Corinthians 11:17–23. Paul addressed divisions and factions, hunger and drunkenness, dispraise and shame. At the height of his overwhelming anger he considers it impossible for the community to practice the Lord’s Supper, and he takes it even further by accusing them of practicing their own meal, the idion deipnon. I understand from this passage that Paul views the community’s experimentation in terms of power struggles and disagreements, which he was not fond of. Therefore, in his argument he criticizes their emphasis on experimentation and names this eating idion deipnon. Summing up: It is to be taken seriously that Paul introduced Jesus the Lord as the symposiarch in v. 23 while keeping this emotional meta-discourse in mind. So far we have seen that Paul dealt with social realities of the community, which he refers to as problematic and troublesome. By giving the ritual a name—“Lord’s Supper” kuriakon deipnon, in contrast with one’s own supper idion deipnon—Paul dealt as much with the particularity of the audience as he did with its given social reality. These observations lead to the impression that Paul expressed alternative social realities by naming Jesus the Lord as the symposiarch of the meal, which is contrasted with one’s own supper idion deipnon. He is able to do so because the ritualization of the people’s action secures emotional unstable arenas for social experimentation. Within these experimentations Paul is giving his advice to realize social alternatives. Social Alternatives As mentioned in my discussion of the features of the Hellenistic meal, the utopian character—which was also expressed by political values—was a very important aspect of the ritual. In his book, The New Testament in its Ritual World, Richard DeMaris points out that a tension between ideal and real posed problems for members of the early church existed (DeMaris 2008, 31). He refers to J.Z. Smith’s description of ritual expression as performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are (Smith 1987, 109). In J.Z. Smith’s chapter “The Bare facts of Ritual,” he also argues that ritual has the capacity to allow the presence of the ideal and the real at the same time (Smith 1982, 53–65). In that chapter, Smith describes “a Siberian ritual in which a bear cub is captured, raised by a village, and then ceremonially slaughtered” (Taussig 2009, 60). Smith describes the sacred character of the ritual as when “the ordinary (which remains to the observer’s eye, wholly ordinary) becomes significant, becomes sacred, simply by being

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there. It becomes sacred by having our attention directed to it in a special way“ (Smith 1982, 55). The distinction between the ordinary and the significant becomes much more focused, when he says: There is a ‘Gnostic’ dimension to ritual. It provides the means for demonstration that we know what ought to have been done, what ought to have taken place. […] Ritual provides an occasion for reflection and rationalization on the fact that what ought to have been done was not done, what ought to have been taken place did not occur. From such a perspective, ritual is not best understood as congruent with something else—a magical imitation of desired ends, a translation of emotions, a symbolic acting out of ideas, a dramatization of a text, or the like. Ritual gains force where incongruency is perceived and thought about (J. Z. Smith 1982, 63).

Catherine Bell summarizes J.Z. Smith as follows: Most simply, for Smith, ritual portrays the idealized way that things in the world should be organized, although participants are very aware that real life keeps threatening to collapse into chaos and meaninglessness (Bell 1997, 12).

Roy Rappaport describes this as ritual’s tendency to dignify human experience (Rappaport 1979). A very impressive example in his book Ecology, meaning, and religion is that of the kneeling worshiper. For one to kneel in prayer is not a gesture of subordination but a sign of a person who identifies him-/herself with subordination (Rappaport 1979, 200). Knowing the form of the ritual is very central for Rappaport, which he defines as, “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (Rappaport 1999, 24). Rappaport focuses a great deal on the formal structure of ritual, whereas Klinghardt characterizes the social values of ritual. Klinghardt sees the utopian character of the meal in the social value of charis, which stands for grace, generosity, and beauty (Klinghardt 1996, 163–174). Obviously these aspects are missing in Paul’s description of one’s own supper idion deipnon. While it was Klinghardt who began thinking about utopian political values, H. Taussig goes into much more depth with this idea in his recent book and concludes that: Early Christian meals, […] were often very significant acts of resistance. On numerous levels, they regularly functioned for their participants as generative of opposition to Rome and models for alternative visions and behavior. It is, nevertheless, also important to remember […] that these meals produced other important effects in the lives of their participants beyond this significant resistance to Rome (Taussig 2009, 143).

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Given that political resistance was not the only struggle Paul and the communities were fighting, it is possible to come back to the question about emotional alternatives, i.e. the resistance to social disagreements that is expressed in 1Cor 11. Paul addressed social alternatives by naming Jesus the symposiarch. On the one hand, addressed through Paul’s responsibility towards the community, we should keep in mind that Paul was not referring to the historical Jesus but to the Lord who was ritually remembered. So, when 11:23 refers to the night he was handed over, Paul was reminding the community of the ritual behavior of the Lord Jesus. In this remembrance of the communal behavior it is also said that Jesus is not the only symposiarch. Quite to the contrary from socialhistorical studies we know that the position of leadership for the next meal is to be given to somebody else. On the other hand, Paul reflects that the “Lord’s Supper” (kuriakon deipnon) was a regular activity for the community, which gave the community the chance to interact with experimental dynamics. Within the group these dynamics were regulated, controlled, and adapted to the needs of the community. In other words, there was no single leader needed. Therefore, it was the responsibility of the group to make the ritual work. On another level it is striking that the variable power dynamics of leadership were related to the Lord. Just remember that the adjective lordly (kurios) usually refers to the emperor. Naming the meal “Lord’s Supper” (kuriakon deipnon) performs social alternatives in two ways. First, Paul names the Lord Jesus, and second, gives him the position of symposiarch, which is not a type of power usually associated with imperial leadership.22 Paul is marking his social alternatives. Jesus, not the Roman Emperor, is the leader of the ritual, and further, it is the responsibility to the community to make the ritual work. The Best of It All Within the Lord’s Supper With these remarks, the exegetical work in placed in the context of sociohistorical practice and allows for several conclusions. The “Lord’s Supper” (kuriakon deipnon) became a Pauline topoi for the realization of ideal social and emotional diversity. Grace, generosity, and beauty—all expressions of charis— stand for social values that can be performed during the Hellenistic meal. Understanding the performance as part of the social code allows us to identify the social code within the texts. We can see clearly that Paul was reflecting the experimental behavior of the community and the role of the symposiarch in his letter to the Corinthians. Knowing that power struggles, disagreements,

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and separation are the voice of experimentations led to the observation that Paul described one’s own supper as the image of a devastated social constitution of the community in which members differ from each other through the satisfaction of their needs. This kind of emotional instability is disqualified in its quality but the ritual dynamic that lead to that kind of outcome is used to guide the community into a social alternative. The “Lord’s Supper” (kuriakon deipnon) in opposition to one’s own supper (idion deipnon) functions as the counter image to experimentation and the devastating side effects that Paul was describing. Comparable to charis, the “Lord’s Supper” stands for the best social values that can be reached by the community. It is remarkable how Paul established the emotional meta-discourse towards an emotionally stable community by introducing Jesus as the Lord and the symposiarch at the same time. Consequently Paul is trying to realize the best social values that he can get out of the emotional variety that is present in that community. Paul might not value that “ritual failure” does not necessarily imply theological failure, but at least in his first letter to the Corinthians he argues for an emotional metadiscourse that is not of utopian imagination but of communal experience. Notes 1 2

3

An earlier version of this chapter was given at the interdisciplinary conference on Judaism and Emotion in Berne, Switzerland. I would like to thank René Bloch, Sarah Ross, Gabriel Levy and the colleagues attending the conference for their interest and recommendations. Except for verbs of emotion, the New Testament makes use of w} expressing emotions, either of a lesser or greater degree. There is stronger emotion in Matt. 15: 28 to&te a)pokriqei\j o( 0Ihsou~j ei]pen au)th|~: w} gu&nai, mega&lh sou h( pi/stij: genhqh&tw soi w(j qe/leij. kai\ i0a&qh h( quga&thr au)th~j a)po_ th~j w#raj e0kei/nhj which announces an immediate reward; in 1 Tim 6:20 introducing a strict command; in Acts 13:10 preceding the announcement of divine punishment. The last three instances, especially Acts 13:10, are closely related to expressing very strong emotion in exclamations (usually written w}) (Friedrich Blass, Albert Debrunner, and Friedrich Rehkopf, Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Griechisch, 18. Aufl. ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), §146). The pres. inf. of du&namai is also used throughout the NT to support the expressions of strong emotions; Mt 6:24, Lk 16:13, Mt 9:15; 19:12, Mk 2:7, 19; 4,33. It is also expressed with strong emotion in rejection of what is heard (Joh 6:60; Lk 11:7, Acts 4:20, Mt 12:34, Mk 3:23; cp. J 6:52; Lk 6:42 (BDAG: du&namai). For a more detailed description, see my dissertation on meals and early Christian identity in Paul: Soham Al-Suadi, Essen als Christusgläubige—Ritualtheoretische Exegese paulinischer Texte, TANZ. Vol. 55, (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2011). Some thoughts in this article rely on previously discussed topics of my dissertation: “Eucharistic vs. Sociohistorical Interpretations” refers to pp. 22–32; “Emotional variety in 1 Corinthians 11” refers to pp. 291–308; “The Symposiarch and his very special duties” refers to pp. 184–85;

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4

5

6

7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15

•D I N I N G S O C I A L A L T E R N A T I V E S • “Social counter settings: idion and kuriakon deipnon” and “Social alternatives” refer to pp. 49–59. Hal Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis: MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 2 defines the widespread character of the meal as follows: “The festive meals of the Hellenistic Mediterranean were almost everywhere. The wealthy, the poor, the elite, the merchants, and the laborers all had some occasion to recline for festive meals. Indeed, in this period after classical Greece’s cultural dominance, these festive meals had spread into societal locations that included a wide range of people not part of the former classical versions. Although not always the norm, both slaves and women now often participated, sometimes even reclining.” Ekkehard W. Stegemann, “Das Abendmahl im Kontext antiker Mahlzeiten,” ZMiss 16/3(1990); Ekkehard W. Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, Urchristliche Sozialgeschichte: Die Anfänge im Judentum und die Christusgemeinden in der mediterranen Welt, 2., durchgesehene und ergänzte Aufl. ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1997); Ekkehard W. Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus movement : a social history of its first century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); Wolfgang Stegemann, Jesus und seine Zeit, vol. 10, BE (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009) elaborate the use of sociohistorical methods for New Testament exegesis and the international historical Jesus debate as well as for Pauline studies. Richard E. DeMaris, The New Testament in its ritual world (London: Routledge, 2008) gives an overview about the importance of ritual studies for New Testament scholars and shows how ritual entry- and exit rites gained importance for early Christian groups. Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity describes a multiple development of ritual performance that allowed communities to experiment and share communal values and begin to identify themselves a Christ-believers. Matthias Klinghardt, Gemeinschaftsmahl und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie frühchristlicher Mahlfeiern, vol. 13, TANZ (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1996) his latest article: Matthias Klinghardt, "Gemeindeleib und Mahlritual," ZNT 27, no. 14 (2011) and Dennis Edwin Smith, From symposium to Eucharist: The banquet in the early Christian world (Minneapolis: MN: Fortress Press, 2003). Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity, 26. Taussig considers dogs as part of marginal personage because they played an important role in cleaning the bread that was used as eating devices by the participants. In the late 19th century the German scholar Alfred Jülicher thought that it was Paul who created this astonishing Hapaxlegomenon (Adolf Jülicher, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, 1. u. 2. Aufl. ed., vol. Einleitung in das Neue Testament (Freiburg i. Br. [u. a.]1894), 31). This was certainly not the case but the emphasis put on the kuriakon deipnon shows the significance for Christian scholarship. If not said otherwise, translation follows NRSV. Blass, Debrunner, and Rehkopf, Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Griechisch, §60(1). Ibid., §244. The classical meaning of sxi/sma is a condition resulting from splitting or tearing or of being divided because of conflicting aims or objectives (BDAG, sxi/sma). Al-Suadi, Essen als Christusgläubige—Ritualtheoretische Exegese paulinischer Texte, 293: “Gerade im 1Kor 11,11f bezieht Paulus die Gefährdung der Gemeinschaft auf den Leib Christi, so dass nur in der Überwindung der sozialen und kultischen Spannungen der Einzelne in den Leib Christi eingebettet sein kann.” It is not advisable to relate ai3resij to

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16 17 18 19

20

21

22

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cultic differences and sxi/sma to social disagreements only. The terms are interrelated and refer to the community’s condition that is dysfunctional on many levels. This concurrence supports scholars to the assume that the “Lord’s Supper” had taken place on the first Christian “Sunday”—the “Lord’s Day”—on which Christians hold the Eucharist. Therefore Klinghardt, Gemeinschaftsmahl und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie frühchristlicher Mahlfeiern, 288 is strictly against the “sequential” interpretation. Al-Suadi, Essen als Christusgläubige - Ritualtheoretische Exegese paulinischer Texte, 294: “Als (be)herrschendes, starkes und entscheidendes Mahl hat es die Fähigkeit, die Gegebenheiten in der Gemeinschaft der Glaubenden in Korinth zu verändern.“ Klinghardt, Gemeinschaftsmahl und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie frühchristlicher Mahlfeiern, 286: This bendiction is also known on Jewish meals (e.g.: Vita Cont 80; 1QS VI 4f) Karl Olav Sandnes, Belly and body in the Pauline Epistles, MSSNTS (Cambridge: UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 80; Sandnes refers to Ezio Pellizer, who describes the balancing duties of the symposiarch as necessary because the symposium is “a disciplined display of individual and collective passions, in search of a norm to regulate the epithymiae and social tensions at the same time as it offers them an outlet” E. Pellizer, “Outlines of a Morphlogy of Sympotic Entertainment,” in Sympotica : a symposium on the “Symposion,” ed. Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 183; cf. pp. 178–9. paralamba&nw is usually also used, when it’s explained that one person is receiving from another; esp. of persons succeeding to an office, etc. H. G. Liddell et al., A Greek-English lexicon (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1996). Other than that “the meal’s pivotal use of early Christian hymns to Jesus as anointed Savior and Lord, especially during the meal libation where one was supposed to salute the emperor, must have been seen from the outside as provocative of Roman ire.” Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity, 125.

Bibliography Al-Suadi, Soham. 2011. Essen Als Christusgläubige—Ritualtheoretische Exegese Paulinischer Texte. TANZ. Vol. 55, Tübingen: Francke Verlag. Bell, Catherine M. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York [u. a.]: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York [u. a.]: Oxford University Press. Blass, Friedrich, Albert Debrunner, and Friedrich Rehkopf. 2001. Grammatik Des Neutestamentlichen Griechisch. 18. Aufl. ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16. Cambridge [u. a.]: Cambridge University Press. Chilton, Bruce. 1994. A Feast of Meanings. Eucharistic Theologies from Jesus through Johannine Circles. Nt.S. Leiden [u. a.]: Brill. Deissmann, G. Adolf.1897. Neue Bibelstudien [in ger]. Marburg: Elwert. DeMaris, Richard E. 2008. The New Testament in Its Ritual World. London: Routledge. Gemoll, Wilhelm. 2006. Griechisch-Deutsches Schul- und Handwörterbuch [in grc ger]. 10. Aufl. ed. München: Oldenbourg [u.a.]. Harland, Phillip. 2003. Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society. Minneapolis: MN: Fortress Press. Hatch, William. 1908. “Some Illustrations of New Testament Usage from Greek Inscriptions of Asia Minor.” JBL 27/2: 134–46.

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Jülicher, Adolf. 1894. Einleitung in Das Neue Testament [in ger]. 1. u. 2. Aufl. ed. Vol. Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Freiburg i. Br. [u. a.]. Klauck, Hans-Josef. 1982. Herrenmahl und Hellenistischer Kult. Nta. Münster: Aschendorff. Klinghardt, Matthias. 2011. “Gemeindeleib Und Mahlritual.” ZNT 27, no. 14: 51–56. ———. 1996. Gemeinschaftsmahl Und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie Und Liturgie Frühchristlicher Mahlfeiern. TANZ. Vol. 13, Tübingen: Francke Verlag. Liddell, H. G., R. Scott, H. S. Jones, and R. McKenzie. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press. Lietzmann, Hans. 1926. Messe und Herrenmahl. Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Liturgie. Bonn: A. Marcus and E. Weber. Luomanen, P. 2007. Explaining Christian origins and early Judaism: contributions from cognitive and social science. Leiden: Brill. Mack, Burton L. 1995. Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. McIntosh, Daniel N. 2008. “Art.: Emotionen. ” In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Rgg4), edited by Hans Dieter Betz. 1258–59: Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Pellizer, E. 1990. “Outlines of a Morphlogy of Sympotic Entertainment.” In Sympotica: A Symposium on the “Symposion”, edited by Oswyn Murray. 177–84. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rappaport, Roy A. 1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. ———. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press. Sandnes, Karl Olav. 2002. Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles. Mssnts. Cambridge: UK: Cambridge University Press. Schrage, Wolfgang. 1999. Der Erste Brief an Die Korinther: 1kor 11,17–14,40. Ekk. Zürich [u. a.]: Benziger. Smith, Dennis Edwin. 2003. From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World. Minneapolis: MN: Fortress Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— 1987. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism. Chicago; London: The Univ. of Chicago Press. Stegemann, Ekkehard W. 1990. “Das Abendmahl Im Kontext Antiker Mahlzeiten. ” ZMiss 16/3: 133–39. Stegemann, Ekkehard W., and Wolfgang Stegemann. 1997. Urchristliche Sozialgeschichte: Die Anfänge Im Judentum Und Die Christusgemeinden in Der Mediterranen Welt. 2., durchgesehene und ergänzte Aufl. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ———. 1999. The Jesus Movement : A Social History of Its First Century. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Stegemann, Wolfgang. 2009. Jesus Und Seine Zeit. Be. Vol. 10, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Stein, Hans Joachim. 2008. Frühchristliche Mahlfeiern. Ihre Gestalt und Bedeutung Nach der Neutestamentlichen Briefliteratur und der Johannesoffenbarung. Tübingen: Mohu Siebeck. Stendahl, Krister. 1976. Paul among Jews and Gentiles : And Other Essays. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Taussig, Hal. 2009. In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

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Matters of the Heart: The Metamorphosis of the Monolithic in the Bible to the Fragmented in Rabbinic Thought

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n this chapter1 I discuss the concept of heart (lev ‫ )לב‬in rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism inherited the perception of the heart as the emotionaland mental center of the human-being from biblical Judaism, but the concept was significantly transformed. My aim is to understand better the perception of the body and the place of emotions in it according to talmudic culture. It is well-known that rabbinic culture constituted a phase in Judaism that was identical neither with biblical nor with medieval Jewish thought. However, the concepts and beliefs of the rabbis are very often understood as borrowed from the Bible, or anachronistically explained in light of medieval ideas. My object here is to read elements in rabbinic literature (in this case “the heart”) as they are reflected independently in this culture. 2 Methodologically, I will do this by showing that the rabbis read the body as a text, 3 comprised of various biblical verses, interpreting its components as words and phrases, full of symbolic meaning. My conclusions will show the kind of cultural transformation that this reading reflects. The Concept of Heart By reading ancient texts and interpreting their constituent parts, a contemporary reader of talmudic literature can come to understand bodyoriented argumentation in talmudic culture. When the rabbis discussed “matters of the heart” in general they had in mind a holistic process of discovering self-knowledge. However, before this can be demonstrated, it would be prudent to ask simply: how was the heart conceived in rabbinic literature? Firstly, we should not assume that our modern conception of what the heart is can help us decipher the cultural lexicon of the people of the Bible and Talmud.

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Long before medical science discovered the physiological importance of the physical heart, the ancient Israelites had been talking of the heart as the center of our whole being, the seat not only of emotions (as it remains to this day in popular and poetic usage), but also of intellect, thought, and will. 4 True, once people learned about the contents of their skulls, they transferred all these aspects to the head and consequently we encounter the “head-heart” dichotomy represented by feeling versus reason. For the biblical Hebrews this tension was non-existent though, since they understood both feeling and reason as originating in the same place—the heart.5 Thus it seems correct to say that ancient Hebrew writers used the term ‫“ לב‬heart” primarily in a metaphorical sense, and they certainly had no conception of its physiological importance. In contrast to the Biblical authors, the rabbis were acquainted with certain notions regarding the anatomical structure of the heart, but the symbolic meaning it continued to maintain demonstrates a rather weak connection to bodily anatomy.6 Nevertheless, perhaps because of this new information, the rabbis ideas about how emotions and the intellect were distributed in the body and how the body was divided between different functions on the symbolic level were revised. In the “rabbinic body,” instead of the existence of a single center at which all the important functions are concentrated, different areas of the human body are now responsible for different mental functions. It is perhaps for this reason that an all-inclusive, coherent anthropological doctrine does not arise in rabbinic culture.7 What is left in the literature are several attempts to arrange new locations for wisdom, will, and feelings within the familiar framework of the human body. Greek thinkers probably influenced this development. Aside from some Stoics, Greeks did not view the heart as the seat of intellect or even as the centre of spiritual life. Instead they speak of nous—the mind or the intellect. Whatever the influence of this Hellenistic idea on the Jews was, in the Talmudic period the heart was gradually separated from the intellect. At the same time, it received a new inhabitant—perhaps isomorphic to emotions, but not identical to them—the ‫ יצר‬yezer, which can be understood as an instinct or inclination. 8 Let me first discuss the gradual infiltration into rabbinic literature of the notion that the intellect is housed in the brain and not in the heart. Then, I will describe the transformation of the Bible’s heart from an autonomous being into the arena of combating inclinations.

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Wisdom in the Heart Let us quickly describe the migration of intellect (interchangeable with knowledge and wisdom in the rabbis’ mind) in the human body from its original biblical abode in the heart to other locations, in terms of a few fragments from the classical works of rabbinic literature. I begin with a text that still retains a view similar to the one evident in the Bible. Bereshit Rabba 46:29 R. Ishmael and R. Akiba. R. Ishmael said: Abraham was a High Priest, as it says: “The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent: You are a priest forever, a rightful king (Melchizedek) by My decree” (Ps. 110:4). Again, it is said: “And you shall circumcise the flesh of your ‘orlah” (Gen. 17:11). If he circumcised himself at the ear, he would be unfit to offer sacrifices; if at the mouth, he would be unfit to offer; at the heart, he would be unfit to offer. Hence, where could he perform circumcision and yet be fit to offer? Nowhere else than at the ‘orlah of the body [the foreskin]. R. Akiba said: There are four kinds of ‘orlah. Thus, ‘orlah is used in connection with the ear, as it stated: “Behold, their ear is ‘orlah (blocked)” (Jer. 6:10); the mouth. “Behold, I am ‘arel (lit.: ‘uncircumcised, impeded speech] of lips” (Ex. 6:30); the heart: “For all the house of Israel are ‘arle [‘uncircumcised’] in the heart” (Jer. 9:25). Now, he was ordered: “Walk before Me, and be blameless” (Gen. 17:1). If he circumcised himself in the ear, he would not be blameless; in the mouth, he would not be blameless; in

‫ר' ישמעאל ור' עקיבה‬ ‫ר' ישמעאל א' אברהם כהן גדול היה‬ ‫שנ' נשבע י"י ולא ינחם אתה כהן‬ (‫ ד‬,‫לעולם על דברתי מלכי צדק )תהלים קי‬ ‫ונאמ' להלן ונמלתם את בשר ערלתכם‬ ,(‫ יא‬,‫)בראשית יז‬ ,‫אם ימול מן האוזן אינו כשר להקריב‬ ,‫מן הפה אינו כשר להקריב‬ ,‫מן הלב אינו כשר להקריב‬ ‫ הוי‬,‫מאיכן ]ימול ויהא[ כשר להקריב‬ ,‫אומר זו ערלת הגוף‬

‫ר' עקיבה אמר ארבע ערלות הן‬ ‫נאמ' ערלה באוזן שנאמ' הנה ערלה‬ (‫ י‬,‫אזנם )ירמיה ו‬ ‫ונאמ' ערלה בפה הן אני ערל שפתים‬ (‫ ל‬,‫)שמות ו‬ ‫ונאמ' ערלה בלב וכל בית ישראל‬ (‫ כה‬,‫ערלי לב )ירמיה ט‬ ‫ונאמ' לו התהלך לפני והיה תמים ]אם‬ ,‫ימול מן האוזן אינו תמים‬ ,‫מן הפה אינו תמים‬ ,‫מן הלב אינו תמים‬ ‫מאיכן ימול ויהא תמים[ הוי אומר זו‬ ,‫ערלת הגוף‬ ‫]נקדה אמר[ ובן שמנת ימים ימול‬

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the heart, he would not be blameless. Where could he circumcise himself and yet be blameless? Nowhere else than at the ‘orlah of the body. Nakdah said: It is written, “And throughout the generations, every male among you shall be circumcised” (Gen. 17:12). Now if he is circumcised in the ear, he cannot hear; in the mouth, he cannot speak; in the heart, he cannot think. Where then could he be circumcised, and yet be able to think? Only at the ‘orlah of the body.

(‫ יב‬,‫לכם כל זכר )בראשית יז‬ ,‫אם ימול מן האוזן אינו שומע‬ ,‫מן הפה אינו מדבר‬ ,‫מן הלב אינו חושב‬ ,‫מאיכן ימול ויהיה יכול לחשוב‬ .‫זו ערלת הגוף‬

The classical 5th century rabbinic midrash Bereshit Rabba, which presents a running commentary on the Book of Genesis, and is considered the oldest aggadic midrash compilation, tells us a short story concerning the election of Abraham and the reception of the commandment of circumcision, whose purpose is to make him perfect—tamim, by the elimination of an unnecessary part—the orla, or foreskin.10 Because Lev 19:23 speaks of orlat levavhem, literally “the foreskin of your heart,” Abraham is perplexed as to whether he should find the unnecessary skin that he is instructed to remove around his heart. He rejects this possibility, however, believing that this operation will damage his ability to think. We can, therefore, see that in this text a person’s intellectual abilities still reside in the heart. In light of this passage and others like it, it is difficult to know how, why, and when the head became the dwelling place of thought [or reason] in rabbinic anthropology. An example of a conflicting conceptions of the location of intellect can be observed in a contemporary document, the Palestinian Talmud, where we find Rabbi Judah the Patriarch’s utterance regarding Levi Bar Sissy, “‫“( ”ניכר אותו האיש שאין לו מוח בקדקדו‬It is noticeable that this man has no brain in his upper skull”) (Yevamot 1,1 2c). This text refers to this student’s limited intellectual ability. This text shows that this rabbi clearly believed that his lack of intellectual ability was somehow tied to the student’s lack of brains in his head. As noted above, the idea that the seat of the intellect is in the head is Greek. Yet controversy about this concept is also recorded in Hellenistic culture. Aristotle placed intellect in the heart, while Plato placed it in the head.11 Therefore it is quite surprising to find the following parallel dispute in a late rabbinic text:

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Midrash Mishlei 1:112 Another matter: “But wisdom, where shall it be found? And where is the place of understanding?” ( Job 28:12) This teaches that Solomon searched for the seat of wisdom. Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Eliezer says: In the head. Rabbi Yehoshua says: In the heart, as it is written “Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than when their corn and their wine increase.” (Ps 4:8)

‫ד"א והחכמה מאין תמצא )איוב‬ (‫ יב‬,‫כח‬ ‫מלמד שהיה שלמה מחפש היכן‬ ,‫החכמה מצויה‬ ‫ר' אליעזר ור' יהושע‬ ,‫ר' אליעזר אומר בראש‬ ‫ הה"ד נתתה‬,‫ר' יהושע אומר בלב‬ (‫ ח‬,‫שמחה בלבי )תהלים ד‬

Midrash Mishlei is relatively late, and although it represents rabbinic culture, was probably only finally edited in the early Middle Ages. 13 Nevertheless, it allegedly contains an authentic tradition in which R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua, two tannaim of the 1st century discuss the question of the dwelling place of wisdom. The sages propose different organs, one placing it in the head, and the other in the heart. The opinion that wisdom is in the head, brought in the name of Rabbi Eliezer, is not authorized in Scripture, and as I argued above, really has no biblical prooftext. Rabbi Yehoshua says that wisdom is in the heart. I find it ironic that from the many verses on the basis of which this can be argued, he chooses one from Psalms which deals not with intellect but with joy dwelling in the heart. Can we be sure that wisdom now resides to the head? Maybe only according to R. Eliezer; but the fact that the question is even asked, shows that we are in the new intellectual atmosphere quite different from the biblical world in which perceptions of the significant areas in human body are different. Another midrash, also dealing with Abraham’s intellectual abilities, teaches us about another possible location for wisdom: Bereshit Rabba 61:1 (657–658)14 R. Simeon b. Yohai said: [Abraham’s] ‫אמר ר' שמעון בן יוחי אב לא‬ father did not teach him, nor did he have ‫ מאיכן למד את‬,‫למדו רב לא היה לו‬ a teacher. Whence then did he learn the ‫ אלא זימן לו הקב"ה שתי‬,‫התורה‬ ‫כליותיו כשני רבנן והיו נובעות‬ Torah? Thus the Holy One, blessed be He,

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made his two kidneys serve like two ‫ומלמדות לו חכמה הה"ד אברך את י"י‬ teachers for him, and these welled forth ‫אשר יעצני אף לילות יסרוני כיליותיי‬ (‫)תהלים טז ז‬ and taught him wisdom; thus it is written: “I bless the Lord, who has guided me; yea, in the night seasons my reins ([kidneys], kelayot) instruct me” (Ps 16:7). Let me clarify this passage; the plain meaning of the verse is not “my kidneys instruct me,” but “my innermost being exhorts me,” or as it is translated in the modern Jewish Publication Society translation “my conscience admonishes me at night,” because kelayot in Biblical Hebrew is the name for the innermost impulses of the soul (see for example Psalm 73:21).15 So where is the residence of the intellect according to the Rabbis? Were there alternative explanations about the dwelling place of the intellect, or did they, as in the case of the soul,16 think that the whole body is full of it and in these locations is a maximal concentration found? The answer is uncertain. In any case, it is clear that in rabbinic texts the heart was no longer the sole center of the regulatory functions of the human body and was left to acquired new roles such as the location of the inclinations, as will be presently argued. Emotion in the Heart This section discusses the transition in the notion of heart from the biblical concentric heart to the rabbinic residence of the yetzer. The locus classicus for demonstrating the heart’s changing features is the midrash on the most celebrated passage from the Shema prayer (Deut. 6:5). Let us consider the words— ‫( בכל לבבך‬be-khol levaveha)—“with all your heart.” The use of ‫( כל‬khol) in connection with ‫( לב‬lev) in the Bible reveals that there are peripheries distant from the heart’s center and effort is required to control them. If the biblical lev does not symbolize a particular part—physical or spiritual—of the person, but rather functions as a representation of the entire human being, the explanation of weakness of the will stems from the inability to unite one’s heart in proper worship. It seems logical to assume that the phrase “all your heart” implies that something can be done with a part of one’s heart. This means that not all aspects of the human heart are always consolidated in a single impulse. This may be because the heart is beyond the control of a person, or because the heart itself has a certain element of autonomy. As we will see below, in rabbinic literature the various parts of the human being tend to be autonomous and the heart becomes even more autonomous.

•M A T T E R S O F T H E H E A R T • Abot de-Rabbi Natan B 1617 Do not associate with the wicked. This refers to the evil inclination, which sits at the opening of the heart. When a man wants to transgress, the evil inclination bends all the man’s organs, over which it rules (lit. “it is king”), as Scripture says: “The profit of the earth is in all things: a king makes himself servant to the field” (Qoh 5:8)

49

‫אל תתחבר לרשע זה יצר הרע שהוא‬ ‫ כשהוא מבקש לעשות‬.‫יושב על פתחו של לב‬ ‫עבירה הוא כופף את כל האיברים שהוא מלך‬ ‫עליהם שנאמר ויתרון ארץ בכל היא מלך‬ .('‫לשדה נעבד )קהלת ה' ח‬

While in the biblical perception, the heart was as a principal of all the body parts, we can see that from a rabbinic perspective, not the heart, but its occupant (yetzer) is the real king of the body. The nature of this occupation is very visible in the following text BT Berakhot 61a

Rav said: The evil inclination resembles a fly and dwells between the two entrances of the heart, as it is written: “Dead flies make the ointment of the perfumers fetid and putrid” (Qoh 10:1). Samuel said: It is like a kind of wheat [hittah], as it says: “Sin [hattath] lies at the door” (Gen 4:7).

‫ ויושב‬,‫ יצר הרע דומה לזבוב‬:‫אמר רב‬ (‫ א‬,‫ שנאמר )קהלת י‬,‫בין שני מפתחי הלב‬ ‫ ושמואל‬.‫זבובי מות יבאיש יביע שמן רוקח‬ ‫ שנאמר לפתח‬,‫ כמין חטה הוא דומה‬:‫אמר‬ .(‫ ז‬,‫חטאת רבץ )בראשית ד‬

Thus, the entrance to the heart is the domain of the yetzer, which, according to other rabbinic traditions, is very small, but nevertheless quite potent, and is similar to a grain of wheat (as in a midrashic word play on hatathita sin/wheat). The presence of evil in the heart includes in it a memento mori— zvuvei mavet (“dead flies” or “flies of death”)—in other words, messengers of Death are ready to do their duty. The rabbis follow the perception of heart as an independent center of the human being in the Bible, transforming it at the same time to an arena for the encounter between good and evil, and developing it further. Now the heart is home to both good and evil inclinations, namely good and evil in their substantive and personal representations. This development is based on the interpretation of the following biblical verse:18

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And the Lord saw that the ‫וַיַּרְא ה כִּי ַרבָּה ָרעַת הָאָדָם בָּאָרֶץ וְכָל‬ ‫ְשׁבֹת לִבּוֹ רַק רַע כָּל הַיּוֹם‬ ְ ‫יֵצֶר ַמח‬ wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination (yetzer) of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Gen. 6:5) The word yetzer in this verse is seemingly lost in translation, for literally in biblical Hebrew it means no more than something shaped or made and is here translated as “imagination”. However in rabbinic thought this word received a new meaning: thought, impulse, and tendency and it became personified. Therefore the concept of yetzer as inclination is a rabbinic neologism which deserves a separate discussion. I will confine myself here only to the following observation(s). The theory that a person only has an evil inclination from birth and does not acquire a good one before the age of thirteen when he becomes an adult according to Jewish law, after he acquires wisdom, is first mentioned in rabbinic literature in the late amoraic midrash Koheleth Rabba 4:13 (6th-7th century). Interestingly, though, according to the 4th century church father Jerome this idea was already known to Rabbi Akiba, who lived in 2nd century.19 All Your Heart As I showed above, a biblical idea about the multiple functions of the heart, coupled with the unusual spelling of the word ‫ לבב‬levav in the biblical verse Deut 6:5 intrigued the rabbis and gave rise to an explicit exegetical tradition. This in turn inspired the tannaitic doctrine on the nature of evil as represented in yetzer, as the Mishnah claims: Mishnah Berakhot 9:5 “And you shall love the Lord ‫"ואהבת את ה' אלהיך בכל לבבך ובכל‬ ".‫נפשך ובכל מאדך‬ your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might,” (Deu ‫ ביצר טוב‬- '‫'בכל לבבך בשני יצריך‬ ,‫וביצר רע‬ 6:5) “with all your heart”—this means with both your inclinations, with the good inclination and with the evil inclination.”

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The double bet in the word levav in the Bible provokes the interpretation of the presence of two warring inclinations in the heart. A person’s religious obligation is to unite the entire heart in the supreme service of the divine. It thus becomes one’s further task to integrate and consolidate the traditional opponents, after a “peace treaty” between them has been negotiated, presumably when one of them (the evil one) had capitulated and surrendered to the mercy of the other.20 Hence we are led to acknowledge the human duty to practice self-control, that is, to assume control over an autonomous part of oneself, meaning the heart, which is the scene of constant conflict between the two inclinations. This idea is further developed in the following text: Bereshit Rabba 34:1021 “And the Lord said to his heart” (Gen 6, 6) “The wicked stand in subjection of his heart” (Ps 14:1) “And Esau said in his heart” (Gen 27:41) “And Yeroboam said in his heart” (1Kings 12:25) “Now Haman said in his heart” (Est 6:6) But the righteous have their hearts under their control—hence it is written: “Now Hannah she spoke to her heart” (1 Sam 1:13), “And David said to his heart” (ibid 27:1 ) “Daniel purposed to his heart” (Dan 1:8) “And the Lord said to his heart”!

(‫ ו‬,‫ויאמר י"י אל לבו ) בראשית ו‬ ‫הרשעים הן ברשות לבן‬ (‫ א‬,‫"אמר נבל בלבו" )תהלים יד‬ ,‫"ויאמר עשו בלבו" )בראשית כז‬ (‫מא‬ '‫"ויאמר ירבעם בלבו" )מלכים א‬ (‫ כו‬,‫יב‬ (‫ ו‬,‫"ויאמר המן בלבו" )אסתר ו‬ ‫אבל הצדיקים ליבן ברשותן‬ "‫"וחנה היא מדברת על לבה‬ (‫ יג‬,‫)שמואל א' א‬ '‫"ויאמר דוד אל לבו" )שמואל א‬ (‫ א‬,‫כז‬ ,‫"וישם דניאל על לבו" )דניאל א‬ (‫ח‬ ."‫"ויאמר י"י אל לבו‬

This midrash juxtaposes a group of biblical righteous persons, with God at the head of them, to biblical villains. The use of the biblical word “heart” in these verses shows a common biblical idiom of presenting reflection, but according to the interpreter it points to the fact that the righteous can control their hearts, while the villains are at its mercy. Here the heart is assimilated to an arena in which the desires are struggling and a person, who is a permanent witness of the combat between the two inclinations, can boost his initially weak, good inclination, and ensure its victory.

52

•R E U V E N K I P E R W A S S E R • Heart as Separate Entity

Thus we see how the heart plays a role as the territory in which a permanent battle between its inhabitants takes place, as long as the person whose heart it is does not intervene in the proceedings. Some may be surprised then that even God is presented in this talmudic theology as, on some level, not in control of his own will: the divine heart has a certain degree of independence from God. There is a permanent collision between God and his heart; in order to resolve it God negotiates with his heart. Let us explore this idea in a well-known parable from the Bereshit Rabba: Bereshit Rabba 27:423 (‫ ו‬,‫ויתעצב אל לבו )בראשית ו‬

Bereshit Rabba 8:322 ‫ויאמר אלהים נעשה אדם וגו' )בראשית‬ (‫ כו‬,‫א‬ ?‫במי נמלך‬ ... ‫אמר ר' ברכיה למלך שבנה פלטין על ידי‬ ,‫ משל למלך ארדיכל ראה אותה ולא ערבה לו‬,‫ר' אמי אמר בליבו נמלך‬ ‫שבנה פלטין על ידי ארדכל ראה אותה ולא‬ ‫על מי לו להתרעם לא על ארדיכל‬ ‫ על מי להתרעם לא על ארדכל‬,‫ערבה לו‬ .‫ויתעצב אל לבו‬ ,(‫ ו‬,‫אתמהא כך ויתעצב אל לבו )בראשית ו‬ ‫אמר רב יאסי משל למלך שעשה לו‬ ‫סחורה על ידי סרסור והפסיד על מי להתרעם‬ ‫לא על הסרסור אתמהא כך ויתעצב אל לבו‬ “And He was grieved at His heart” (Gen 6:6) R. Berekiah said: If a king has a palace built by an architect and when he sees it, it displeases him, against who is he to complain? Surely against the architect. Similarly, “And He was grieved at His heart,” (Gen 6:6).

“And God said: Let us make man etc. With whom did He take counsel?” R. Ammi said: He took counsel with His own heart. It may be compared to a king who had a palace built by an architect, but when he saw it, it did not please him: with whom is he to be indignant? Surely with the architect! Similarly, “And He was grieved at His heart (Gen. 6:6). R. Jassi said: This may be compared to a king who did some business through an agent and suffered loss. With whom is he to be indignant? Surely with the agent! Similarly, “And it grieved Him at His heart” (Gen 6:6).

•M A T T E R S O F T H E H E A R T •

53

The collision between the king and his unsuccessful servant who is unable to please the ruler is evident in the plot of these parables. But what is the projection of this collision on the intended meaning of the parable? Obviously that the king in these parables is similar to God and his unsuccessful helper is his heart. One may argue that due to the requirements of the parable plot, and due to the human characters acting in it, the appearance of the servants’ role became necessary and actually it is not about the autonomy of the God’s heart from God himself that is under discussion.24 But the scholars provide a more consistent proposition; they suggest here a kind of theological approach, which differentiates between God and his heart. They see in this passage a concept of “heart” that is very similar to the “divine logos,”25 as suggested by Menahem Kister 2006: The solution “He consulted with His own heart” in Genesis Rabbah the plural form is explained by some sort of distinction between God and His “heart,” comparable to the distinction between the king and his architect or agent. To be sure, God’s “heart” is an indivisible part of God himself. If we wish to put this notion in more abstract terms, we may say that the “heart” [= wisdom] is similar to the Logos, an emanation or hypostasis of God with which He took counsel before He created the world and Adam.26

What is important for my purposes from the analyses of these parables is that the heart and its owner are independent from each other to some extent. It is possible to understand the gap between them in terms of the difference between master and servant. The servant should be obedient, but can also be rebellious and prone to making his own decisions. It is possible that after the heart had become an arena of confrontation between two inclinations, and the outcome of the fight was accorded such importance, it was perceived as external to the person, and authority over it was seen as different from the control of other organs. Interestingly, a similar conception regarding the heart, as a separate unit, was developed in Syriac Christianity, in which aside from the biblical concept of the heart ancient perceptions of the body deriving from Aramaic-speaking peoples have also had their influence. They developed the concept of heart as separate unit that should be kept pure by the pious behavior of believers, because only in this part of the body that the unification between Divine and human is possible.27 When it becomes the abode of the two yetzarim, the heart developed an even greater independence, becoming a representation of the human

54

•R E U V E N K I P E R W A S S E R •

personality at its most basic and rebellious level, as is evident from the following citation: BT Eruvin 52b R. Yohanan said:, R Oshaya b’Ribi had twelve students and I trained eighteen days among them, and I learned the heart of each and every one and the wisdom of each and every one. He learned the heart of each and every one and the wisdom of each and every one, but he did not learn gemara [received tradition].

‫ שנים עשר תלמידים‬:‫והאמר רבי יוחנן‬ ‫ ושמונה עשר‬,‫היו לו לרבי אושעיא בריבי‬ ‫ ולמדתי לב כל אחד ואחד‬,‫ימים גידלתי ביניהן‬ !‫וחכמת כל אחד ואחד‬ - ‫לב כל אחד ואחד וחכמת כל אחד ואחד‬ .‫ לא גמר‬- ‫ גמרא‬,‫גמר‬

This is one of the five sources mentioning R. Yohanan’s brief stay in Caesarea while studying with R. Oshaya.28 R. Yohanan went to Caesarea in order to “sit at the feet” of R. Oshaya and study mishnaic traditions or their interpretations. In these same two and a half weeks R. Yohanan boasts that he was able to exhaust the entire wealth of learning of R. Oshaya’s twelve prime students. The anonymous editor of the Bavli apologetically explains, however, that R. Yohanan was only able to appreciate their wisdom, rather than exhaust it. What is important for us here though is that R. Yohanan boasts that in these eighteen days he came to know the students hearts, namely their knowledge. Heart as Intention On the issue of the heart as a source for intentions and thinking, and on its opposition to the lips, as the opposition between thought and speech, we read in the Mishnah: Mishna, Terumot 3:8 One who intends to say: “heave ‫”המתכוין לומר "תרומה" ואמר‬ "‫"מעשר" — מעשר ואמר "תרומה‬ offering” but says, “tithe,” “tithe,” but says “heave offering,” "‫"עולה" ואמר "שלמים‬ one who intends to say, “burnt "‫"שלמים" ואמר "עולה‬ offering” but says “peace offering,”

•M A T T E R S O F T H E H E A R T • “peace offering” but says “burnt offering,” one who intends to say, “I will not enter this house”, but says, “that house,” “I will not derive benefit from this one,” but says “from that one” has not said anything until his mouth and heart agree?!

55

"‫"שאיני נכנס לבית זה" ואמר "לזה‬ "‫"שאיני נהנה לזה" ואמר "לזה‬ .‫לא אמר כלום עד שיהיו פיו ולבו שוין‬

In this tradition it seems that the heart houses the true intention of the person, the one that he wishes to express with his mouth, but words can either express the meditations of the heart or distort them. Agreement between mouth and heart here indicates a harmonious situation in which a person’s thoughts match his words. But the power of speech is fully independent and not controlled by a person’s heart. This source demonstrates the constantly existing opposition between cognitive ability and verbal ability that the Rabbis saw as permanently requiring to resolution through certain practices; for example, in the process of repetitive learning related in the tannaitic midrash Sifre Devarim 296:29 “Remember” (Deut 25:17) with .‫ "אל תשכח" בלב‬,‫ בפה‬,"‫"זכור‬ (the utterance of) your mouth. “you '‫וכן הוא אומר 'שמעו עמים ירגזון‬ .(‫)שמות טו יד‬ shall not forget” (25:19) in your heart, as it said “the people have heard, they tremble” (Exod. 15:14) We also see such an opposition in, for example, an aphorism from Koheleth Rabba 12:10: The heart does not inform the mouth. Whom does the mouth inform?

?‫ פומא למאן גלי‬.‫לבא לפומא לא גלי‬

We can learn from these texts that the heart is full of unspoken thoughts, words, feelings that do not find verbal expression, and even in case something receives verbal expression, it is not identical with what is in the heart, thus preserving a constant potential for conflict. Thus, rabbinic definitions of honesty are formulated as: ‫דבליבא בפומא‬, namely “what is in one’s heart is in ones mouth” and dishonesty as: ‫ מה דבליבא לא בפומא‬meaning “what is in one’s heart is not in ones mouth”.30

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Thus, rabbinic thought considered that, in addition to those things which are in the heart and are undoubtedly true, a lot of things exist such as verbal expression, verbal displays of emotion, that are external in relation to the heart and are not equivalent to its intentions. Conclusions We may therefore conclude that the heart has preserved its cognitive function from biblical to talmudic Judaism, but its nature has changed. The complexity of the attempt to consolidate the peripheral zones of the heart, as already present in the biblical concept, developed into a dramatic situation of constant conflict, which is accompanied by a constant aspiration for resolving the imbalance between heart and lips, thoughts and their verbal expressions. The heart gradually gave up its position as the seat of intelligence, but maintained its role as the dwelling place of emotions. At the same time it now represented free-will or personality rather than simply vitality and, consequently, it became a representation of the entire human being. The bodily representations of the human being went a long way from the monolithic in the Bible to the fragmented in rabbinic thought. Going through the texts of the Bible, the rabbis collected those verses where bodyparts appear and by combining various ones of these together and interpreting their components, they filled them with new symbolic meaning, resulting in new anthropological values and concepts “embodied” in the bodies of the ancient verses. Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

Without the conference in Bern, October 2010 this article would probably never have been written, for which I am deeply grateful to the organizers Sarah Ross, Gabriel Levi and Soham Al-Suadi. Friendly scholars read a few previous drafts of the article and enriched me by their notes, I am thankful to everyone—Tal Ilan, Samuel Kottek, Ronit Nikolsky, Amram Tropper, Serge Ruzer, Alex Gordin, Dan Shapira. This attempt follows in the footsteps of other scholars, see for example the attempt of “reading sex” in rabbinic literature by Boyarin 1993. See also Rubin 1998, 171–183 and see my own attempt at reading the body in rabbinic texts Kiperwasser 2012. See Holma 1911, 69–80; Berquist 2002, 18–39; Briggs 1897, 94–105; von Meyenfeldt 1950; Fabry 1995, 399–437; Behm 1972, 605–614. See Meyenfeldt 1950, 137–145. See Kadari 1967, 352 (Hebrew). See Stiegman 1979, 487–579, Meyer 1937, 193,

•M A T T E R S O F T H E H E A R T • 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

57

See Porter 1901, 110–111; Cohen-Stuart 1984, 223–225. See Urbach 1987, 471–473; Cohen 1980, 495–520 and see Rosen-Zvi 2011. The text is according to Theodor-Albeck edition p. 462. For the naïve “anatomical” interpretation of it, see Preuss 1977, 103. See Mayer L. 1980–1982, ‘Orla’ in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. XI, 359361. Aristotle. 1983. Movement of Animals, English Translation by E.S. Forster, Cambridge Massachusetts, 703a13ff p. 475, Plato. 1942. Timaeus, English Translation by Rev. R.G. Bury, Cambridge Massachusetts, 73c-d, pp. 190–193. The text is according to Visotzky ed. 7–8. See Stemberger 1996, 324; Lerner 2006, 152. Despite the late redaction of this work the tradition discussed above seems to me an authentic one and probably belongs to a relatively ancient layer of the text. See also Abot de Rabbi Natan A 33 (Sechter 92): … it teaches us that the Holy One, blessed be He, appointed the two kidneys of Abraham our father to act as two teachers, and they made him understand and counseled him and taught him wisdom every night, as it is written: “I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel; yea, in the night seasons my kidneys (kelayot) to instruct me’ (Ps 16:7) See also Vayiqra Rabba 4, 4 p. 96: ‘The Kidneys Give Advise’ etc. See Kottek Samuel. 1994. ‘‘The Kidneys Give Advice”, Koroth 10: 44–53. See Urbach 1987, 232–239 (above n. 8). Kottek Samuel. 1979. ‘The Seat of the Soul: Contribution to the History of Jewish Medieval Psycho-Physiology’, Clio Medica 13: 219– 246. Schechter ed. 36. See Boyarin 1993, 2.71 (above n.); Otzen B. ‘Yezer’, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. VI, 264–266. Jerome quotes in the name of his Hebrew teacher: “When we read Ecclesiastes, my Hebrew teacher, whom I have already mentioned, told me of a saying by Bar Akiva, whom they admire: Better the inner man, who wakes up in us after maturity at the age of thirteen, than the external man, the one from his mother's womb. Truly, the external man does not know how to stay away from sin…” cited in Hirshman. 1996. A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity, Albany, 101. See. Krauss S. 1893/1894. "The Jews in the Works of the Church Fathers." Jewish Quarterly Review 5/6, 254; Ginzberg L. 1933. "Der Kommentar des Hieronymous zu Koheleth." In Sonderabdruck aus: Abhandlungen zur Errinerung an Hirsh Perez Chages. Vienna. See Urbach 1987, above n.8, 471–483, Rosen-Zvi 2011, 3–8, 21–22. Theodor-Albeck ed. 320. Theodor-Albeck ed. 59 Theodor-Albeck ed. 258–259. See Ginzberg Levi. 1900. Die Haggada bei den Kirchenvätern, vol. ii., (Berlin : S. Calvary), 2021. Ginzberg was of the opinion that “His heart” means “Himself” and that “heart” is actually the “knowledge ” of God, but that this wording created the potential for Christian speculations. This opinion was fully accepted by Urbach 1987, n. 8 above, 207: “The Church Fathers . . . adopted the Jewish interpretations, namely that God addressed Himself, His heart, or in their terminology (bileshonam), His Sophia, Logos, or hands— expressions that they identified with the ‘son’ or the ‘holy ghost’”; thus also Fossum J.

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25

26 27 28

29 30

•R E U V E N K I P E R W A S S E R • 1985, “Gen. 1,26 and 2,7 in Judaism, Samaritanism, and Gnosticism,” JSJ 16: 202–239: “his heart (i.e., himself)”, 210. Baer, however, takes a different track and claims that in Bereshi Rabba 1:1 and Bereshit Rabba 8:3 the “architect” is the demiurgus, the result of an ancient mythical doctrine (Baer, I. 1969. Israel among the Nations: An Essay on the History of the Period of the Second Temple and the Mishnah and on the Foundations of the Halachah and Jewish Religion [Jerusalem: Bialik Institute], 131, n.3 [Hebrew]; Liebes argues in a similar vein: “The heart of God appears here to be a separate entity, which mediates between Him and the Creation” (Liebes J. 1994. “de Natura Dei: On the Jewish Myth and Its Metamorphoses,” Masu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish Philosophy in Memory of Prof. E. Gottlieb [eds. M. Oron and A. Goldreich; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute], 280 [Hebrew]). Kister Menahem. 2006. “Some early Jewish and Christian exegetical problems and the dynamics of monotheism”, Journal for the Study of Judaism 37,4, 548–593. Kister 2006, 573–574 See Brock 1982, 131–142. To the comparative study of similar anthropological approaches between the syraic Christianity and rabbinic Judaism I will apply elsewhere. This entire episode was carefully analyzed by Hirshman M. 2009. The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E.-350 C.E.: Texts on Education and their Late Antique Context, Oxford, 51–53. Text according Finkelstein ed. 314. Translation according to Hammer 1986, 286. See Ecclesiastes Rabba 12:10 and Midrash Tehilim 28:4, BT Sanhedrin 35a.

Bibliography Baer I. 1969. Israel among the Nations: An Essay on the History of the Period of the Second Temple and the Mishnah and on the Foundations of the Halachah and Jewish Religion. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. [Hebrew] Behm J. 1972. Art.: Кαρδια, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel. Geoffrey W.Bromiley (vol. 3). Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.F. Eerdmans, 605–614. Berquist J.L. 2002. Controlling Corporeality: The Body and the Household in Ancient Israel. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Boyarin D. 1993. Carnal Israel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Briggs Ch. A. 1897. Art.: A Study of the Use of Lev and Levav in the Old Testament. Semitic Studies in Memory of A.Kohut, Berlin: S. Calvary, 94–105. Brock S.P. 1982. “The Prayer of the Heart in Syriac Tradition,” Sobornost 4:2, 131–142. Cohen J. 1980. Original Sin as the Evil Inclination—A Polemicist’s Appreciation of Human Nature, HTR 73, 495–520. Cohen-Stuart G. H. 1984. The Struggle in Man between Good and Evil: an Inquiry into the Origin of the Rabbinic Concept of Yeser Hara, Kampen: Kok, 223–225. Fabry H.-J. 1995. Art.: ‘Lev’, In G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren and Heinz-Josef Fabry (eds), Theological dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. VII, Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.F. Eerdmans, 399—437. Fossum J. 1985. Art.: Gen. 1,26 and 2,7 in Judaism, Samaritanism, and Gnosticism, JSJ 16: 202–239. Ginzberg L. 1933. Art.: Der Kommentar des Hieronymous zu Koheleth. In Sonderabdruck aus: Abhandlungen zur Errinerung an Hirsh Perez Chages. Vienna. Ginzberg L. 1900. Die Haggada bei den Kirchenvätern (vol. ii.). Berlin : S. Calvary, 20- 21.

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Hammer R. 1986. Sifre : A Tannaitic commentary on the book of Deuteronomy, New Haven. Holma H. 1911. Die Namen der Körperteile im Assyrisch- Babylonischen, Eine Lexikalisch— Etymologische Studie; Anales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Ser. B Tom. VII; 1, Helsinki. Kadari M.Z. 1967. Art.: ‘Nominal Phrases of “Lev, Levav” in Biblical Hebrew’, Bar Ilan: Annual of Bar-Ilan University Studies in Judaica and Humanities IV-V, 352 (Hebrew). Kiperwasser R. 2012. ‘Body of the Whore, Body of the Story and Metaphor of the Body’. In: Tal Ilan, Monika Brockhaus and Tanja Hidde (Eds), Introduction to Seder Qodashim. A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, 305–319. Kister M. 2006. “Some early Jewish and Christian Exegetical Problems and the Dynamics of Monotheism”, Journal for the Study of Judaism, 37,4, 548–593. Kottek S. S. 1979. ‘The Seat of the Soul: Contribution to the History of Jewish Medieval Psycho- Physiology’, Clio Medica 13: 219–246. Kottek S. 1994. ‘‘The Kidneys Give Advice”, Koroth 10, 44–53. Krauss S. 1894. “The Jews in the Works of the Church Fathers.” Jewish Quarterly Review 6 225– 261. Lerner M. B. 2006. ‘The Works of Aggadic Midrash and the Esther Midrashim’, The Literature of Sages, edited by Sh. Safrai, Z. Safari, J.Schwartz, P. Tomson. Royal Van Gorcum: Fortress Press. Liebes J. 1994. “de Natura Dei: On the Jewish Myth and Its Metamorphoses,” Masu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish Philosophy in Memory of Prof. E. Gottlieb [eds. M. Oron and A. Goldreich; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1994], 280 [Hebrew]). Mayer L. 1980–1982. Art.: ‘Orla’ in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. XI, 359- 361. Meyenfeldt F. H. von 1950. Het Hart (Leb, Lebab) in Het Oude Testament Leiden : E.J. Brill. Meyer R. 1937. Hellenistisches in der Rabbinischen Anthropologie, Rabbinische Vorstellung von Werden des Menschen, Stuttgart : W. Kohlhammer. Otzen B. 1980–1982. Art.: ‘Yezer’, In G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren and HeinzJosef Fabry (eds), Theological dictionary of the Old Testament: Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, Vol. VI, 264–266. Porter F. Ch. 1901. The Yezer Hara, A Study in Jewish Doctrine of Sin, Biblical and Semitic Studies, Yale Historical and Critical Contributions to Biblical Science: New York-London. Preuss J. 1977. Biblical and Talmudic medicine (Trans. of Biblisch—Talmudische Medizin, Berlin, 1911, by E.Rosner), New York; London. Rosen-Zvi I. 2011. Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity: Philadelphia: Penn Press. Rubin N. 1998. ‘From Corpse to Corpus : the Body as a Text in Talmudic Literature’, Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience, 171–183. Stemberger G. 1996. Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Stiegman E. 1979. Art.: ‘Rabbinic Anthropology’, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt vol. 2, ed. H. Temporini und W. Haase. Berlin; New York: W. de Gruyter, 487–579. Urbach E.E. 1987. The Sages, Their Concepts and Beliefs; translated from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams, Jerusalem: Magnes Press.

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Introduction to Performance Section The inner history of a people is contained in its song.

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—Adolf Jellink (1844)1

dolf Jellinek’s quotation about ‘the place’ of a people’s inner history—which might be equated with a people’s inner voices— somehow points to the heart of this section, and thus to the core of this book. When we talk about Judaism and emotion, we also talk about the inner voices of the Jewish people, which are contained in different religious and cultural forms and traditions. Moreover, these voices emerge through diverse scientific approaches—such as historical text studies, (ethno)musicology, and cognitive science of religion—each shown in this volume. While the scientific community tends to see these fields of scholarship as separate entities, the authors of the following chapters on performing the emotions in Judaism rather regard them as members of one tribe. The performance of emotion in Judaism first of all refers to the bodily representation, or embodiment, of religious feelings through ritual ceremonies and music. Following Jonathan Friedmann’s statement that texts and other forms of art are only copies and repetitions of specific ideas of emotions, the following contributions will mainly focus on Jewish ritual music—the medium through which emotions are expressed and conveyed. Taking into account that emotions conjured by ritual music are largely dependent on associations,2 such as non-musical images, sentiments, or even memories that might be linked to one’s past—to a certain time or place—these chapters discusses the different ways the inner nature of religious emotions, and thus the inner voices of Judaism, are revealed through music. In doing so, both contributions focus on the evocation of emotions through Nusach, the Jewish prayer modes, while considering the interconnectedness of concepts of music in rabbinic literature and the actual performance of these ideas and Jewish symbolic values in synagogue ritual.

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These observations are furthermore linked to theories on music and emotion, to cognitive theories, as well as to the notion of entrainment and its importance in the experience of Judaism through music. While most scholars of music psychology agree upon the fact that music “expresses emotions that listeners perceive, recognize, or are ‘moved’ by”, 3 there is, however, a little less agreement and ongoing debate on the question of whether music induces or produces emotions, and on what kind of emotions are most likely to be expressed.4 Thus, although scholars of various fields of research have been fascinated by music’s mysterious ability to evoke strong feelings, the study of the emotional effects of music still faces serious problems: besides the lack of appropriate research methods and paradigms, investigations on music and emotion are mostly handicapped by the misuse of the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘feelings’, as Klaus R. Scherer (2004) explains, as well as by the fact that only the subjective perception of expressed emotions can be measured, rather than felt emotions. 5 Notwithstanding, there is no need to review the wide-ranging literature on music and emotion,6 but it is worthwhile to point to one aspect that also correlates, to a certain degree, with the explanations in the chapters of this section. Aside from the common understanding that “conscious feelings have traditionally been viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion,”7 and that “affect produced by music should be studied as (more or less conscious) feelings that integrate cognitive and physiological effects,” 8 Piotr Winkielman and Kent C. Berridge (2004) make the case that emotions can also be genuinely unconscious. In doing so, they refer to the current widely accepted notion that cognitive processes and states can occur below awareness as well as without attention or even intention. This point allows the consideration of unconscious or implicit emotions, which—in contrast to explicit emotions (“a person’s conscious awareness of an emotion, feeling, or mood state”)—refers to alterations in “experience, thought, or action that are attributable to one’s emotional state, independent of his or her conscious awareness of that state.”9 These emotional processes remain unconscious, even though the person is focused and motivated to describe his or her feelings. Thus, Winkielman and Berridge’s view is contrary to the conventional understanding that once emotions are caused, they are always conscious. 10 Although further appropriate methods and research on unconscious emotions is needed, particularly with regard to the emotional effects of music, the general idea of conscious/explicit and unconscious/implicit emotions draws a parallel in synagogue music discussed in the following articles: to the conscious

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production of emotional stimulation in Jewish ritual music on the cantor’s side in comparison to the unconscious reception/experience of the same on part of the worshipping community. Accordingly, on the one hand, Amit Klein demonstrates how skilled cantors and precentors within the cantorial recitative, as well as the so-called Carlebach Nusach, intentionally use musical tools and techniques in order to interpret the prayer texts and to bring out and amplify their emotional contours. On the other hand, Gabriel Levy and Sarah Ross show how the emotional and physiological rhythm of a 24-hour Shabbat cycle is inflected in part by the oscillation between different prayer modes, and thus between different moods conveyed by the music. In doing so, they point to the music’s power to synchronize the entire community, and to entrain the worshippers into a shared sentiment connected to Shabbat. In comparison to the active and conscious production of emotional excitement by the cantor, the process of entrainment is a rather passive and implicit one. Thus, in terms of music, the following contributions deal with the “inner history” of Judaism that inhabits at the same time the inner voices, and thus the emotions of the cantor and the worshipping community. Notes 1

As quoted in Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ed. 2011. Quotations on Jewish Sacred Music. Plymouth: Hamilton Books, 3. 2 Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ed. 2012. Emotions in Jewish Music: Personal and Scholarly Reflections. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK: University Press of America, 1–2. 3 See Patrik N. Juslin and Hohn A. Sloboda, Eds. 2010. Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 3. 4 See Klaus R. Scherer. 2004. “Which Emotions Can be Induced by Music? What Are the Underlying Mechanisms? And How Can We Measure Them?” Journal of New Music Research, Vol. 33, No. 3, 239. 5 Ibid. 6 For a detailed literature review see Patrik N. Juslin and Hohn A. Sloboda (2010). 7 Piotr Winkielman and Kent C. Berridge. 2004. “Unconscious Emotion.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 13, No. 3, 120. 8 Scherer 2004, 3. 9 Piotr Winkielman and Kent C. Berridge 2004, 120–121. 10 Ibid.

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Singing Their Heart Out: Emotional Excitement in Cantorial Recitatives and Carlebach Nusach Introduction Avodah Sheba-Lev (‘Service of the Heart’)

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rayer is one of the most significant acts of worship in Jewish tradition1. It is a ritual performed on a daily basis that involves approaching divinity. Since it is an act of communicating with God, the prayer ritual often involves emotional arousal and excitement. The association between the act of prayer and the heart, which symbolizes the emotional aspect of our existence2, goes back to the Midrash itself: “What service is performed with the heart? It is prayer” (Sifrey, Deuteronomy, 41). One of the elements that makes the prayer ritual emotionally charged is the fact that the prayer text is loaded with emotionally expressive fragments. The prayer text covers a wide spectrum of emotional expressions: praise, glory, happiness, sorrow, lament, cry, yearning, and longing. The emotional character of the text to a large extent determines the emotional character of that part of the ritual, but it is by no means the only element that affects the emotional character of the ceremony. Other components of the ceremony, such as choreography, staging, accessories and, of course, music, generate an emotional atmosphere, which can either intensify the emotions emanating from the text, undermine them, or add other layers and dimensions to them. In this essay I will delve into the musical mechanisms employed by two traditional communities in order to intensify the emotional impact of the prayer ritual, by amplifying emotions that these communities consider central to the prayer ritual. I will examine how those who emphasize the supplication element of prayer use musical devices that express a broken-hearted plea to God, while those who emphasize the thanksgiving element of the prayer use musical devices that generate joy and happiness.

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The two traditions I am referring to are the Cantorial Recitative and the Carlebach Nusach, respectively. Both these genres evolved in Ashkenazi synagogues over the last two centuries, and use music to achieve emotional excitement, employing different mechanisms, which share certain similarities: both genres employ mechanisms that create a certain mood; both genres also feature an intensification process that generates high emotional arousal. In the cantorial recitative, the cantor conveys a mood of supplication by musically imitating the weeping and crying of a person pleading to God. The cantor also generates a musically sophisticated mechanism of intensification in which emotional excitement is systematically built up by gradually increasing various musical attributes in two main categories: pitch height and pitch density. The Carlebach nusach, by contrast, generates a radically different mood, one of happiness and joy. It also utilizes an intensification process— albeit of a different kind—based on music speed and volume. The Emotional Significance of Music in Judaism Already in the ancient world, the Jewish tradition acknowledged and cherished the power of music to generate emotional excitement. A well-known and venerated example is the singing of the Levites in the Temple. The Levites’ singing accompanied the sacrificial rituals and was mandatory; the absence of the appropriate song could invalidate the entire ritual.3 The music is thus a constitutive component of the ritual that is required to validate the ritual.4 Another example of the importance of music in Jewish tradition is its role in many Biblical stories in which a prophet sings or plays a musical instrument and is thus inspired to make his prophecy. In these biblical stories, music is evoked specifically for the purpose of achieving a certain emotional state. It is by means of music that the prophet transcends to the ecstatic meditative state required to communicate with God. 5 A more common example for the Jewish use of music as an emotional vehicle is the blowing of the shofar as part of the prayers on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. The sound of the shofar, reminding the congregation of the sounds of weeping and moaning, 6 is intended to move the hearers to repentance (Teshuva). 7 Here, again, musical sound is used to evoke a religiously desirable emotional state in its hearers.8 Music continued to play a major role in Jewish religious life even after the Temple was destroyed and the magnificent musical rituals held in the Temple ceased to exist. In later generations, Jews continued to introduce musical elements into prayer rituals in order to generate various emotional states. Furthermore, as is typical of many ritualistic elements, prayer music has also

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undergone a process of canonization and sanctification in which certain tunes and melodies have become canonical. These tunes came to be associated with the ritual to such an extent that they are now considered to be an inherent part of the liturgy.9 Nowadays, various communities employ a wide range of musical liturgies that stem from various traditions. As we shall immediately see below, these liturgies generate different emotional states, states which these communities consider to be of religious significance. The Production of Emotional Excitement in Synagogue Music Different musical styles tend to generate different emotional states (think, for example, of blues and swing). Like other musical genres, Jewish Ashkenazi synagogue music, too, has evolved and developed over the generations. These changes have affected not only the musical characteristics of the genre but also the emotional state that this style tends to generate. As noted above, in this essay I examine how the musical features of two historical genres of Jewish Ashkenazi synagogue music produce different kinds of emotions. The instances I refer to have both prevailed during the 20th century. The first few decades of the 20th century were the culmination of a long legacy of cantorial art. The cantorial recitative, or Chazanut, is a highly elaborated form of traditional prayer-chanting, which developed to its peak in the first half of the 20th century. The last decades of the 20th century witnessed the rise of more modern-sounding music, the Carlebach Nusach, named after the late R. Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994). Although it was a new movement, the Carlebach style has gradually become a common alternative to the traditional synagogue chant and the cantorial recitative. There are many significant differences between these two musical styles. Carlebach’s music is mainly based on modern “Western” popular music, rather than the traditional “oriental” Nusach, 10 which is the basis of the cantorial art. The cantorial art is a solo, virtuosic, melismatic, and un-metered improvisation-like composition, while Carlebach style is characterized by simple, metered, and symmetrical melodies intended to be sung by the whole congregation. The emotions that these genres evoke are also different; cantorial music tends to be sad and sorrowful while the Carlebach’s music is happy and joyful. Nonetheless, in order to achieve emotional arousal both styles employ a similar mechanism, which I refer to as the intensification process. In the following two sections, I will analyze cantorial music and Carlebach Nusach respectively. In each of these sections, I will begin by briefly describing the musical genre. I will then describe the mood that each genre generates.

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Finally, I will explain the intensification process employed by each of these genres. I will not attempt to provide a full musicological (or ethnomusicological) analysis of these two genres, nor will I delve into the reasons for the decline of the cantorate, on the one hand, and the rise of the Carlebach Nusach on the other hand.11 I will concentrate only on the different musical means used by these two genres in order to generate emotions. However, before I turn to the analysis of these two genres, a brief discussion of the relationship between music and emotions is in order. Music and Emotions12 Many different questions can be asked regarding the relationship between music and emotions. For example: What does it mean to say that a certain musical piece is sad. Or what connection is there between a sad musical piece and the listeners’ emotional state? Or we may ask how is it that the music is sad? What is it about it that makes it sad? The question I will be focusing on here is the latter one. I am mainly interested in the musical mechanisms employed by composers, performers, and other people who make music for creating happy music, sad music, and so forth. That said, in order to have a better grasp of how the specific mechanisms I will discuss herein generate music which is emotional in certain ways, it would be useful to provide a general view on what makes music emotional.13 It would be an understatement to report that there is no consensus on the answer to this question. There are many theories on what it is in music that makes music emotional, and most of them are subject to serious criticisms. Since there are so many theories, it would naturally be difficult to provide an account that would satisfy all discussants. One of my aims in this paper is to show that my account comes close to being uncontroversial by demonstrating that the main criticisms raised against most theories do not apply to the specific cases that I will be discussing.14 One possible way in which music conveys emotions is by representing them.15 There are various modes of representation, and music may represent emotions through any of them. For example, tears and weeping sounds may represent sadness, the facial expressions of a sad person may reveal his feelings and represent sadness; the word sadness refers to and represents the emotion sadness, and so on. Music may stand for the emotions it represents in the same manner: it could be that the sounds resemble certain vocal emotional expressions, as when a blues guitar sounds sad;16 it could be that the music’s rhythm, dynamics or contour are bent, in the same way that a

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depressed person is bent;17 and it could simply be that music represents a certain emotion in a manner which is contingent upon history, as when a trumpet is associated with bellicosity, in the same way that names are arbitrary and contingent.18 Some criticisms of this theory (or, more precisely, family of theories) invoke the intuition that the connection between, say, happy music and happiness is natural (or is inherent in the music) and is not merely a matter of convention (namely, something that the music is reminiscent of).19 Other criticisms point to the normal relation between an emotion and a sentient being expressing the emotion, which is absent in the case of music representing a certain emotion.20 Because of these criticisms (among others), other theorists argue that music is emotional because it conveys the emotions of a real person21 (like the composer, the performer and so on) or an imagined one.22 While these theories can accommodate the two questions mentioned above—regarding the direct connection between music and the emotions it generates and regarding the connection between the generated emotions and the emotions of some sentient being—they are plagued by another problem. It is not clear that the emotions generated by the music always correspond to the actual emotional states of the composer, the performer, or some other real person.23 As I noted earlier, I will try to demonstrate that the cases that I will discuss can avoid the problems of both theories.24 So far in this chapter, I have mentioned mainly discrete emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, fear and so on.25 Many theorists believe that the phenomenology of emotional experience can be described in terms that are similar to these: all emotional episodes can be divided into one of several categories that are universal and stem from evolutionary development. 26 Other theorists, however, argue that reducing all emotions to one of a limited set of categories fails to do justice to the richness of emotional experience. 27 For this reason (among others), theorists have suggested different approaches to the description of the phenomenology. According to these approaches, emotions can be described by placing them along affective dimensions. 28 Such models elegantly grasp two aspects of emotional experience, namely that emotions vary in degree, and that some emotions may be conceived of as bipolar (Sloboda & Juslin 2011, 78). Dimensional theories differ in the types as well as number of emotional dimensions they stipulate.29 The most influential of these is Russell’s twodimensional circumplex model (ibid., 77). According to Russell’s model, emotions can be described by placing them on two bipolar axes, one referring to valence and ranking emotional experiences as being pleasant

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versus unpleasant, and another referring to arousal and ranking emotional experiences as being activating versus deactivating (Zentenr & Eerola 2011, 198). While the dimensional approaches have problems of their own30 and have even been referred to as lacking theoretical depth (Sloboda & Juslin 2011, 78), they certainly fair better than categorical approaches in registering the variance in degree of emotional experiences. As many people describe both cantorial music and Carlebach music as moving, exciting, emotionally charged, and so on, a theoretical model that acknowledges these experiences is needed in order to provide a better understanding of how these experiences are generated. Since much of this paper will focus on the question of how the two liturgical traditions discussed manage to generate such intense emotional experiences, I will assume herein that there is at least one bipolar dimension along which emotional experiences vary, namely the arousal (or activation-deactivation) dimension.31 There is one additional point about the literature regarding music and emotions that is worth highlighting. Much of the writing on music and emotions focuses on abstract instrumental music that is not accompanied by text or dramatic accompaniment, and does not convey a narrative.32 Since the problem of how music generates emotions is most acute when it comes to absolute music, where words, drama, context, or even referential objects are absent and cannot explain the emotions generated, much of the theoretical writing on the connection between music and emotions has focused on absolute music of this sort. The current chapter deals with music that is all but abstract. It is accompanied by words (or, rather, accompanies words), it serves as part of a contextually meaningful ritual, and it is supplemented by other components of the ritual such as choreography, dramaturgy, and so on. My arguments in this chapter will focus on how music, in and of itself, produces certain emotional effects, but since it is extremely difficult to divorce the emotional impact of the music from the emotional impact of other elements of the ritual, and from the context in which it is played, the claim that the emotions are generated by the music alone should be taken with a grain of salt. While I will point out features of the music that seem to have the tendency to produce certain emotional states, it seems to be the case that the actual emotional impact that the worshippers experience is also significantly affected by the other elements of the rite. And now, after the preliminaries, let us proceed to the music itself.

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Chazanut Chazanut—or the cantorial recitative—is a form of art which has developed gradually since the mid-eighteenth century and reached a certain peak in the first half of the twentieth century. Chazanut is characterized by a dialectical interplay between simple traditional patterns of synagogue chanting, dating back to medieval times, and sophisticated artistic creativity dictated by modern musical sensibilities. Broadly speaking, the cantorial art uses florid virtuosic ornamentation in order to extend and expand the traditional plain chant (nusach), and adds further melodic and melismatic layers to it. The ornamentations have increased in number and complexity over the years and reached their peak in the first half of the twentieth century, due in part to the development of the recording industry. The introduction of the recording industry opened a new era in the annals of cantorial music, namely, its (partial) phasing out from the functional and limited environment of the synagogue and entry into the commercial world. Due to its unprecedented success, both in terms of popularity and wide distribution and in terms of its influence on the character of the cantorial recitative, the recording era was later named, “The Golden Age of the Cantorial Art.”33 The popularization of cantorial music in the golden age era led to the increased use of virtuosic vocal passages. As noted by Werner (1976, 236), “every passage, was chanted to impress the listeners (not the worshipers) by the brilliance of their voices and their vocal acrobatics.” The close-to-impossible virtuosic vocal passages, reaching fantastic pitch heights and seemingly endless melismas, enabled the cantors to imbue the music with a melodramatic atmosphere. The melodramatic format of the cantorial recitative (which I term the supplication recitative) was designed to be an effective way to make good use of the cantor’s vocal abilities and to generate the emotional states that should accompany the prayer. This format consisted of elements generating the appropriate mood and elements creating great emotional arousal. Emotional Mood One of the key goals of prayer is to plead before God and to ask him for physical and spiritual salvation. Although Jewish prayer comprises several types of texts expressing various emotional moods (such as supplication, praise, and thanksgiving), throughout the ages, the cantorial world mostly preferred texts of supplication, probably due to their prominence in the prayer, in terms of

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their textual length, emotional significance, and central placement. 34 The Sages of Israel have noted the supremacy of the supplication in various sayings such as: “Rabi Shimon Says: When you pray, don’t do it in a fixed manner, but rather be in a merciful supplication manner before the Lord.” (Avot 2, 13, italics mine, A.K.). Another example is Rabbi Eliezer’s statement stressing the power of tears: “From the day that the Temple was destroyed, although the [heavenly] gates of prayer have been locked … the gates of tears have not been locked” (Brachot 32b, italics mine, A.K.) 35. The importance of supplication in the prayer was noted by the cantors over the generations, especially in Eastern Europe. The main focus of the cantors in their musical compositions was directed to supplication texts. Over time, a special format was developed to fit the supplication mood of the text and to generate a mood appropriate to it. The music was designed to resemble the image of a crying person. The cantors of the golden age, in particular, conveyed the mood of supplication in their cantorial recitatives by means of two musical techniques. Firstly, they musically simulated and imitated the weeping and cries of a person pleading to God. Secondly, the cantors repeat the prayer text and the music many times.36 To demonstrate the supplication format, I will use a typical and famous composition by Cantor Yakov Rapaport—Anenu from the slichot service.37 The text is a clear supplication in the form of a litany 38 in which every phrase repeats the plea anenu (“answer us”39) with various epithets of God, associated with his merciful nature and with his benevolence towards the three founding fathers of Israel (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). Cantorial recitatives based on this particular text were composed by many cantors. Here, I analyze Rapaports’ rendition as performed by Cantor Mordechai Hershman. The central part of the supplication recitative is usually the part in which the cantor mostly emphasizes the supplication motives whose features are most characteristic of the supplication recitative, and is usually the most complex part of the piece. For this reason, I skip directly to the central part of the recitative named, hereinafter, the supplication section (see Figure 1). The musical attributes associated with the supplication (cries and repetition) mentioned above are clearly evident in this excerpt. Notice the cantor’s cry and his seemingly endless repetitions of the word Anenu. In the first three phrases, the cantor repeats the same musical motive, albeit with small variations. Each musical phrase begins with a high, long, and almost irritating

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note, which sounds like a cry of the plea “Anenu.” The cry then develops into a very long melismatic motive in which the same notes are repeated over and over, especially the minor second interval that resembles the sigh of the crying and pleading person. The repetition of musical motives and text is very clear also in the following phrases: in phrase 4 the recitation motive (E♭-D-B♭) is repeated two times, in phrase 5 the up and down minor-sixth interval is repeated three times, and in phrase 6 the F-E ♭ -D ♭ -C-D ♭ -E ♭ motive is also repeated three times. Phrase 7 repeats, again, the sigh motive (F-E♭) five times (see the arrows in phrase 7 in Figure 1 below). Figure 1. The supplication section in Anenu by Y. Rapaport

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All these repetitions of the text and the music, and, especially, the continuous sound of the sigh motive, create the sorrowful mood of a persistent plea and bring about the image of a crying person. As I noted earlier, some theorists argue that the way in which music can evoke emotions in listeners is through representation.40 I also noted that there are several ways by which music can represent the emotions it stands for. Some of them are arbitrary and contingent, but other ways of representation are natural, for example, a smile representing happiness.41 In this case, the relation between the music and the mood of supplication is straightforward. Sighs and repetitions are typical characteristics of supplication: the sighs are typical sounds that a supplicant would generate, and the repetitions are typical to his act of supplication.42 The fact that the association here is natural rather than arbitrary, rules out the criticism, raised against semiotic theories, that people normally sense the mood inside the music and not lying outside of it in a place that the music merely refers to.43 Another criticism raised against semiotic theories is that in the normal case emotions can only be expressed by sentient beings.44 Here, the role of the cantor as a sentient being whose emotions are expressed in the musical piece is clearly important. The supplicatory mood is not merely an emotion that the music expresses; it is first and foremost the emotional state of the cantor. Jewish tradition has emphasized the importance of a cantor who is well placed to supplicate.45 The conveyance of the supplicatory mood from the cantor to the congregation may provide some of the explanation to this tradition.46 This view also addresses the concern raised against the expression theory, according to which, music conveys the emotions of a real persona. In this case, the persona in question is the cantor himself. The critics assert that there is sometimes no correspondence between the actual emotions of the relevant persona and the emotions that the music conveys. While this dissonance may occur in reality, Jewish tradition has sought to minimize the risk of its occurrence by insisting that the cantor should be the kind of person likely to supplicate. 47 As I noted earlier, I am not trying to suggest which theory is correct;48 I am merely demonstrating that my account works for all theories in question.49 Emotional Arousal I already mentioned the penchant of the golden age cantors for emotionally charged music. One of the major techniques used by cantors of the golden age to achieve this end and to arouse intense emotions through their music is what I call the intensification process. Underlying this mechanism is the fact that

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simultaneous intensification of various musical attributes generates an effect of high emotional arousal. As noted earlier, throughout this chapter I assume that emotions can be described by locating them along a bipolar axis that represents arousal (or activation-deactivation).50 In this section I will suggest that the intensification process generates high arousal, or moves the listeners along the affective axis in the direction of more activation, and will explain how it does so. I will do this by showing that the intensification process employs certain musical patterns, which according to some empirical studies using different methodologies, tend to generate emotional excitement, intensity, dynamism and so forth.51 In other words, they influence the arousal axis and generate more activation.52 The intensification process in the cantorial recitatives involves many musical elements (as detailed below), and encompasses the entire composition, from the beginning to the end. 53 Throughout the cantorial recitative, a musical crescendo is built up gradually. This is not the usual crescendo often found in many musical scores ( ), which represents a local intensification of the volume of the sound. Here the range of the intensification is the entire work, and it involves many more musical attributes in two main melodic categories, namely, pitch height and pitch density. The emotional excitement is built up systematically by gradually increasing these musical attributes and this generates the emotionally charged atmosphere mentioned above. In light of their strong focus on the supplication motive in the prayer, as demonstrated above, it is not surprising that the peak of the intensification process occurs in the supplication section. A vivid example of the intensification process can be seen in the supplication section of the Anenu analyzed above. For example, the melodic motive in bar 2 is repeated in bar 3 in an intensified manner (see the arrows between bar 2 and 3 in Figure 1 above). In bar 2, the culminating note (A♭) is sung twice, while in bar 3, it is sung three times in the melisma. In bar 2, the musical phrase ends with the short motive F-E♭-E♭-D♭, while in bar 3, the cantor prolongs the concluding phrase with additional seven ornamental notes in between the original motive notes: F-E♭-E♭-F-G-F-E♭-F-E♭-E♭-D♭ (added notes in bold). The motive in bar 3 is clearly more melismatic than its parallel in bar 2. Sometimes, the intensification process begins before the beginning of the supplication section in the recitative; however, the peak of the process is typically found in the supplication section. Figure 2 demonstrates the gradual ascent in four musical attributes: average pitch height, maximum pitch height, pitch duration, and length of melodic melismas, generated by the

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intensification process. It refers to a section beginning a few phrases before the supplication section and ending at the end of that section. As can be clearly seen in the charts referring to each of the aforementioned musical attributes, there is a constant and steep trend upwards 54 that begins in the opening section (points 1–5 in the chart) and continues to soar until it reaches its peak in the supplication section (points 6–12 in the chart). The simultaneous intensification of these attribute generates the emotional arousal in the supplication recitative. The aforesaid about the intensification generated by the ascent of certain musical attributes can be generalized to other attributes as well. As demonstrated in Figure 3, the line in the graph depicting the trend of many

Figure 2. Intensification process in four musical attributes

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musical attributes (not only the ones discussed earlier) ascends throughout the chart. These musical attributes relate to pitch height (such as average pitch height, maximum pitch height, and tessitura range) and to pitch density (such as average melodic interval, note-to-syllable ratio, syllable-to-melisma ratio, number of direction changes, and note speed). The ascent of these attributes represents the intensification which gradually arouses emotional excitement throughout the cantorial recitative. Figure 3. Summary of intensifiaction attributes in Anenu

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There are other elements that contribute to the creation of emotional arousal throughout the cantorial recitative. One of these elements is the ascent in the height of the tonic. The tonic is not (necessarily) the same height as the average pitch height and the rise of the tonic adds a further aspect of intensification to the ascent of the average pitch height and generates further emotional arousal. Another even more significant element is the change of the tonal mode. One aspect of the music that affects its emotional impact is the specific intervals in the musical scale. Studies show that dissonant intervals create an active atmosphere and emotional excitement. 55 As we shall see, cantors tend to favor modes that contain dissonant intervals. Figure 4 exemplifies the use of these elements in the Anenu composition. Firstly, the height of the tonic ascends as the cantor moves from F minor to B♭ minor. This modulation typically takes place in proximity to the supplication section and accelerates the intensification process leading to the peak of the composition. But there is an additional modulation that occurs later on in the supplication section in bar 4 of Figure 1, above. While the tonic pitch in bar 4 stays B♭, the tonal mode turns into Steiger Ahava-Raba.56 Steiger Ahava-Raba has the unique interval of the augmented second—a very dissonant interval— and it therefore generates an emotionally charged atmosphere. Here we can see how the cantor creates an emotional boost simply by shifting to a mode with more dissonant intervals. It is no wonder that this particular mode (along with the likewise dissonant Ukrainian-Dorian mode) was favored by cantors and was extensively used by golden age cantors as the tonal base for their supplication recitatives in order to make them emotionally charged. Figure 4. Tonal map of Anenu by Rapaport Bb–Ahava Raba Bb–minor F –minor

Let me briefly summarize this section. The cantorial style emphasizes the supplication elements of the prayer. It emphasizes these elements, inter alia, by using musical means that create an emotional atmosphere conducive to supplication. It generates the appropriate mood by imitating crying and weeping and by employing persistent repetitions. In addition, it generates an emotionally charged atmosphere generated by using what I termed the intensification process. 57 The aroused atmosphere, together with the

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supplicatory mood of the music gives the recitative its unique character and generates the appropriate emotional state in the listeners. Carlebach The cantorial style emphasizes a certain aspect of the prayer, the supplication motive; but this is by no means the only aspect of the prayer that Jews throughout the generations have sought to emphasize. While Jews have supplicated in prayer, they have also rejoiced, been elated, and expressed other emotions in prayer. In this section, I will examine how Jews employed music for the purpose of creating and enhancing joyous emotions in their prayer. As mentioned above, another musical genre that became increasingly popular in Ashkenazic synagogues in the twentieth century is the Carlebach Nusach. The development of the Carlebach Nusach in the later part of the twentieth century and its rapid integration into the Ashkenazic synagogue scene is a fascinating phenomenon. Owing much to Carlebach’s charismatic personality, his music became part of the mainstream of synagogue-chant in no more than a few decades. As Weidenfeld (2008, 1)58 summarizes: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994) was a prolific composer of Jewish music, a nonconformist religious figure, and a culture hero. Carlebach composed hundreds of songs which have influenced the development of liturgical and popular Jewish music of the 20th century. His many performances were a combination of song, music, dance, story-telling, ethical teachings and inspirational speeches. Carlebach’s music and teachings, live performances, records, audio and video tapes, compact discs, and literature have been disseminated in America, Israel, and all over the world. His musical style as well as its cultural and social implications significantly influenced the beliefs and lifestyles of many Jews around the world.

With regard to Carlebach’s synagogue music, Weidenfeld writes: Carlebach’s early years in Europe, influenced by his father’s function as a Chief Rabbi, exposed him to the world of synagogue prayer. Carlebach attended synagogues with different prayer traditions, and eventually composed his own Nusach. Parts of his Nusach, especially those which accompany the Friday night liturgy, have been adopted by countless congregations all over the world. … The inclusion of the Carlebach nusach into the Jewish prayer service of nearly all denominations greatly influenced the communal prayer experience … His music has attained a status of a genre and is often listed among other genres, such as cantorial, klezmer, etc. (ibid).

There are many noteworthy musical differences between the cantorial style described above and Carlebach’s music. First, in terms of its musical origins, while the cantorial style derives from the Eastern-European musical style, Carlebach’s music has the stylistic features of Western music (for example,

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tonal modes, harmonic vocabulary, and structural form). The second difference is in terms of these styles’ respective relation to the traditional chants that had formed the musical style dominating Ashkenazic synagogues in earlier years. The relation between the cantorial style and the traditional chants common throughout the Ashkenazi world since the Middle Ages—that is, the Nusach—is complex and, yet, it is clear that the cantorial style was meant to blend with the Nusach and to complement it. Cantorial recitatives sometimes use the Nusach melodies as a basis and extend the existing chants by decorating, embellishing them, and by adding solo virtuosic passages to them. Carlebach’s synagogue music, by contrast, replaces the traditional chant with simple metric melodies that are designated for the whole congregation to sing together. It is worth noting that Shlomo Carlebach himself, when he led the prayer by performing his melodies, used to combine those melodies with tunes based on the chants of the traditional Nusach (together with other elements, such as inspirational speeches). His followers, however, focused mainly on his original compositions and, therefore, what is widely practiced nowadays in Carlebach services, and is now commonly referred to as the Carlebach Nusach, is mainly a replacement of the traditional Nusach with Carlebach’s famous melodic and metric compositions. Carlebach services are famous for being charged with an electrifying atmosphere and for generating emotional excitement. The question that calls for an explanation is: how does the Carlebach Nusach emotionally move the congregation with its fairly simple, and at times even banal, music? The answer I would like to suggest is that the Carlebach Nusach generates a joyful mood and, in addition, a high emotional arousal by using simple musical means. Emotional Mood I demonstrated above that the cantorial recitative tends to generate a mood of supplication. Carlebach’s music, by contrast, is disposed to generate a lively and happy atmosphere. Carlebach melodies are usually sung in fast tempos which tend to generate, and are associated with, joy and vitality. Furthermore, many times the rhythm the melodies are written in is also a rhythm associated with similar emotions. An upbeat rhythm, an accentuated rhythm, or a dotted rhythm all tend to generate happiness, and many Carlebach melodies have rhythmic patterns which are likewise associated with this and similar emotions. Moreover, Carlebach’s songs are melodically simple and employ catchy and symmetric phrases. Usually, the melodic phrase consists of two

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periods and employs basic tonic-dominant harmonies. Simple melodic structure is another characteristic of music associated with joy and happiness59. I am using the term ‘associated with’ because, as I noted earlier, often music generates emotions by representation. The connection between simplicity, fast tempos, and certain rhythmic patterns and happiness is less transparent than the obvious connection between cry-like sighs and supplication, but it can still be explicated in natural (rather than historically contingent and arbitrary) terms.60 A fast tempo is the manner of speech of a happy person, and simple life is often equated with happiness and tranquility. 61 As in the case of cantorial music, here, too, the connection between the music and the generated emotions can be explained not only by means of theories that emphasize associative connections (like the semiotic theory or the contour theory) but also by theories that emphasize the expression of emotions by a sentient being; again, the sentient being whose emotions are conveyed is the person leading the ceremony (the performer).62 Needless to say, as in the case of cantorial music, 63 here too, Shlomo Carlebach’s overt elation in the prayers led by him corresponded with the joyful emotions that these ceremonies expressed (and, conversely, that the lack of such correspondence would have been detrimental to that atmosphere).64 Moreover, unlike the case of cantorial music, it is very obvious why people should put themselves in a situation where they experience happy emotions as a result of the music they are willingly exposed to.65 People actively seek happy emotional episodes and enjoy them. Happy emotional episodes are even described as ‘contagious’ in that being in a happy environment, in itself, makes us somewhat happy.66 The joyful emotional states that they generate are probably one further explanation of the huge popularity of Carlebach services67. There is another feature that contributes to the happy mood that the Carlebach services create, and it, too, is a result of the simplicity of Carlebach’s music. This feature is the similarity between the setting of the Carlebach prayer and other joyous events. The simple structures and harmonies of the Carlebach Nusach make it easy for the whole congregation to join in and sing along with the prayer leader (the ba’al tfila). Contrary to the cantorial singing, which is a solo performance led by a virtuosic cantor, the Carlebach services are events that call for the participation of all. On occasion, the singing is also enriched by instrumental accompaniment. This is a further dimension that widens the circle of active participants in the ceremony. The result is an ecstatic, bacchanalia-like, celebration, in which all participants take part in contributing to the success of the event and, in their turn, get inspired by it.

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The process of the audience joining in is, of course, a gradual one. A listener with a musical ear and an extrovert personality starts singing along with the leader and, slowly, other listeners join in, humming at first, then singing, and then dancing, drumming and so on. Larger parts of the audience are gradually included in the ceremony and, as a result, the scenery gradually becomes more and more similar to other merry gatherings. Eventually, the occurrence becomes reminiscent of other joyous occasions in the Jewish life-cycle: a wedding ceremony in which all participants partake in the mitzvah (commandment) to regale the newlywed couple or a bar mitzvah celebration in which the congregation introduces the young boy to adulthood. While the aforesaid sounds very similar to the semiotic theory of musical expression discussed above,68 it is clearly distinct from it. According to the iconic theory, it is the music that reminds us of an emotional episode, as when the sound of the organ reminds us of religious songs or of being in church. The music, therefore, represents, or stands for, the emotional episode. Here, by contrast, it is the scenery itself (the congregational singing) that represents or stands for the emotional episode (wedding or other religious celebrations). Indeed, it is thanks to a downright musical feature, namely, melodic simplicity, that this representation is generated (and this justifies discussing it in our context). But the connection is between the scenery (rather than the music) and the emotional episode and it is therefore more natural.69 There is another way in which the resemblance between the scenery of Carlebach services and other religious festivities enhances the generation of a happy atmosphere. As some critics note, some dynamic musical patterns (like a fast tempo or a dotted rhythm) may resemble the manifestation of several very different expressions.70 Someone talking at a fast pace may be doing this out of elation or out of growing irritation. A fast tempo, hence, does not discriminate between being happy and being irritated. The context (among other things) is what enables us to differentiate between such emotions, and the resemblance of the scenery provides us with a contextual background that allows us to interpret the fast tempo, the dotted rhythm, and so forth, as expressions of happiness.71 A typical example of Carlebach’s happy-joyful praying style and his simplistic compositional style can be found in a rare video-recording of his Hosahna-Raba morning service. 72 Carlebach is standing at the Bima (the

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prayer leader’s stand) in the middle of the synagogue, holding his guitar, and surrounded by his group of players.73 As is typical to his prayer style, instead of reciting the prayer in the ordinary Nusach chants, Carlebach uses one of his melodies to sing the text. It is a simple A-B symmetrical melody (see Figure 5), which is repeated over and over again until the text runs out, and then switches to nonsense syllables (Ay-dai-dai and so forth). 74 The singing goes on for a few minutes and gradually the typical Jewish swinging of the body in prayer becomes an organized rhythmic motion, which eventually turns into an ecstatic dance. As noted earlier, the participation of the whole congregation, the dancing, plus the occasional use of instruments (or other band-like features) makes the event resemble a celebration of a big crowd and contributes to the happy atmosphere. Figure 5. Carlebach's David Melech melody

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Emotional Arousal Like the cantorial style, Carlebach’s music too aims to produce an emotionally charged atmosphere. As I pointed out, the mood that the Carlebach music generates is a different one—happy, rather than supplicatory—but the insistence on intense emotional arousal is the same with both genres.75 While both genres aim to produce emotional arousal, the intensification mechanism that these two genres employ in order to generate

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this arousal is entirely different. Cantorial music is usually sung by a highly skilled musician. The cantor who performs the cantorial recitative—either in the synagogue or in the concert hall—is a trained professional. He is, therefore, capable of generating an intensification process by intensifying parameters that relate to the melody itself, like pitch height or pitch density. The cantor’s vocal abilities allow him to produce emotional impact through the music by employing sophisticated embellishments and high-pitched melismas. Carlebach’s music, on the other hand, is sung by the whole congregation, a mass of people that usually includes many participants who have no musical training. Their ability to produce a wide vocal spectrum that contains high notes and to accurately control and maneuver their voice in order to generate complex melismas is limited. Moreover, even skilled cantors with a good command of their voice will find it difficult to sing such complex melismas in a chorus. For those reasons, the intensification process must be generated by manipulating parameters other than pitch height and pitch density. The high emotional arousal that the Carlebach music generates is achieved by the means of increase in speed and increase in singing volume. As we said earlier, Carlebach’s music is usually sung at a fast pace, which often generates a happy mood. Along the piece, however, the tempo tends to get significantly faster. The tempo acceleration does not merely make the music happy in the same manner that the originally fast tempo produced; it also generates an emotional arousal or a greater activation, in the sense explained above.76 The fact that the music becomes louder and louder along the piece is another parameter that generates a greater activation and produces the emotionally loaded atmosphere characteristic of Carlebach’s music. It is important to note that tempo and volume are factors that tend to produce not only intense, or highly activated, emotions; they also have a tendency to produce certain discrete, or categorical, emotions. 77 Both fast tempo and loud music volume often tend to produce joyful emotions (and, indeed, Carlebach music employs a fast tempo to generate the happy mood that it aims to produce). But, in addition, fast tempo and loud music volume tend to generate an intense atmosphere, in a manner that is not necessarily related to the specific mood that the music produces. 78 Moreover, as Gabrielsson and Lindstrom point out (Gabrielsson & Lindstrom (2011, 392–392), the impact that tempo and loudness generate in terms of

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activation (the intensity of emotions) is more salient than their impact in terms of valence (joyful vs. sad music).79 The fast tempo in which Carlebach music is sung is used, therefore, not only to generate a happy mood but also to generate emotional arousal (and the same is true for the increase in the music’s volume). A typical example of this intensification process can be found in the following performance of a typical Carlebach song: Od Yishama.80 This song is usually sung in marriage celebrations but the tune is frequently set to texts of the prayer in Carlebach prayer ceremonies.81 As can be seen in Figure 6, this Carlebachean simple song is 32 bars long (symmetric, having two 16 bar sections, each divided to 8 and 4 bar phrases). The intensification process in this performance is clearly felt both in speed and in the singing volume. As can be seen in Figure 7, over time, the speed gets faster and faster. At first, there is a gradual ascent throughout the first five phrases, and then there is a speed leap to almost two times the original speed. Also, the gradual ascent of the singing volume is clearly shown in Figure 8. The increase in speed and in volume increases the emotional tension produced by the music and contributes to the creation of an atmosphere that is happy, on one hand, and emotionally charged, on the other. Figure 6. Carlebach’s Od Yishama melody

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•A M I T K L E I N • Figure 7. Speed intensification in Od Yishama

Figure 8. Volume intensification in Od Yishama

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Concluding Words By its very nature, music tries to move people emotionally. To say that a musical piece is not moving is almost tantamount to calling it “bad music.”82 Functional music, that is, music that has a certain role within an independently meaningful ritual, such as prayer, faces a further challenge. It need not only be emotionally moving; it should also move people in a certain specific way, arousing the appropriate emotional states that are conducive to furthering the values that the ritual both embeds and engenders. In this chapter, I have attempted to show how two musical styles that prevailed in the Ashkenazi synagogues over the past 150 years have purported to meet these challenges. I demonstrated how both genres employed intensification mechanisms in order to generate emotional arousal and how they both utilized musical devices in order to generate the emotional states that they considered significant to the prayer: a supplicatory emotional state in the case of the cantorial recitative and an elated emotional state in the case of the Carlebach Nusach. But there is one further criterion that music ought to meet if it is to be emotionally moving. Authors often stress that music’s emotional expressions can only be properly perceived by suitably qualified listeners. Suitably qualified listeners are those who not only hear the sounds and know how to distinguish between them and background noises; they are also familiar with—and usually form part of—the social, cultural, and artistic background in which the music is composed and played. Chinese opera is less likely to generate the same emotional impact in a Western listener as in a Chinese listener. Note, however, that being emotionally moved by music is different from appreciating it, and while it may suffice to know the syntax and dramaturgy of Chinese opera in order to appreciate it, something further is required for someone to be moved by it. This additional element is the ability to empathize with the social sensitivities that this form of art carries with it and to experience the music as though it communicates with the history and culture that shaped oneself. Bearing the above point in mind may help understand both the huge success of the cantorial recitative in Europe and in America during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as its decline and the rise of the Carlebach Nusach in Israel and in the United States over the last few decades. The supplication of the cantorial recitative struck a chord in the soul of all Diaspora Jews. The agonizing passion of the pleading cantor expressed the existential state of the needy, persecuted Jewish minority, in a manner far stronger than words. But the sorrowful mourn of the Diaspora ceased to be so

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central to the experience of Jews after the establishment of the state of Israel. While Jews around the world understand, and are fully aware of, the Jews’ long history of persecutions, those who themselves had no first-hand experience of such persecution are less likely to be moved by a composition communicating this story. Shlomo Carlebach appeared at the right point in time. Jews living comfortably and in relative security in Israel and in the established Jewish communities of the United States were looking for a new source of emotional manifestation of their personal experiences. They were looking for a fresh interpretation of the ritual and a new kind of music with which they could fully empathize. Carlebach’s musical style caters well to this need. In a remarkably perceptive manner, Shlomo Carlebach managed to decipher the cultural code of the modern Jewish community and to create a musical style reflecting the zeitgeist. Carlebach’s music is egalitarian and inclusive. It allows all members of the community to take part, actively conducting the ceremony as peers. It strengthens the communal bonds by encouraging collective action, and it celebrates the fact that the link between man and God can be directed at God’s exuberance and not only at man’s dependency. The above suggestions are, of course, speculative. It would require further ethnomusicological research (which exceeds the scope of this paper) to establish that these are indeed the causes of the decline of the cantorate and the rise of the Carlebach Nusach. What is obvious, however, is the huge success of both these genres and their ability to sway large crowds and generate intense emotional arousal. This chapter explored the means by which they succeeded in doing so. Notes 1

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According to the Talmud, the prayer ceremony came from the three founding fathers of Israel (that is, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), who established the idea of the three daily prayers (Babylonian Talmud, Brachot 26b). Since ancient times, the prayer has evolved and developed, and is nowadays more or less fixed in its structure and textual content. At first, the prayer ritual was free in form and content; however, legend has it that the 120 scholars of the Great Assembly (sages who lived during a two centuries period ending circa 70 A.D.) standardized the general text, content, and order of the ritual (Megila, 17b, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Prayer 1:4). Since then, a few additions and omissions have been made for various reasons. Also, see Reuven Kiperwasser’s chapter in this volume on the development of the concept of the heart in rabbinic literature. As is said in the Talmud (Erchin 10b): “The song prevents the sacrifice, says Rabi Meir.” Another example of the mandatory status of the music in the Jewish tradition is the following harsh statement by Rabi Yochanan: “Whoever recites without melody and

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learns without song, on him it is written (Ezekiel 20, 25): ‘So, too, I gave them decrees which are not good and ordinances whereby they should not live’” (Megila 32a). 5 6 7 8

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To give just one of numerous examples from the Bible: “And Elisha said … But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him” (Kings 2, 15, 14). Rosh Hashana 33b–34a. The mechanism of imitating the sounds of weeping and crying will be discussed in details later on in the context of the cantorial recitative. Musical sound might on other occasions generate a religiously undesirable emotional state. For example, according to Jewish law, men are forbidden to listen to female singing since the female voice is considered erva (nakedness). Shmuel said: “The voice of a woman is erva, as it is said: ‘For your voice is sweet and your face is comely’ (Song of Songs 2)” (Brachot 24a). The sages fear that the female singing voice might generate an undesirable emotional state, namely, that of lust. A typical example is the cantilation of the Torah in which the Te'amim (the small musical neumes) are considered so essential to the liturgical obligation that only a person who can recite the bible verses in a musically correct way would be considered fit to fulfill the various Torah-reading obligations. Another famous example is the misinay tune of KolNidrey, which became so closely associated with the holiness of the Day of Repentance that one cannot imagine the prayer without humming this melody. The use of the term nusach both with respect to the traditional chants that were sung in Ashkenazi synagogues since the Middle Ages and to Carlebach’s tunes might be confusing. The word Nusach in Hebrew means 'a version' and, while it originally referred to different traditions of the prayer text, it later also came to refer to different versions of traditional prayer chants. To minimize the confusion, I will use the word nusach to refer to the traditional Ashkenazi chants and will refer to Carlebach’s tunes as Carlebach Nusach. Some of these reasons are discussed elsewhere. See Schleifer (1990) and Klein (2009). The developing field of music and emotions is growing rapidly and is too broad to encompass in this paper, even in a nutshell. I will therefore focus solely on issues relevant to the musical analysis that follows. Note that there are at least two ways in which music can, for example, be happy: it may express happiness, or it may make the listeners feel happy. Technically, these forms are referred to as the distinction between perceived emotion and felt emotion. While some of my claims refer specifically to felt emotions or to perceived emotions, much of what I say applies equally to both. It is also worth noting that the emotions expressed by the music often coincide with those felt by the audience. It is precisely because of the music’s sadness that the audience feels sad. The account provided in the next few paragraphs (as well as many of the examples provided) draws heavily on Davies (2011). Theories that adhere to this account are referred to as semiotic theories. This is the iconic or the symbolic version of the semiotic theory (Davies 2011, 26–27). This is a combination (admittedly, mine) of the semiotic theory and the contour theory (Davies 2011, 31–35). According to this theory (and others in the same vein), music represents emotions in a manner that is merely referential. The only connection between the organ and religiosity is that, as it happens, the organ was played in churches; an alternative connection could equally have been created with trumpets or harps (if the tradition emanating from the Levites’ song in the Temple had prevailed).

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•A M I T K L E I N • Some versions of the semiotic theory (for instance, the iconic version or the contour theory) are less vulnerable to this objection than others because they explain the connection between music and the emotions it generates in less arbitrary terms. In the normal case, sadness has to do with someone being sad, while the semiotic theory implies that there is sadness in the air without any sentient creature being (necessarily) sad. Theories of this type are referred to as expression theories (Davies 2011, 28–29). Davies (2011, 30–31). A different version of the theory argues that the sentient being whose emotions are expressed is the listener himself. It submits that music has a certain emotional character if and only if it has the propensity to generate that emotion in an audience of qualified listeners under the normal conditions (this theory is referred to as the arousal theory (Davies 2011, 29–30)). The view that the music conveys the emotions of an imaginary persona suffers from other problems, namely, that we do not always imagine such persona when we are emotionally moved by music and that it is not clear that an imagined persona satisfies the requirement of a sentient being. There are other problems regarding the way in which music conveys emotions. First, it is not obvious why the emotions that the music expresses are normally the same emotions that the listeners feel. The expression of anger by another person does not necessarily make us angry; sometimes it makes us frightened. Another question is why the audience willingly attends concerts where sad music is played. We normally try to avoid sad emotions and our pursuit of sad music calls for an explanation. As with the other criticisms mentioned above, I will try to show that these problems also do not affect the cases that I discuss. The distinctions described in this paragraph and in the next one are common in the empirically oriented literature. My description draws mainly on Sloboda & Juslin 2011, Zentenr & Eerola 2001, and Gabrielsson & Lindstrom 2011. Theories explaining the phenomenology of emotional experience in these terms are referred to as categorical approaches. Theories of this kind often mention five basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust) although some postulate as many as 14 or 16 discrete emotions (Sloboda & Juslin (2011, 77). These approaches are referred to as dimensional approaches (ibid). There are one-, two-, and three-dimensional models (ibid). For example, according to Russell’s model, two distinct and affectively distant emotions like anger and fear are both located next to one another, both being negatively valenced and highly active (Zentenr & Eerola 2011, 199–200). It is worth noting that single-dimension models emphasize something like the arousal dimension (rather than something similar to the valence dimension), ibid. This rules out not only composed texts like operas, lieder, pieces for ballet, or other dramatic performances but also program music (such as Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique). For an overview of the Golden Age era, see chapter six “The Golden Age of Cantorial Art,” in Heskes (1994, 56), and “The Golden Age of Hazzanut,” in Edelman (2003, 127). For example, the daily Amida prayer—the major part of the three daily prayers—is designed so that the central part, named bakasha (request), comprises the various requests (such as for good health and a good livelihood), between the first and last parts named shevach (praise) and hodaya (thanksgiving). This section is also the longest, more than double in length—thirteen benedictions vs. six (Avot, Gvurot and Kedusha in the beginning praise section, and Avoda, Hoda’a and Shalom in the concluding thanksgiving section). Also, the text in the middle section is highly emotional (For example, “[heal] us, Eternal, and we

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shall be healed, save us and we shall be saved,” and “[have] pity and compassion on us and accept our prayer with compassion and favor”). In some cases the emphasis on supplication and crying becomes a decree, not merely a recommendation. For example, regarding the emotional prayer recited at the end of Ne'ila in Repentance Day, “May it be Thy will who hears the sound of cries, That Thou shalt put our tears in your flask to be, And that Thou shalt save us from cruel decrees, For to Thou alone our eyes turn” the author of Sefer Hassidim (section 250) instructs the cantor to omit these words unless he is weeping, or the congregation are weeping, for otherwise he will be lying when he is uttering “[He] who hears the sound of cries… put our tears…”. The correlation between supplication and persistence and perseverance is well known, particularly in religious contexts. For example, Midrash Raba on the verse “And I besought the LORD at that time” (Deuteronomy 3, 23), explains that Moses pleaded no less than 515 times to enter the promised land (based on the numerology of the Hebrew word vaetchanan (“And I besought”)). In his letter (Ephesians 6,18) the apostle Paul emphasizes the importance of perseverance: “[praying] always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints” (italics mine, A.K.). The perseverance is not only restricted to the text; the cantor also repeats the musical motives several times, although the repetitions are not identical, but involve small melodic variations. Slichot are penitential poems said in the period leading up to the High Holidays, and on Fast Days. The central theme throughout these prayers is God’s Thirteen Attributes of Mercy. A litany (“supplication”, in Ancient Greek) is a textual form of prayer consisting of a number of petitions in which, in each repetition, part of the phrase changes. Originally the term referred to the Christian Kyrie (Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison), but also many Jewish piutim (liturgical poems) are written in this structure (for example: Avinu malkeinu, Hosha na, Le-el orech din, and more). In this context the meaning of the term is something like ‘answer our pleas’. Those who adhere to the semiotic theory. See footnotes 15 to 20 above and the accompanying text. This is the iconic theory. See footnote 16 above and the accompanying text. The representation here can be explained not only through the iconic theory but also through the contour theory (see footnote 17 above and the accompanying text). See footnote 19 above and the accompanying text. See footnote 20 above and the accompanying text. The cantor should be someone who is virtuous and in need. For example, he should preferably be married and have dependents, over the age of 30, humble and agreeable to the congregation and so forth (Taanit 16a, Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim, 581, 1 and 53, 4). Note also that the cantor’s presence makes the association between the music and supplication even stronger. While the sighs and repetitions are features of the music, they are sung by a human cantor (rather than, for instance, by an oboe). This strengthens the association. Moreover, this also explains why the cantor should be someone agreeable to the congregation (see footnote 45 above). It is easier to sympathize with someone who is agreeable to the worshippers, and his emotions are more likely to generate the desirable effect. It goes without saying that the Jewish sages’ efforts were not always successful. For a lively description of a cantor whose prayers make the whole congregation cry and tremble

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•A M I T K L E I N • in supplication, while he himself remains unmoved, see Agnon (1968, 262–272) especially page 267. Note that even those who argue that music often generates emotions by means which are non-associative (for example, Davies 2011, 31–33; Kivy 1999, 5) generally agree that music can, and sometimes does, elicit emotions by virtue of its associative features. Hence, while I often try to demonstrate that my argument works even according to those who believe that music does not always generate emotions through associative means, it will suffice to rely on the claim that music also generates emotions through associative means, which is not very controversial. Regarding the other problems noted (see footnote 24 above), it is not surprising that the emotions expressed by the music are the same emotions that members of the congregation feel, as this seems appropriate to the situation when one supplicating person is joined by another who is in the same position. This is another reason why the cantor should be agreeable to the congregation. It is also not surprising that people put themselves in a situation where they will be overwhelmed by somewhat unpleasant and sad supplicatory emotions. Their reasons for doing so emanate from and can be explained by their religious devotion. See footnote 31 above and the accompanying text. See, for example, Gabrielsson & Lindstrom (2011) cited above. Gabrielsson and Lindstrom’s meta-research discovered that with respect to a variety of musical attributes, higher indexes tend to generate higher levels of emotional activation. In particular, this is the case with respect to the indexes mentioned hereinafter, namely, pitch height, and pitch density. Note that in doing this, I do not wish to imply that the greater arousal affects the supplicatory mood of the cantorial recitative or vice versa (nor do I wish to imply the opposite). The question of the relation between the arousal dimension of the emotional phenomenon and discrete emotions like happiness, fear and so on, is far from clear. It is widely acknowledged that the arousal dimension on its own fails to do justice to the rich phenomenology of emotional experience (see footnotes 30 above and the accompanying text). It fails to distinguish between two very different experiences like intense fear and intense happiness, for example. Some theorists—most notably Russell—have added further dimensions to the model. But, first, even after adding another dimension (such as valence) to the model, it still fails to account for the variety of emotional experience (as was acknowledged by Russell himself as noted above), and, second, it is not quite clear what the relations between the various dimensions are. For all these reasons, in discussing the intensification process in this chapter, I will not draw any relation between this process and the generation of the discrete mood of supplication described previously. For a more detailed account of the intensification process, which refers to the historical development of the intensification of various indexes and provides more details about the statistical methods, see Klein (2011). The ascent of the curve is demonstrated not only by the measured values of each attribute but also by the trend line that the curve generates. The trend line is a statistical mathematical calculation of the data used to determine whether certain measurements exhibit an increasing or decreasing tendency that is statistically distinguishable from random behavior. Here I used the Excel polynomial trend function (order 2). See Gabrielsson and Lindstrom (2011, 389–390) and in Table 14.2, 384. Steiger Ahava-Raba is a Phrygian mode with a raised second degree.

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As noted earlier (footnote 52 above), an investigation of the relations (if any) between the intensification process and the supplicatory mood of the music is not within the scope of this paper. All I can say here is that, in itself, the intensification process does not evoke supplicatory emotions in the listeners and that it is conceivable that the application of the same process against the background of a different mood might generate an altogether different range of emotions. Sarah Weidenfeld's research on Carlebach (which, to my knowledge, is the most recent and comprehensive study on this topic) deals with many aspects of Carlebach's life and music, including his biography, theological philosophy, and musical Nusach, that is, the Carlebach Nusach. The association between all of the musical features mentioned in this paragraph and happiness-related emotions is well documented. See, in general, Gabrielsson and Lindstrom's meta-research already mentioned (footnote 51 above). Specifically, on fast tempo see id. on p. 376; on upbeat tempos and dotted rhythms see Huron & Margulis (2011, 589); on melodic simplicity (and fast tempo) see Gabrielsson & Lindstrom (2011, 381). As I noted earlier (cf. footnote 43 above and the accompanying text), this is important because it helps us explain the intuition that the emotions are inside the music and not merely referred to by it. As can be seen in, for example, the radiating optimism and joyful mood of the paintings of Naïve Art painters like Henri Rousseau or Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses. The ba'al tfila's presence also makes the association between the musical features and the emotions they represent stronger. If fast tempo is associated with happiness because it is the manner of speech of a happy person, then the fast singing of a person seems to be more closely connected to happiness than, say, a fast tempo piano playing (cf. footnote 46 above). See footnote 47 above and the accompanying text. As can be seen, for example, in the recording cited below (footnote 72). See footnote 49 above. See Davies (2011, 37). And, again, as noted earlier (see footnote 24 above), it seems appropriate that the joyful emotions expressed by the music will be mirrored in the felt emotions of the congregation, as the happiness of a member of the congregation gives a reason to other members of the congregation to feel happiness (cf. footnote 49 above). Footnote 15 above and accompanying text. Cf. footnotes 41 to 43 above and the accompanying text. Davies (2011, 27–28). Needless to say, further associative impact is generated by the words, movement, and other features of the ceremony. As noted above (text in paragraph accompanying footnote 32 above), much of the writing about music and emotions focuses on absolute music, precisely because the accompanying text or narrative may serve to explain the emotional impact of the music by providing contextual reference, as it does here. The recording is an unprofessional recording of the prayer that can be found on file with the author. It may be worth noting that the use of musical instruments is untypical of Jewish ceremonial prayers. Most Jewish ceremonial prayers take place during the Sabbath or during the Holidays when the use of musical instruments is prohibited and this occasion is exceptional.

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•A M I T K L E I N • Carlebach usually does not have fixed tunes for a prayer. On the spur of the moment, he chooses a tune from his repertoire and uses it for a specific prayer. On this occasion, Carlebach’s famous David Melech composition is set to the words of the Hosahna-Raba Halel prayer “Hodu LaHashem”. This structured flexibility in the assignment of tune to text bears some resemblance to the degrees of freedom embedded in the traditional Nusach. The relation between the flexibility on one hand and rigidity on the other of the Carlebach Nusach and the traditional Nusach is a broad and complex topic that should be addressed elsewhere. For some general comments on the distinction between the mood that the music generates (or the discrete emotions it expresses) and the music’s arousal or level of activation, see text accompanying footnotes 50 to 52 above. Ibid. See more about models referring to emotion categories and models referring to dimensions of emotional affect in the text accompanying footnotes 25 to 31 above. For example, in Orwell's famous dystopia 1984, the slowly increasing volume and pace of the sound coming from the telescreen generate and facilitate the rage experienced by the masses during the Two Minutes Hate (Orwell 1950, 13–18). As I noted earlier (see footnote 52 above), I cannot, herein, examine the relations (if any) between the arousal generated by the intensification process and the evoking of basic emotions. Note, however, that contrary to what I noted in the context of cantorial music (see footnote 57 above), the same mechanism that Carlebach’s music employs in order to generate intense emotions also has the tendency to generate happiness-related emotions. Nevertheless, as the example in the beginning of this footnote demonstrates, the intense emotions generated by increase in volume and in tempo and the happy emotions generated by these features may come apart. Gabrielsson & Lindstrom (2011), pp. 392–392. The performance cited is from Weidenfeld (2008), accompanying sound disc (CD-2510). See footnote 74 above regarding the various uses of Carlebach’s tunes. It should be noted that while the recorded performance in this example is taken from a live performance, the phenomenon discussed is characteristic of prayers sung in Carlebach services and the intensification process described herein applies equally in the context of a synagogue prayer. Another point that is worth noting is that the use of wedding songs’ tunes in prayer is another means by which Carlebach services generate resemblance to wedding ceremonies and produce a happy atmosphere. Cf. Kivy (1999, 9).

Bibliography Davies, S. 2011. “Emotions expressed and aroused by music: philosophical perspectives.” In Handbook of music and emotions, edited by P. Juslin, & J. Sloboda, 15–44. Oxford : Oxford University Press. Edelman, M. B. 2003. Discovering Jewish music. Philadelphia: The Jewish publication society. Gabrielsson, A., & Lindstrom, E. 2011. “The role of structure in the musical expression of emotions.” In Handbook of music and emotions, edited by P. Juslin, & J. Sloboda, 367–400. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heskes, I. 1994. Passport to Jewish Music: Its History, Traditions, and Culture. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

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Huron, D., & Hellmuth, M. 2011. “Musical Expectancy and Thrills.” In Handbook of music and emotions, edited by P. Juslin, & J. Sloboda, 575–604. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kivy, P. 1999. “Feeling the Musical Emotions.” British Journal of Aesthetics , 39 (1), 1–13. Klein, A. 2009. The Musical Supplication in the Ashkenazic ‘Golden Age of Chazonus’. (Ph.D diss. Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University). ———. 2011. “Musical Supplication in the Golden Age of Ashkenazi Cantorial Art.” Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online , 9, 201–224. Orwell, G. 1950. 1984. New York: Pengium Group. Schleifer, E. 1990. “Fifty Years of Cantorial Art in Israel.” Duchan , 15, 15–26. Sloboda, J., & Juslin, P. 2011. “At the interface between the inner and the outer world: psychological perspectives.” In Handbook of music and emotions, edited by P. Juslin, & J. Sloboda, 73–98. Oxford: University Press. Weidenfeld, S. 2008. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s musical tradition in its cultural context: 1950–2005. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University. Werner, E. 1976. A Voice Still Heard...: The Sacred Song of the Ashkenazic Jews. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Yosef, A. S. 1968. Bridal Canopy. New York: Schocken Books. Zentenr, M., & Eerola, T. 2011. “Self-report measures and models.” In Handbook of music and emotions edited by P. Juslin, & J. Sloboda, 187–222. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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here has been a great deal of focus on Jewish bodies, and even Jewish eros in recent years. Something that is missing from these studies is a plain language approach that explores the way bodily and biological rhythms are inflected, affect, and are affected by “cultural” rhythms. Music and ritual tap into, or are an intrinsic part of, a dynamic interaction taking place between emotional bodies. Or, to put it another way, they are part of an intersubjectivity of emotion at the core of all social interaction among humans and some other animals. In this chapter, we propose that the time sequence in the oscillation between major and minor modes in the Jewish liturgy helps encode culturally salient memories. Both natural and cultural rhythms are a common feature of human experience. In a recent study by Rutishauser, Ross, Mamelak, and Schuman (2010), the team was able to record single neurons in active human subjects. The team found that subjects held stronger memories when individual neurons fired synchronously, or were “phase locked” with the “theta wave,” a pattern of neuronal population firings in the brain with the frequency of 3–8 Hz. In other words they found that, “successful memory formation in humans is predicted by a tight coordination of spike timing with the local theta oscillation” (903). We argue that there is an analogy, and possibly a physiological link between the findings of this study and our own. Our argument is that cultural memories are more strongly encoded when they fit with the oscillation pattern of the liturgy and we examine the Shabbat cycle as one particular example. We want to be clear from the start that our analysis is not meant to be an explanation of the ritual in the strong sense of giving the necessary and sufficient conditions for it. Our argument is descriptive in the sense we are trying to describe how memories are encoded in Jewish liturgy and to determine whether these correlate with the emotional and musical cycles that develop during Shabbat.

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We focus in particular on the notion of time. Not only does the ritual interlace the real time of its action sequence with the virtual time of the narratives represented in the Torah, time and timing are also extremely important with regard to emotional and musical synchronization. We find that the basic alteration between major and minor modes acts as a kind of metronome for the ritual process and as a focus for attention. We argue further that it is this rhythm of the service that leads to entrainment. In particular the entrainment concerns training participants attention. It is a way of letting people know some type of transition in the ritual is taking place. Based on our pilot study in Berlin in February 2010, our broader project, of which this chapter is one element, seeks in part to examine how rabbinical views on religious sentiment are related to today’s ritual and musical performances throughout synagogue worship. We draw on methods from cognitive religious studies as well ethnomusicology. The data presented in this chapter is based on an initial pilot study in Berlin, consisting of a narrative interview with chazzan Jalda Rebling (Feb. 19th 2010) and of participant observation during a full 24-hour Shabbat cycle in the “Synagoge Pestalozzistrasse”. Further data has been collected in email-interviews with Jalda Rebling’s former teacher, Chazzan Jack Kessler from Philadelphia, as well as in personal conversations with psychologist Sharon Alexander from Basel, Switzerland, and Daniel Boyarin, Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. In the first part of the chapter, we will present some general ritual and musical knowledge on the Shabbat liturgy, while discussing the “ideal way” of conducting the Shabbat liturgy and creating a meaningful religious/emotional Shabbat experience as it has been presented to us in the interview with Jalda Rebling. In the second part of the chapter we will discuss the emotional and cognitive development within the Shabbat liturgy. In doing so, we will compare the information of the first part of the chapter to our findings of the synagogue service we attended in Berlin. The last part of the paper provides an outlook for future research. Note on the Method Emotion is notoriously difficult to “measure.” We chose to focus on the most basic source of data for entrainment studies set out by Clayton, Sager, and Will (2004): that is, through introspection and ethnographic investigation, gathering reports of “affect” and “emotional response” (23), recording some “musical sound” (we asked to record a video of the ritual but this was not allowed), and visible physical behavior. In the ongoing process of our study we hope to gather this data more systematically (both temporally and spatially)

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and include the fourth source of data they describe, namely, “physiological processes,” which perhaps provide the best “objective” measures for emotion and embodied cognition. In the Wilderness Entrainment and timing processes are probably ubiquitous phenomena in rituals throughout the world, but they take on their own characteristics in the Jewish case. We argue that there is a physiological and emotional pulse to the 24-hour Shabbat cycle that is determined by the oscillation between the major and minor modes in the liturgy, as well as by the intensification within the performance of each mode. Time and timing is a major conceptual focus during Shabbat and in many other Jewish rituals. As the “day of rest,” Shabbat is not necessarily out of time but requires the body to take up an entirely different emotional and physiological routine in relation to the hustle and bustle of the work week— hearkening back to life in the Garden of Eden. Shabbat is sacred, in part, because it is a sacrifice of time that could otherwise be used more “productively.” As Judith Shulevitz notes in her recent book The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a different order of time (2010), the contrast between work and rest is especially significant in the 21st century, when time feels like it is contracting; we feel like we have less and less time to do more and more. Shabbat, she notes, is about letting go, letting the world run its course without pushing our own agency and mastery upon it. It is a vision of the “World to Come” in this respect, in the sense that in death we give up mastery of the world and let go. It is also interesting that according to Jewish sages the rest that takes place on the Sabbath also applies to God.1 The Sabbath is stipulated in none other than the fourth commandment, right after the stipulations with regard to God and his representation, and right before the rest of the social stipulations. The Sabbath thus sits betwixt and between heaven and earth. It was a radical idea at the time, for its prohibitions even applied to slaves and animals. In Torah, the rationale for the Sabbath involves sympathy and solidarity with slaves (especially in the book of Deuteronomy) and is part of the recognition that Israel was once enslaved in Egypt (Deut. 5:14–15). In this case, the Sabbath is a central example of what Shulevitz, calls the “social morality of time” (Shulevitz 2010, 11). It is worth noting further the derivation of the term “work” (‫) ְמלָאכָה‬. In Genesis 2:2, God completes his “work” on the sixth day and stops it on the seventh. The word Shabbat is derived from the word for God’s desisting in this work; that is, ultimately Shabbat means to STOP. The term for “work” is

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related to and probably derived from the verbal root (‫”—)לאך‬to send”—which is the same root for the words for messenger and angel (one who is sent). Work in this context thus involves a sense of agency, of sending (probably one’s hand or one’s angels, as it were) out to do something, while rest entails the opposite.2 We want to emphasize and focus on the role of Shabbat in the rhythm of Jewish life. Calendrical time synchronizes the social body, allowing everyone to “be on the same page.” Weekly and daily ritual cycles perhaps have a more immediate effect. In the case of Shabbat, it comes without fail every seven days; that is, six days and then a rest. This rhythm sets up, especially in children, bodily and emotional expectations, that enhance the entrainment of individuals who participate in the rituals. As Shulevitz rightly notes, the rabbis in the Talmud had some rather interesting discussions about this basic rhythm of social life. The rhythm was connected to the very essence of creation, it was a way to model human time on the cosmic time of creation, but there were some ambiguous questions that legal minds needed answered. The two Talmuds have slightly different versions of the debate. In the Bavli it comes in Tractate Shabbat 69b. R. Huna and Hiyya bar Rab debate the question: if one is lost in wilderness and looses track of the date, should one observe the Sabbath the following day and then go six days before the next Sabbath or wait six days first and then observe it on the seventh? R. Huna went with the first option while Hiyya bar Rab thought the second. The Talmud puts the difference between the two options this way: “One authority enumerates in accord with the creation of the world, the other counts in accord with the creation of the first man [his first complete day was the Sabbath (Freedman)]” (see The Babylonian Talmud, Neusner 2006). In other words, man was created on the sixth day of creation, so his first full day was actually a day of rest. So Hiyya bar Rab’s option follows the perspective of man while R. Huna’s follows God’s. The Babylonian Talmud favors the more lofty option and eventually sides with R. Huna. In Talmud Yerushalmi, Rab and Samuel have the same answer as R. Huna, “another” has Hiyya bar Rab’s but a third response is presented as well, coming from R. Isaac bar Eleazar in the name of R. Nahman bar Jacob, in what might be called the Shabbat elevator solution to the problem: “He counts six days and observes the Sabbath, five and observes the Sabbath, four and observes the Sabbath, three and observes the Sabbath, two and observes the Sabbath, one and observes the Sabbath” (See The Jerusalem Talmud, Neusner 2006). This is probably the most fastidious answer and least likely in making a mistake. There is some debate about whether this option makes sense because it does not guarantee one would observe the Sabbath on the

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right day. To prevent this problem, the only solution is to regard the Sabbath as every day. But then, how would one eat? (Yerushalmi Shabbat III 3A) These varying rhythms of social life, or meters if you will—six beats and rest, rest and six beats, six then rest, five then rest, four than rest, etc.—enunciate the fact that what matters to the rabbinic mind is not the particular day the Sabbath falls on but the pattern and the timing. Since human beings do not have an independent mental faculty that is especially committed to the perception of time, they are dependent on tools, such as music to perceive time and rhythm. Music has the ability to order and organize time, and thus to coordinate and synchronize activities of a group of people engaged in performing a collective task, such as the Shabbat ritual (see Clarke et al. 2009, 102). That is why music plays a central role within Jewish ritual and why Jews have and always had strong feelings about music. Within the lived-in world of Jewish communities today, the singing of Jewish ritual music and Nusach (the Jewish prayer modes) serves the basic cognitive and emotional function of synchronizing the collectivity within the actual time of the synagogue service, as well as within the virtual time when referring to Jews from other places and times, and thus to a shared cultural, historical, and religious memory. Time/Timing is thus a key element in the Jewish weekly ritual. Many years ago Blacking ([1973] 2000) noted what Stravinsky stated in his biography, that “music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time” (26). Blacking goes on to state that, every culture has its own rhythm, in the sense that conscious experience is ordered into cycles of seasonal change, physical growth, economic enterprise, genealogical depth or width, life and afterlife, political succession, or any other recurring features that are given significance. We may say that ordinary daily experience takes place in a world of actual time. The essential quality of music is its power to create another world of virtual time (26–27).

It is precisely this relation between ritual timing, music and emotion that we are interested in exploring in the Jewish case. Although some pivotal work on religion, cognition and culture, and thus on the relation between religion and the emotions has been done within the field of religious studies, as e.g. by Lawrence Barsalou (et al. 2003/2005), Peter Deeley (2004) and John Corrigan, Eric Crump and John Kloos (see Corrigan et. al. 2000), detailed studies on the meaning of emotions in Judaism are still missing. A number of ethnomusicologists, such as Ellen Koskoff (2001), Mark Slobin (1989) or Jeffry Summit (2000) and others provide us with rich and deeply layered case studies

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of Jewish ritual music. But there is a crucial lack in music scholarship addressing the interplay between Jewish ritual music and its performances while focusing on this interaction. Furthermore the question how this creates emotional and spiritual ebbs and flows during synagogue service, which in turn also generates strong feelings about Jewish ritual music itself, remains yet to be addressed. In other words, further research on how Jewish ritual music induces emotions is needed. There is an irony to the study of emotion within the study of Judaism, represented by the recent contribution by Joel Gereboff to the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2008) in that many of the scholars still focus on literary representations of emotions in Judaism rather than getting, as it were, to the heart of the issue in terms of real human beings feeling emotions in the context of Jewish life. This chapter takes steps to correct this problem. Musical Tools As Ekman’s (see 1999) studies have shown, at a basic level human beings share many physiological expressions of emotion, but what about music? Are emotions consciously conveyed through a musical composition, or as in this particular case through Jewish ritual music, understood by all Jews throughout the world? Within common Jewish belief and traditional religious practice, the answer is probably yes. This can best be studied when looking at the music of the Shabbat liturgy, which has a distinct character and creates a certain atmosphere and spirit throughout the ritual succession of Shabbat day. During the interview with chazzan Jalda Rebling, who is a Jewish Renewal trained cantor living and working in Berlin, it became obvious that there exists—at least among Jewish Renewalists—a common understanding of an “ideal way” to conduct a Shabbat service that considers the role of emotions in the interplay between ritual practice and music. In general, the music of the synagogue can be divided into simple Nusach, the Jewish prayer modes, cantillation of the liturgical text, cantorial chanting and metrical songs, socalled zemirot. Within this context, particularly the Jewish prayer ‘modes’ 3 are used as both a musical as well as an emotional tool. Nusach originated as a textual, not a musical term, and implies, according to Mark Slobin, much more than either text or tune, but a “way of life” (Slobin 1989, 260). Being aware of the diverse definitions of the term used within musicological discourse, one of the most concise descriptions of Nusach is given by musicologist Judit Frigyesi who explains: “Nusach means something like ‘the traditional way (of singing) according to the given liturgical function and local custom’… And whereas

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metric tunes can be replaced or omitted, nusach is indispensable—without it there is no ritual” (Frigyesi 1993, 69). Each mode is composed of a certain scale and a varying set of motifs. Although the term Nusach is difficult to define,4 musically speaking, it is (at least within Eastern European tradition) used to describe how the liturgy (certain groups of prayers and sections of the synagogue service) has to be intoned. The concept of Nusach thus includes the basic musical content of the prayer modes. However, according to Sholom Kalib (2002) quantitative and qualitative elements of the Jewish prayer modes can be identified (Kalib 2002, 92–101). While the quantitative elements, such as scales and motifs, can be presented in musical notation, the qualitative elements, such as mood, atmosphere, and emotionally engendered nuances, cannot be notated. The latter are primarily determined by the literal meaning, religious message, and significance of the sacred texts, which are in turn related to a particular religious occasion. The qualitative elements of Nusach are thus also determined and influenced by social, cultural, economic, political and historical circumstances of the Jewish community (ibid.). Thus, Kalib’s explanations of Jewish musical modality corresponds to Boaz Tarsi, who stated that a complete definition of nusach depends crucially on the practical application and arrangement of all of the musical components within the appropriate context of a variety of extra-musical factors. These are primarily text, time of the day, calendar […], occasion, and ritual (Tarsi 2002, 178).

Within the (traditional) synagogue service the cantor intones the ending and sometimes also the beginning lines of single prayers, indicating the place and setting the pace of the service (Summit 2006, 272). But beyond being a symbol of traditional and “authentic” Jewish ritual music that identifies and situates a particular religious and musical moment—and also a particular location—Nusach is meant to create a certain sentiment throughout synagogue service (see Slobin [1989] 2002, 260). In other words, there is an emotional correspondence of the tune to the season, or a particular holiday. In this sense, Chazzan Jack Kessler defines Nusach as follows: A nusach is a gestalt of scale, typical motives, and mood, whereby these modes and their melodic component motives […] are generally accepted as normative tradition for the part of the service where used. Nusach is not musical settings; it is an improvisational medium within which the hazzan, or for that matter any davenner, expresses the inspiration of the words. Thus, every nusach came from someone’s musical imagination and was applied to texts. In the case of nusach, it is more likely that there were multiple imaginations in different places and times (Email-interview with Jack Kessler, June 3rd 2010).

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Although prayer in Judaism consists of several musical settings, reaching from modal chants to choral arrangements, each of which are meant to intensify the quality or theme of the prayer text and/or particular time of the Jewish calendar (Friedmann 2012, 3), and being aware that Jewish liturgical music is much more complex than presented here, the following parts of the article will focus especially on two particular Nusachot that are central to Kabbalat Shabbat, Shabbat Ma’ariv and Shaharit: namely Adonai Malach (which is based on a mixolydian mode) and Magen Avot (which is based on an aeolian minor mode). Both modes are meant to convey the particular Shabbat spirit. While the Adonai Malach mode derives from Pentateuchal cantillation, Magen Avot derives from the cantillation of the Prophets, the Haftarah (Heskes 1971, 114). A third mode, which is mainly used in weekday services, only appears at the Amida and Musaf prayer throughout the Shaharit, the Saturday morning service. It is another minor mode called Ahavah Rabah, meaning “great love”, which is sometimes also referred to as Freygish (Phrygian). The Ahavah Rabah mode is characterized by oriental-sounding scale and the ‘typically Jewish sounding’ interval of an augmented second.5 With regard to the argument of this chapter, the importance of Nusach does not primarily lie in the musical structure of each scale itself, but in the dramaturgical way these modes are used throughout the 24-hour Shabbat cycle; in other words, how Nusach is used to induce a certain mood and emotions. Or, as Mark S. Goodman puts it: “the nusach patterns of the Jewish worship service are an essential element of the foundation upon which the service is built. They serve to connect the sensitive congregant to the emotion of the holiday [Shabbat included] and to complement the text” (Goodman 2012, 30, accentuation in original). According to former research on music and emotion, it is “difficult to find direct and simple links between musical features and emotions” and “musical features must rather be related to possible induction mechanisms” (Juslin 2009, 134). Such an inductive mechanism is the constant alternation between major and minor modes within the Shabbat liturgy that involves a perpetual change between faster and slow tempo, as well as between higher and lower pitch (cp. Post and Huron 2009, Huron 2008).6 Entrainment is usually understood as the synchronization of two or more independent rhythmic processes. Against this background, the two independent rhythmic processes are the music, and—through the ritual—the cognitive and emotional states of the individual participants. This occurs through the constant change between the two Nusachot, Adonai Malach (major) and Magen Avot (minor), which are characterized by a free and

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“flowing rhythm” (see Frigyesi, 193). Or as Clarke, Dibben, and Pitts (2009) put it: “the notion that music is a form of entrainment is tantamount to saying that music is a means for people to alter their mood: to be entrained is to be pleasurably stimulated, and mood can be understood as a state of arousal (energy) with a particular valence (positive or negative)” (90). How this becomes relevant in the course of the 24-hour Shabbat cycle will be shown subsequently. On Shabbat and Its Music The Jewish day of rest is meant to bring sweet peace and is moreover considered a delight and day of good cheer. The latter understanding goes back to Isaiah’s injunction, saying: “And you shall call the Shabbat a delight” (Isaiah 58:13). Against this background, and throughout Jewish history, music has always been considered the chief aid toward the realization of Isaiah’s command. However, among other biblical references, the most obvious link between the observation of Shabbat and music is given in Psalm 92, which is commonly known as the special “Psalm for the Shabbat day” and which is chanted in the Shabbat eve liturgy (Kabbalat Shabbat). The psalm begins with the Hebrew words Mizmor Shir, which both mean “song”. Accordingly, the rabbinical interpretation says that the day of Shabbat is full of song and praise, and so is to be a delight (cp. Heskes 1971, 97 et seqq.). Furthermore, the first stanza of the psalm contains much musical terminology, such as asor (a tenstringed instrument), nevel (a large harp), higgayon (meditative music), kinnor (a small harp) and aranan (which means “I shall sing” or “I shall be joyful”). Beyond that, it is incumbent on Jews to bless Shabbat with their mouth (see Heskes 1971, 98). The fulfillment of the commandment is given by the men’s reading of the weekly Torah portion as well as of the Prophets (Haftarah) throughout Shaharit (the Shabbat morning service). These texts have to be read “with a sweet voice” (or tune), which means that they have to be sung to certain cantillation modes, which is also relevant for all liturgical texts, such as prayers, which are sung to Nusach. Generally speaking, that is why music and rhythmic speech (chanting) is used in Jewish prayer, and why music is an integral part of the celebration and of the very spirit of the Shabbat day. The command to keep and bless the Shabbat is also the reason why more than the usual amount of singing characterizes the Shabbat service in synagogue (see Heskes 1971, 97–99, Steinsaltz 2000, 104–107). Closely related to this singing, and moreover to the function and meaning of music within the Shabbat liturgy, is the Kabbalistic idea of the Neshama Yeterah: the

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additional soul, also referred to as “the Shabbat soul,” that descends upon the one who observes the Shabbat day according the law. Throughout Jewish (music) history, the mystical ideas of the Kabbalah not only had a significant influence to the development of Jewish ritual music—within and outside of Chassidic contexts—but have also been associated with Shabbat. Thus, it is believed that the Neshama Yeterah can only be attained through song on Shabbat (cp. Heskes 1971, 100). Shabbat in Berlin You would not notice Synagoge Pestalozzistrasse, if you did not know it was there. If you knew something about violence against Jewish sacred sites in Europe you might know something was going on there by the two uniformed German police standing outside in their green puffy jackets and the two cleancut young fellows with an Israeli demeanor standing next to them. Once you pass through the metal detector you enter a door on an opposite courtyard and find your way into the synagogue proper. The synagogue is reminiscent of a large theatre with a seating section upstairs and three main seating sections below. The women are supposed to sit upstairs or on the two side seating areas downstairs. In front of the pews is the bema with a large desk, and in front of that the curtain within which the Torah scrolls are kept. At sundown on Friday, Shabbat begins. People file in to the synagogue, perhaps sixty people, with more coming in throughout the service. Many are probably coming from their jobs that day. There are few children and many elderly people. In strictly orthodox communities some Jews pray three times a day. At Pestalozzistrasse, most of the people who attend probably only attend the Shabbat service, either on Friday or on Saturday, and not the rest of the week. The Shabbat service is an extended form of the standard evening service. In addition, on Friday evenings, a blessing is said especially for the Sabbath candles (prayers are also said for the bread and wine, but this happens other days of the week as well). This ritual marks the beginning of Shabbat, the point of transition into ritual time. The prayer that is said is the standard blessing, thanking God for the commandments and especially the commandment to hold a Sabbath. The Rhythms of Shabbat The Shabbat liturgy actually starts with the Friday Minhah prayer, which is the afternoon prayer that has the function of preparing the worshipper for ushering in the Shabbat. On Shabbat eve, the custom is to link together the

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Minhah and the Ma’ariv, the evening prayers, in one continuous time flow, while utilizing the interval between them for Kabbalat Shabbat, which is the welcoming and reception of actual Shabbat (cp. Steinsaltz 2000, 107). Kabbalat Shabbat literally means “receiving the Shabbat”. Aside from welcoming the community, the basic function of the Kabbalat Shabbat service is to create the transition from secular into “sacred” time, and thus from work to rest. It is the time when the worshipping community “dives into Shabbes” as chazzan Jalda Rebling described it (personal interview with Jalda, Feb. 19th, 2010). In order to convey this feeling, the Kabbalat Shabbat liturgy is sung to certain Nusachot and moreover follows one of the most complicated musical maneuvers that are used within prayer chants to change the mood and mode during synagogue service.7 So, the Kabbalat Shabbat service is made up of six plus one psalms, starting with psalms 95 to 99 and psalm 29. These psalms represent the six-weekdays and have to be recited with an elevated spirit and joyful enthusiasm (see Steinsaltz 2000, 108). According to tradition, these psalms are sung to Nusach Adonai Malach (literally: “God reigns”), which is said to suggest the sweet peace and rest attitude of Shabbat and signifies Israel as “the Prince of God”. The Adonai Malach mode consists of a major scale with a lowered (minor) seventh and tenth.8 Because of its majestic feel, this prayer mode is used for services that require a grand atmosphere, such as the first part of the Kabbalat Shabbat liturgy. In this particular context, the Adonai Malach mode helps the Jews to extricate themselves from the mire of the weekdays and work life, and to put on their Shabbat clothing. More precisely, this mode is meant to prepare for the receipt of the Neshama Yeterah, the additional Shabbat soul (see Heskes 1971, 101 et. seqq.). When Psalm 29 is chanted, the cantor switches in the middle of the psalm from the Adonai Malach mode into a minor mode, namely Magen Avot (or as Rebling puts it: “the Friday evening minor”)—the second prayer mode used in the Shabbat liturgy, which primarily appears in the Ma’ariv, the Friday evening service. Following psalm 29, the cantor moves back to the Adonai Malach mode and the whole congregation sings the famous piyyut (liturgical poem) “Lecha Dodi”, which is a song of praise of the Shabbat day, of deep devotion, and of the bond between man and God (see Steinsaltz 2000, 108). After “Lecha Dodi”, the seventh, special psalm for Shabbat, Psalm 92 is chanted—namely, in the same minor mode as the second half of Psalm 29. The Kabbalat Shabbat service now directly moves into the Ma’ariv. According to Chazzan Rebling, the Friday evening prayer marks the reconnection of the Jews with God, their Jewish heritage and roots, what might

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have induced Abraham Z. Idelsohn (1992) to call the Magen Avot mode “the deepest expression of the Jewish soul” (as quoted in Heskes 1971, 114). The Ma’ariv service communicates the message “Now, it’s Shabbes!”: the feeling of leaving behind weekly secular time and being present within “sacred” time.9 Musically, it is characterized by the use of the Magen Avot mode (literally: “Shield of our Fathers”). This mode is an aeolian minor scale comprised of distinctive melodic motives and cadential phrases. Although it is in minor, this mode is not meant to induce sadness (a sentiment forbidden at Shabbat), which is commonly attributed to minor. Instead the minor mode must be understood in relation to the other modes throughout the liturgy, especially the major. The emotion is not sadness but serenity or calmness. Because of its simplicity, it has the function to create a spirit of rest and to reflect the peaceful atmosphere of Shabbat. This mode is the musical carrier of the prayer texts of the Ma’ariv and continues through the half Kaddish (the prayer on the magnification and sanctification of God’s name) before the Amida, instilling the chanting of the Friday evening with peacefulness appropriate to the spirit of Shabbat (cp. Davidson 1996, 57).10 The Amidah (the standing prayer), also known as the Sh’moneh Esre, is the core of every Jewish prayer service and consists of a three-part-structure of praise, petition, and thanksgiving. Here, the cantor switches the modes again, namely from Magen Avot back into the Adonai Malach mode. In doing so, the cantor musically and emotionally already sets the stage for the Shabbat morning service, the Shaharit.11 The Shaharit is the heart and centerpiece of the whole 24-hour Shabbat cycle as well as of all services of the week. It is a time without any rush, and thus a time at which the cantor has the chance to devote himself to melodic interpretation and dramatic musical flourishes, in order to convey the majestic feeling of the liturgy, and to create an ecstatic experience among the worshippers (Goodman 2012, 39). Until the reciting of the Shaharit Amidah, the minor mode Ahavah Rabah predominates the musical structure of the service. As the cantor tends to express his deep devoutness and firm faith in God by the use of this mode, it is no coincidence that the Ahavah Rabah mode is set to the Shabbat morning liturgy (ibid.).12 Just before the Torah scroll is taken out of the ark and is raised to be displayed to the people, the cantor returns to the major mode Adonai Malach. Within the whole Shabbat ritual, this is a very important and solemn moment that is accompanied by the majestic character of the Adonai Malach mode. The same mode is also used during the Torah service, the following reading, and during Torah study. According to chazzan Jalda Rebling, the focus of the Shaharit service lies in the excitement of the Torah study, and in

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the emotional teaching of the weekly Torah portion. After the Torah study and the reciting of further prayers, Psalm 29 is chanted again in the Adonai Malach mode while the Torah is brought back into the ark. The synagogue service now moves into the Musaf, which is a prayer in addition to the three usual daily prayers, and which is recited on days on which an additional sacrifice was offered in the Temple, such as on Shabbat (Steinsaltz 2000, 400). Up to this point, the Saturday morning service is predominated by the use of the Adonai Malach mode. We observed a prominent change in the musical mood during the afternoon prayer service, the Minha. The Minha service is supposed to be a time of complete rest.13 The atmosphere of the Minha service is described by Steinsaltz (2000) as a “time of calm and conciliation, of serenity and complete relaxation, accompanied by spiritual thirst and longing, as the pinnacle of all Shabbat yearnings” (116). Another aspect here is that the atmosphere of the Minha service is also characterized by the sorrow over the departure of central figures in the Jewish history (namely Joseph, Moses, and David), who passed away at this time. Accordingly, the formulations of the Shabbat Minha prayer and the musical mode set to these prayers are highly influenced by this atmosphere. Thus, a very unique Nusach for Shabbat Minha is used, which is a variation of the Magen Avot mode. This particular mode is of a very “laid-back” character, as chazzan Rebling puts it, and thus reflects the peaceful atmosphere of Shabbat. This service is, according to Rebling, focused on the so-called Menuha Shelama, of “the taste of the world to come”. 14 The Minha is completed by the Seudat Shlishit, the Third Meal, which gives some additional time for Torah reading and discussion, and is thus about being together, sharing stories and food, while the sun is going down and Shabbat draws to a close. Throughout the three Shabbat meals, but particularly during the Seudat Shlishit, it is a custom to sing so-called zemirot, joyful table songs that are sung in honor of the Shabbat.15 The Ma’ariv on Motza’ei Shabbat then follows, which is the conclusion of Shabbat. Here, psalms are recited again, in order to escort out Shabbat with dignity. One particular feature here is that the Ma’ariv prayers are recited in a “slow melody, so as to prolong the transition from the holy to the profane, and to show how difficult it is for us to part with the Shabbat” (Steinsaltz 2000, 118). Another musical feature of the Ma’ariv is that the cantor switches into weekday Nusach, in order to foreshadow the transition from sacred to secular time (ibid.).

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The actual departure of Shabbat is marked by the Havadalah, the “separation-ritual”. This ritual gives emphasis to the sanctity and exclusivity of Shabbat by making a distinction and separation between Shabbat and the weekday. Just as Shabbat had been greeted upon her arrival in the Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony, so she has to be escorted out. This parallelism is expressed in the very structure of the Havdalah and the details of the customs, such as the lightning of a candle, as well as in the music. As a matter of fact, there is always a great deal of singing at the outgoing of Shabbat, primarily Kabbalistic and nostalgic tunes, as the singing indicates the accompanying of the Shabbat Bride back to her residence where she would remain until her return on the following Shabbat. Together with the Shabbat Bride, also the Neshama Yeterah, the additional soul, departs. The loss of this soul leads to a feeling of weakness and lowered vitality, thus the smelling of the spices at the end of the Havdalah is meant to revive the body and soul, and to give strength for the week to come. After the Havdalah, songs dealing with the coming of the Prophet Elijah delivering Israel from exile are sung (see Steinsaltz 2000, 120 et. sqq.; Heskes 1971, 113 et. sqq.). To sum up: typically, the Shabbat liturgy is either sung to the Adonai Malach or the Magen Avot mode, with a rather short but prominent interruption by the use of the Ahavah Rabah mode on Saturday morning. According to the tradition, these Nusachot are not only meant to create a general mood of peace and rest, but also to relax the mind, to raise the worshipper to a higher spiritual level and to lead her toward a deeper concentration in devotion. In addition, it can be observed that the cantor moves several times between those modes, between major and minor, the feeling of majesty and calmness respectively. This musical technique is labeled as Yishtabach Maneuver, which is meant to lend a particular feeling of grandeur to the Shabbat liturgy. Next to the seven day rhythm of the week and the musical pattern created by the oscillating use of the Jewish modes, Judit Frigyesi states that “the melodic-modal system, the nusah, cannot be understood without the system of rhythmic styles” (Frigyesi 1993, 70). In other words, the process of synchronization and entrainment among the worshippers also significantly depends on Nusach in terms of melodies that are exclusively characterized by a flowing rhythm, which Frigyesi describes as a “rhythmic structure without clear beat” (ibid., 67, 69). In Jewish ritual music, the melody sung to the prayer texts is by no means fixed, but left to improvisation. And so the rhythmic contour is shaped spontaneously, while following the current emotional state

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of the precentor, who in turn is influenced by the mood of the service evoked by the prayer texts and the actual occasion. Entrainment: Talk to the Universe We adopted the following figure from an image, called “Talk to Universe,”16 which we received from an informant, a cantor whom we asked to explain the relation between Jewish liturgy and Jewish music in the course of a synagogue liturgy. It represents the emotional development and musical flow of the Shacharit or morning service. In Jewish Kabbalah, which emerged out of ancient theosophical and gnostic traditions combined with Biblical terminology, the primal man is called Adam Kadmon. He is primal in the sense that he provides the blueprint for every created human being. But Adam Kadmon is also the blueprint for the whole of creation and a model for understanding God. The tetragrammaton is the four letter name of God found in the Hebrew Bible. The word came to take on mystical significance later and eventually was only pronounced by the high priest in Jerusalem once a year on the Day of Atonement. Later mystics consider the name itself to be a model of the divine man. Yud forms the head, Heh the shoulders, Vav the back, and Heh the legs. In this model there is a homology between the body of the corporate group and the body of the individual. We have adopted the slide for a similar purpose to illustrate the emotional development throughout the Shabbat day, and we have included the parts of the service that switch between the two musical modes (Figure 1). Though we do not endorse the image as an explanation for the ritual process we observed, we consider it useful as a hermeneutic tool. The reason for this is because the figure derives from Kabbalistic traditions that seek to reincorporate the body into cognition. Kabbalah is quite focused on, and explicit about, the dynamic and interpersonal space of emotion we discussed at the outset of this chapter, and thus we believe it cannot be ignored in the present discussion. Corresponding to the presented model of the four worlds (“Talk to Universe”), and thus also corresponding to the data collected in the interview with Jalda Rebling, the Berlin worshippers’ concentration and emotional connection to the liturgy was, at the beginning of each of the Shabbat services, at a very low level. So was the congregation’s participation in communal singing, even though the ritual music itself is, according to traditional belief, constructed to raise higher attention and tune the worshipper into the spirit of Shabbat.

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In contrast, at the point of the Shabbat service when the Sh’ma Yisrael was recited (which occurs in the four-world-model shortly before the Amidah, and thus before the service reaches its zenith), a higher level of concentration and participation among the worshippers could be observed. According to tradition, the Sh’ma has to be recited with highest concentration, and even the unknowledgeable worshipper knows that the Sh’ma Yisreal is the most important prayer in Jewish liturgy. These were also moments when the music became louder and richer, and where the worshippers’ participation in communal singing increased significantly. During the Shaharit on Saturday morning, a decrease in attention and in the music could be observed again throughout the Torah study that culminates in the Aleynu prayer, which marks a phase in synagogue services that is meant to (re-)ground the worshippers by reminding the community of their own religious responsibilities.18 A number of conclusions can be drawn from our initial analysis of the relation between emotion and music in the liturgy, specifically with regard to the oscillation between the modes, and thus between scales and related musical motives, between major and minor. This pattern sets up a series of expectations on the part of the ritual participants, leading to an entrainment effect, which in turn encourages collective memories to form; and finally, a

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certain type of emotional and cognitive mood is set up by the oscillation. These will be discussed in the following. First of all, Judaism is a comprehensive religion that draws on an even more complex system of commandments directing the behavior and inner life of its adherents, indicating proper and improper actions and emotions (see Fishbane 1998, 151). This has impact on its ritual music as well. Accordingly, as Clayton, Sager, and Will (2004) put it, “[listeners] unfamiliar with a particular musical [and here also religious] stimulus may fail to demonstrate an appropriate response to that music because they have not learned the ‘right,’ e.g., culturally [and/or religiously] appropriate, way to do so” (Clayton et. al. 2004, 22). In this sense, Jewish prayer modes might be regarded as “symbolic sound” representing the self-awareness of a community by capturing and sustaining the worshipping community’s feelings, experiences, and ideas. To put it differently, Nusach (as symbolic sound) is a “concrete object to which felt emotions can be attached” (Friedman 2012, 62). Thus, much effort is invested in keeping up with and passing down the tradition of Nusach as a musical tool to organize Jewish prayer services and regulate the emotional development within it. However, knowledge of the musical parameters of the Jewish prayer modes is not the primary element within Jewish ritual that generates particular feelings and an emotional identification of the worshiper. 19 Rather, we observed that the expectations participants consciously or unconsciously ascribe to the prayers and music—and thus to the whole ritual process of the Shabbat liturgy—are, with regard to entrainment and synchronization, as important as the prayer modes themselves. Against this background, newer research on music and emotion that discusses the mechanisms through which music can induce emotions is particularly relevant. One of these mechanisms is musical expectancy, which “refers to a process whereby an emotion is induced in a listener because a specific feature of the music [such as the constant oscillation between major and minor modes] violates, delays, or confirms the listener’s expectations about the continuation of the music,” or because “the expectations are based on the listener’s previous experiences of the same style of music” (Juslin 2009, 137, cp. footnote 6). Closely related is another mechanism, episodic memory, which “refers to a process whereby an emotion is induced in a listener because the music evokes a personal memory of a specific event in the listener’s life” (ibid.). Both mechanisms can to some extent be related to the analysis of the emotional and cognitive rhythms in Jewish ritual music. According to cognitive psychology, perception, attention, and expectation (as very briefly discussed here) are all rhythmic processes that are subject to

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entrainment. In the case of the Synagoge Pestalozzistrasse, it could be observed that the worshippers have a particular knowledge of the liturgy, and thus also have certain expectations towards the (contents of the) prayers. In other words, the worshippers’ expectations are based on shared experiences from earlier synagogue services. These expectations and memories are closely linked to the ritual music, which induces the emotional ebb and flow throughout Shabbat services. This results in the synchronization of the individual worshipper with the community by perceiving, reacting properly, and also enjoying the ritual and its music. Moreover, and this would finally suggest a descriptive function of Nusach, Jewish ritual music, “as an external oscillator entraining our internal oscillator, has the potential to affect not only our sense of time but also our sense of being in the world” (Clayton, Sager, and Will 2004, 14). As we stated earlier in this essay, Nusach synchronizes the collectivity within the actual time of the synagogue service as well as within the virtual time when referring to Jews from other places and times, and thus to a shared cultural, historical, and religious memory. Notes 1 2

See the midrash on Exodus 20:11 in Mekhilta de Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai. We would like to thank Daniel Boyarin for pointing us to this etymology (personal communication, June 2010). 3 Within the context of Jewish ritual music, the term “mode” is often used mistakenly, as Boaz Tarsi explains. Jewish modality is thus not for the equivalent of the Greek or Church modes, or even the Arab makam (see Tarsi 2002, 177). 4 For a more detailed discussion on the definition of the term Nusach, please see Tarsi (2002). 5 Email-interview with Jack Kessler, June 7th 2010. 6 According to studies by Olaf Post and David Huron (2008 and 2009) on the relationship between musical mode, tempo, and pitch in Western classical music, it could be observed that slower tempo markings are mainly associated with the minor mode and vice versa, as well as that minor-key themes in classical music are slightly lower in pitch than major-key themes. These findings correspond with our data collected during our pilot field study in Berlin. 7 Email-Interview with Jalda Rebling, May 7th 2010. 8 The authors draw on a working paper on Jewish prayer modes that has been compiled by Chazzan Jack Kessler (unpublished). 9 Cp. interview with Jalda Rebling, Feb. 19th 2010. 10 See working-paper of Jack Kessler (unpublished). 11 We have made the sound archives for our research available on the web. 12 At the conference on “Judaism and Emotion” in October 2010, Prof. Eliyahu Schleifer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) further elaborated on “The Mode of ‘Ahavah Rabbah’ as an Emotional Vehicle in Ashkenazi Cantorial Music”. The lecture dealt with the Steiger (i.e. mode) Ahavah Rabbah, with its typical interval of 11/2 tone. A short expose of the

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musical features of the mode (scale, motifs, and modulations) was followed by an exploration of its usage by Ashkenazi cantors as a means to express and evoke emotions. The lecture was accompanied by examples of simple chants, improvisational patterns as well as samples of elaborate compositions. Cp. interview with Jalda Rebling, Feb. 19th 2010. See interview with Jalda Rebling, Feb. 19th 2010. We found that the three elements that do the most to entrain the community at a physiological level are the bodily movements of the ritual (standing/sitting/bowing), the music (entrainment), and the food (which calibrates glucose levels to some extent). The figure was originally designed by and published in Marcia Prager’s “A Siddur for Erev Shabbat”, accessed July 4, 2012, http://rabbimarciaprager.homestead.com/siddur.html. Image editing: Avi Epstein, 2012. Interview with Sharon Alexander, March 25th 2010. This has been confirmed in the interview with chazzan Jack Kessler, who stated: “the folks that are familiar with the service will definitely have that 'ah, it's [Shabbat]' reaction. For people who are never in a synagogue, coming in the first time, the only thing I can suggest is that the emotional feel of the Nusach, if it is done sensitively of course, will transmit a subliminal message that communicates the nature of the day. For instance, someone who has never ever been in a service and comes on Erev Rosh Hashana [the evening before the Jewish New Year’s Day] will hear a melody that is glorious, uplifting, and majestic. On Tisha b’Av [an annual fast day in Judaism] the same someone will hear an ancient, haunting melody that implies deep pain. These are particularly strong examples, of course, and I am not sure that an outsider would always have that kind of experience. Jewish worship is a rich, complex tradition and access is not always easy” (Email-interview with Jack Kessler, June 3rd 2010).

Bibliography Barsalou, Lawrence W. et al. 2003. “Social Embodiment.” In The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 43), edited by B. Ross, 43–85. San Diego: Academic Press. ———. 2005. “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5, 1/2: 14– 57. Blacking, John [1973] 2000. How Musical is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press. Davidson, Charles. 1996. Immunim Be-Nusah Ha-Tefillah: A Study Text and Workbook for the Jewish Prayer Modes. Elkins Park, PA: Ashburn Music Publication. Deeley, Peter Q. 2004. “The Religious Brain: Turning Ideas into Convictions.” Anthropology & Medicine 11, 3: 245–267. Ekman, Paul. 1999. “Facial Expressions.” In Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, edited by T. Dalgleish and M. J. Power, 301–320. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Fishbane, Michael. 1998. The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friedmann, Jonathan L, Ed. 2012. Emotions in Jewish Music: Personal and Scholarly Reflections. New York: University Press of America. Frigyesi, Judit. 1993. “Preliminary Thoughts toward the Study of Music without Clear Beat: The Example of 'Flowing Rhythm' in Jewish 'Nusah'”. Asian Music 24, 2: 59–88. Gereboff, Joel. 2008. “Judaism”. In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, edited by John Corrigan, 95–110. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press..

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Goodman, Mark S. 2012. “Why Nusach Still Matters.” In Emotion in Jewish Music, edited by Johnathan Friedmann, 30–44. New York: University Press of America. Heskes, Irene, ed. 1971. Studies in Jewish Music: Collected Writings of A. W. Binder. New York: Bloch Publishing Company. Huron, David. 2008. “A Comparison of Average Pitch Height and Interval-Size in Major- and Minor-Key Themes: Evidence Consistent with Affect-related Pitch Prosody.” Empirical Musicology Review, 3, 2: 59–63. Juslin, Patrik N. (2009). “Emotional responses to music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut, 131–140. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirschner, Sebastian and Michael Tomasello. 2009. “Joint drumming: Social context facilitates synchronization in preschool children.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 102, 3: 299– 314. Koskoff, Ellen. 2001. Music in Lubavitcher Life. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Moisala, Pirkko. 1995. “Cognitive Study of Music as Culture – Basic Premises for ‘Cognitive Ethnomusicology’”. Journal of New Music Research, 24: 8–20. Neusner, Jacob, trans. 2006. The Babylonian Talmud and The Jerusalem Talmud. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. Post, Olaf and David Huron (2009). “Western Classical Music in Minor Mode is Slower (Except in the Romantic Period)”. Empirical Musicology Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2–10. Shulevitz, Judith. (2010). The Sabbath World: Glimses of a Different Order of Time. New York: Random House. Slobin, Mark. [1989] 2002. Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Summit, Jeffrey A. 2000. The Lord’s Song in Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Worship. Oxford: University Press. ———. 2006. “Nusach and Identity: The Contemporary Meaning of Traditional Jewish Prayer Modes”. Philip V. In Music in American religious experience, edited by Bohlman et al., 271– 286. Oxford: Oxford University Press.. Tarsi, Boaz. 2002. “Observatons on Practices of 'Nusach' in America”. Asian Music 33, 2: 175– 219.

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his section contains two very different chapters that both nonetheless utilize theories and methods from the mind sciences to gain insights about Judaism and emotion. Biro’s chapter is a groundbreaking study examining the usefulness and challenges of applying theories from the cognitive science of religion to Judaism. Judaism presents a problem for these theories because it persists despite a lack of extreme and high-arousal rituals, or rituals that directly engage counterintuitive agents. Biro thinks the answer is to be found in part by modifying the dominant theories in the cognitive science of religion. He argues that ritual systems persist when they balance the ‘tension’ between boredom and high emotion. While in a theological sense Judaism moves away from the standard high-arousal elements of ritual, in practice Jewish sects tend to incorporate many theologically incorrect elements that insure the rituals will not be boring. At times, this can lead to movements within Judaism that challenge traditional theology, from Messianic movements to new-spiritualism. While Biro’s chapter is offered as a contribution to the cognitive science of religion, Levy’s chapter is not. Instead Levy hopes to use tools from the mind sciences, including cognitive science, to enlighten the study of Jewish texts within the humanities. He uses the model of emotion developed in Geneva at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, to argue for three possible methods to integrate the study of emotion into textual studies. The first method uses an Excel Macro program designed by the Center to analyze the emotional valence of small sections of text. The second uses the Automap data-mining program developed at Carnegie Mellon to analyze large sections of text. The third method combines these two methods to analyze large sections of text using emotional language as a hermeneutic key. Levy then presents an initial application of these methods to Song of Songs and Song of Songs Rabbah.

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ince the 1990s, a number of Jewish histories have been written that would have been unimaginable in traditional historiography: the history of the Jewish man and woman, the history of the Jewish body or the history of Jewish sexuality. 1 It is actually surprising that the history of the Jewish emotions have not yet been written. Following predecessors—Michael Fishbane or Hava Tirosh-Samuelson—focussing on the role of (certain types of) emotions in specific literary genres and specific historical contexts, new developments toward such a history include the works of Jewish studies scholar Joel Gereboff (2008)2 and biblical scholar Thomas Kazen (2011). Yet, I am not going to fill this lacuna here. Rather, I am turning the question around: is it possible to write Jewish history (the history of the Jewish religion, the history of Jewish thought, the history of the Jewish people, the history of Jewish folklore, etc.) using emotions as one of the main explanatory factors? Even this enterprise is infeasible within the confined space of this chapter. Therefore, I am further refining my goal: to sketch the contours of a history of Judaism using a specific theoretical framework borrowed from the cognitive science of religion. Unduly underrepresented in Jewish studies before the publication of the current volume, the cognitive science of religion has become one of the most influential theories of religion in the last decade. Approximately half of the chapters in a recent overview of contemporary religious studies (Stausberg 2009) address books and theories belonging to this new paradigm. Based on their earlier, 1990 seminal work, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley developed a cognitive theory accounting for the dynamics of religious rituals3 that will serve as our point of departure. Their 2002 theory reflected upon Harvey Whitehouse’s (1995) analysis of a ‘splinter group outburst’, which he had witnessed during his fieldwork on a cargo cult in Papua New Guinea.

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Both McCauley and Lawson, and Whitehouse attempted to identify the cognitive factors underlying religious rituals and movements, and thereby to explain the mechanisms giving rise to what Max Weber had called ‘routinized’ and ‘charismatic’ forms, while Ruth Benedict had identified as ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ practices.4 Whitehouse’s Modes Theory offers a dozen psychological and socio-political features distinguishing between the doctrinal mode and the imagistic mode, which in turn are related to the use of two different memory systems in the human mind. McCauley and Lawson rather focus on the mental representation of the rituals, which we shall return to (pp. 130ff). They make predictions about the dynamics of different ritual systems as a function of the distribution of the rituals along three dimensions: the frequency of certain rituals, the mental representations of their conceptual structures, as well as the emotions and sensory pageantry associated to them. In particular, the lack of a certain type of high-arousal rituals creates an unbalanced system, yielding the tedium effect. The tedium of such a routinized-doctrinal system will in turn prepare the floor for splinter group outbursts, characterized by charismatic-imagistic forms of religions and by high-arousal rituals with mental representations of the missing type. First, we shall turn to the question whether cognitive science can approach emotions in a religious context at all, and then introduce the Lawson-McCauley model with examples taken from Judaism. We shall conclude that the purely halakhic view of Judaism is prone to ‘tedium’ (in a purely technical sense) and therefore the model predicts the emergence of ‘splinter groups’ (used as a technical term). We address three core topics, though a number of issues are simplified or left aside.5 First, the connection between the technical term tedium and the everyday concept of boredom raises the question what roles emotions play in a cognitive approach to rituals. Second, we ask whether Jewish practices corroborate or refute the LawsonMcCauley model, and what kind of refinement is needed in order to adopt the model to Judaism. Finally, we speculate about whether this tedium can account for certain phenomena in Jewish history and the history of Judaism. The present chapter cannot provide definitive answers, but pave the way to them. Cognitive Science and Emotions: A Contradiction in Terms? A cognitive model for emotions and religion? The reader may be surprised at this point. Indeed, many scholars believe that the cognitive sciences are about cognition, placing rational, rule-based thinking at the core of their interest:

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planning actions, performing mathematical operations, playing chess, recognizing a visual scene and understanding language. No doubt, cognitive scientists fifty years ago put these issues mainly related to human cognition on their research agenda, hence the term ‘cognitive science’. At the same time, they decided to deny, to ignore, to put in parenthesis, or at least temporarily to underplay topics that had been central to psychology earlier, such as behaviour, emotions, bodily factors and the social-cultural context. Traditional Cognitive Science Looking back in time, despite opposing voices in the history of the cognitive enterprise, I suggest viewing the denial of these topics merely as a useful tactic in the research strategy: it was easier to develop new tools, techniques and approaches, new paradigms while only tackling “rational” phenomena initially. This new approach was characterized by two key innovations: a biological, brain-centric view, as well as a computational perspective (we return to them immediately). Subsequently, the second or third generations of scientists were able to refine this biological-plus-computational approach by also taking further factors into consideration, including, among many others, emotions. Indeed, emotions have been central in the work of Antonio Damasio, a major figure of contemporary cognitive science (see for example, Damasio 2003). Moreover, the growing body of literature under the umbrella term embodied and embedded cognition also reemphasizes emotions on the cognitive science agenda (Clark 1997).6 In fact, the term “cognitive” has become a misnomer for those who are used to the old meaning of the word of Latin origin, cognition: “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses; a perception, sensation, idea, or intuition resulting from the process of cognition.” 7 In current usage, cognition denotes any function of the mind/brain, including not only the recognition of a face, the performing of a logical deduction step or the decoding of the meaning of a linguistic utterance, but also non-knowledge acquiring activities: the production of a sentence, the planning of an action series, the learning of how to bike, and many, many others. Cultural products, such as literature, artefacts, and not least, religious beliefs, texts and rituals come into existence because the mind of an author has created them, the mind of a transmitter is willing to transmit them, and the mind of a reader is able to make sense of them. Therefore, they are also related to functions of the brain, and so these domains are relevant to the cognitive sciences. Even emotions and human behaviour are produced by the

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human mind/brain, and so they cannot be dismissed from the cognitive enterprise. Moreover, social groups are formed by individuals who perceive the group through their mind, and join the group as a decision made by their mind.8 Social phenomena emerge from the interaction of a large-number of mind/brains.9 The cognitive approach to human behaviour, society, culture and religion can be summarized as viewing them as products of the human mind/brain. Their details depend on constraints imposed by the mind/brain: how they can be represented by the mind/brain and how they can be transmitted from mind/brain to mind/brain, given a social network. (Note that even the social network is constrained by the social capabilities of the human mind/brain.10) Certain representations are easier to acquire, simpler to produce and to interpret, more likely to be transmitted, and therefore more wide-spread. Something is “popular” if it is attractive to the mind/brain. The cognitive sciences are engaged in uncovering the mechanisms beyond the cryptic terms that I have just used in the previous sentences: ‘representation’, ‘production’, ‘interpretation’, ‘acquisition’ and ‘attractiveness’. In order to understand these mental mechanisms, cognitive scientists disengage the two parts of the expression ‘mind/brain’: the computational and the biological. The more biologically inclined among them follow a bottom-up approach: they focus on the brain, the physical organ, and its physiology. They visualize which brain area is active during what kind of activity, and they aim at discovering the way information flows from cell to cell. Those adopting the top-down approach, however, employ models—more or less formal ones, eventually implementable on a computer—to simulate the same information flow in the mind, an abstract information processing device. Advances in this second approach reproduce the observable phenomena in a gradually improving manner. Ever better industrial by-products of the computational perspective are known as ‘artificial intelligence’, and include autopilot systems, signature recognition software, human-computer communication technology, just to name a few. Yet, without advances in the bottom-up approach we will not know if the human brain also employs the same “software”. At the same time, the bottom-up approach would be lost amidst the billions of neurons without the help of top-down scholars, who rely not only on the careful observations of the phenomena, but also on the knowledge accumulated by previous generations of (non-cognitive) scholars working on the same field. To summarize, in my view, cognitive approaches are about two main themes. First, they are about the idea that human phenomena are products— though, often through many intermediate steps—of the human brain. And second, they are about the idea that as long as we cannot understand all details

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of the human brain, we should create formal models of the mind. Formal models can be computer programs, mathematical equations, formalisms with tree-like graphs or box diagrams with interacting components. Deducted from carefully observed phenomena, the formal models serve as lighthouses on the sea of brain neurons. Some lighthouses may prove to be misleading, and then scholars have to create new models by reconsidering the phenomena. The long-term aim is to understand how information flow in the brain gives rise to the observable products of the mind. Thus far, we have discussed the traditional approach in the cognitive sciences. Yet, to complicate the situation, emotional, bodily and societal factors often interact with what people would see as “rational” mental functions. Hence, it is a fashion nowadays to criticise the traditional view of the mind as a disembodied, emotionless, isolated computer. I would rather argue that the view of a disembodied, emotionless, isolated computer was a very useful, strategic first step, before including body, emotions and societal factors into the refined approach. Some say that cognitive science by definition rejects factors that had been unquestioned earlier—such as emotions, body and group influence—and since this error is nowadays being slowly discovered, the cognitive enterprise is approaching its end. However, contrary to their view, cognitive science is flourishing, as testified by the ever-growing number of publications and ever-growing conference attendance figures. All these originally ignored complicating factors are gradually imported into the methodology based on a brain-centric view and (formal, computational) models. Emotions and Cognitive Science Before moving on, let us discuss the notion of ‘emotions’ from a cognitive angle. 11 The history of science, and especially the history of the cognitive sciences, is replete with cases when ‘folk-notions’ (common language terms) are replaced with scientific notions. A typical folk-notion is music, which since Pythagoras has been decomposed into scientific notions such as pitch (frequency of sound waves), volume (energy) and rhythm. Moreover, pitch, volume and rhythm—or, frequency and energy—are characteristic not only of music, but also of speech, noise and many more physical phenomena. Thus, music has been reduced—or at least related—to acoustics, and yet, neither music-lovers nor musicologists have lost anything by this decomposition. The same seems to happen to the concept of ‘emotion’. 12 It is most probably not feasible to find a one-to-one correlate in the brain for the common concept of emotion, or for any distinct emotion category (Lindquist et

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al. 2012). Emotions are rather constructed of brain networks of more general purpose. The mind encodes various phenomena, including heart rate and sweating level, but also some kind of “attitude”. By “attitude” I mean one or more bits of information saved somewhere in memory whose value may determine future decision making processes. The folk-psychological notion of “loving person X” is thus decomposed into a number of mental facts. For instance, the heart rate increases if the representation of person X becomes activated in the mind, due to either a visual input in X’s presence, or a mental input when remembering X. A further mental fact related to this notion is that the brain will make decisions involving X in a biased manner, due to the above mentioned “non-rationality bit” of information. Another folk-notion, “disliking food Y”, primarily means that food Y is not preferred to its alternatives in a situation of choice. The bit of information causing the choice of an alternative food can be due to learning from previous personal experience or from learning in a cultural context (Biró 2011). When the mental representation of food Y is turned on, a number of further data structures also become active: beside the non-preference bit, probably also memories of the situation in which this bit was learned. The latter subsequently may activate knowledge of social and cultural consequences (punishment or ostracism if one consumes prohibited food). Bodily reactions (nausea), primed by the memory trace, may serve as a reinforcement in the choice making process.13 Bodily reactions are again represented in the mind, triggering further mental functions (hand and head movements, communication about one’s nausea, saving a memory trace of the current situation, etc.). All these can, in turn, cause physiological effects, such as increased heart rate and sweating, as well as decreased computational resources allocated to mental processes running in the same time (leading to what one would call “irrational decisions”). Some of the processes are conscious, others are not. Some of them can be controlled, others cannot. The resultant is experienced as the phenomenology of the folk-psychological concept emotion. Yet, behind the scenes, we have extremely complex computational processes performed by the mind/brain. A cognitive science of emotions ought to decipher the “computer code of this software”. Let us turn back to Judaism and emotions, and how we can tackle them from the point of view of the cognitive science of religion.

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A Personal Experience Let me start with a story. It happened in 2004, in Groningen, a major town in the Northern part of the Netherlands where I worked on my PhD at that time. I used to lead the service in the small local Jewish community: although I lack all requisites of a professional cantor, I had taken it on myself to coordinate the biweekly services as a sheliach tzibbur, the ‘representative of the community’. For the high holidays, however, two youngsters were invited from Amsterdam, who were much more proficient than me. A few hours before the beginning of Yom Kippur, I received a call from the head of the community, who told me that one of the two guys would not come because his wife had just given birth and there were some complications. So, the head of the community asked me if I would be able to lead the Yom Kippur service with the other youngster. Well, that was a rhetorical question, for I had no choice. We divided the labour so that he would do the harder job, including Kol Nidrei, Musaf and Minchah, whereas I would do the relatively shorter services, that is, Shacharit and Neilah. So I was standing in the Groningen synagogue, at the place I used to stand every second week, but this time I was reciting Avinu Malkenu at the end of the Neilah service. This is the very last portion of the very last service on the holiest Jewish holiday, a series of requests beginning with the words “Our father, our king”. It was an extremely emotional and moving moment. Can we understand why it was emotionally so touching? On a regular weekday I recite my prayers without the slightest kavanah (concentration, emotion). A Shabbat prayer is less frequent, Yom Kippur is even rarer. Importantly, it was a Yom Kippur falling on Shabbat, and Avinu Malkenu was only recited during the Neilah—a further possible source of my emotions. Do not forget that this was the very first time in my life I had been in such a situation, so it felt like undergoing a rite of passage. Consequently, there must be a frequency effect: the rarer the ritual, the higher the related emotions. Second, standing in front of the community is also a factor increasing emotions, either on a regular Shabbat or in this special occasion. Although there is no formal difference between the status of the sheliach tzibbur and that of a regular congregant, still the fact that the first one is a “representative”, who is “sent” by the community, has a special effect. The cantor feels his own importance and central place in the liturgy, as if he were the one making the service, not just one among many participants with a somehow special role. Here we encounter a first example for a theologically correct14 halakhic construct contradicting the intuitive mental representation of the ritual; emotions depend on the latter, not on the former.

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So I was standing there in front of the wide-open Torah Ark, which reminded me “the gates of the heaven that were just closing”, while I was trying to slip in my last petitions through them. If I did it correctly, I could coax the Divine to grant to each of us and the whole community a good new year.15 In such a situation, even the most sceptical person becomes emotional. This second factor, the constellation of the participants (“who does what, when, where, on behalf of whom”), will be called the form of the ritual. Third, there are additional factors. I remembered the Avinu Malkenu recited by Professor Schweitzer, former neologue chief-rabbi of Hungary during a Neilah in the mid-1990s, which since then served to me as an example. Listening to Professor Schweitzer, you could be sure that each line and each word deeply resonated in him, and that is what I wanted to imitate in 2004. Another crucial factor is the bodily effects of fasting in the previous twenty-five hours, together with strained prayers. Dehydration is especially known to be one of the factors causing altered states of consciousness (Ludwig 1968). Although these last factors are unquestionably central to the cited example, we shall focus on the earlier ones. McCauley and Lawson, in their 2002 book, asked which of the first two factors—frequency or form—is a better predictor of the emotions associated with the rituals. They argued it was the form. Now we turn to a more precise definition of what ritual form is, and how it predicts emotions. The Cognitive Science of Religion on Rituals The starting point in the new paradigm called the cognitive science of religion is that religious phenomena are variants of analogous secular phenomena with a twist. Luther Martin summarized the core of this approach as the idea that “religious thought and behavior are to be understood as ‘closely related variants of ordinary cognitive processes.’” 16 For instance, the mental representation of gods, spirits, ancestors and demons are borrowed from the mental representation of humans, but some of their features are altered, turning them into what we shall call a counterintuitive agent (Boyer 1994 and 2001). Similarly, rituals are actions, and the cognitive mechanisms behind rituals are the same as the cognitive mechanisms behind secular actions. What we need then is a model of actions in general, as well as the explanation of what makes rituals different from secular actions. The scheme of the human action representation system introduced by Lawson and McCauley in 1990 is based on

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contemporaneous Chomskyan syntax, the theory of the so-called thematic roles (the theta-theory). What makes rituals different is that certain roles of the actions are filled by concepts originating in a religious framework: most often, by culturally postulated counterintuitive agents or other counterintuitive elements, where counterintuitiveness must be understood in a technical sense. Let us now unpack this summary of the cognitive approach to rituals.17 Representation of Actions and of Entities Let us begin with a simple observation: the difference between an active and a passive sentence in English is that the entity being “acted upon” (the “logical” or “semantic” object) is moved from the syntactic object position to the syntactic subject position, whereas the “acting” entity (the “logical” or “semantic” subject) of the sentence is either dropped or moved syntactically to a phrase containing the preposition by. Consequently, we need to make a distinction between syntactic positions—syntactic subject and object—on the one hand, and the “semantic” or “logical” roles, on the other hand. The latter ones are called thematic roles in modern syntax. A verb has a number of arguments or roles or slots that must be filled in order for the sentence to be grammatical. For instance, the verb to give has three slots: a giver (the person who gives), a given (the object being given) and a “givee” (the person who receives). A major concern in syntactic theory is how these slots are filled in a sentence, that is, how these slots are paired with syntactic positions such as the subject, the object, the dative phrase, the to-phrase or the by-phrase. Compare the differing syntactic ways of instantiating the same thematic roles in the following sentences: John gives Mary an apple; John gives an apple to Mary; An apple is given to Mary (by John); Mary is given an apple (by John); John presents Mary with an apple. The most known thematic roles are the agent (that is the “logical subject” of an action-verb), the patient (that is the “logical object”) and the instrument.18 The verb to give suggests that we also need a receiver or goal role. Time and location are also slots that are very often instantiated, although most verbs do not require them necessarily to be filled. Additionally, a number of verbs fill their subject-position not by an agent, but by a different role, for instance an experiencer. If we compare the English sentence I like that girl to the French sentence Cette fille me plaît, then we see that the liker role is moved to a dative position in French, while the liked role becomes the syntactic subject of the sentence. The rule in both French and English is that the agent of an active sentence becomes the subject. Yet, in the present case, the verb to like / plaire

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has no agent, rather an experiencer, which is more flexible and can be realised as a dative object in certain languages. Such linguistic considerations have multiplied the number of thematic roles in the literature, and we still miss a list that is comprehensive across languages and across scholars. In their 1990 book, Lawson and McCauley take for granted that at least action-verbs have an agent, and most often also a patient and/or an instrument. For instance, the action of giving has an agent (the giver), a patient (the given object) and a goal (the receiver). This trichotomy is a universal feature of the human mind representing the action of giving, and is independent of how different languages express this action, and which syntactic positions they assign to the three roles.19 In the case of a religious sacrifice, the human mind makes use of the same action representation system: the action is again giving, but with its slots being filled by religiously significant elements. Often the giver must be a priest, that is, a person having earlier undergone other rituals, also involving a deity. Religious constraints may also apply to the patient, that is, to the object being given. But most importantly, the role of the receiver is fulfilled by a deity (such as a god, a spirit, an ancestor)—this is the crucial twist that differentiates between a secular giving action and a religious one, called a sacrifice. In general, a ritual is, for Lawson and McCauley, an action that contains a religiously significant element in its structural description. What is a “deity” or a “religiously significant” entity, which turns a general action into a ritual? Besides representing actions, the human mind also represents people, animals, plants and objects. Based on advances in psychology, scholars in the cognitive science of religion have been hypothesizing that the human brain entertains a number of ontological categories, such as artefacts, natural objects, plants, animals and humans. These categories come with ontological expectations, such as solid objects are impenetrable (folk-physics), humans and animals are mortal and beget conspecies (folk-biology), as well as humans are driven by their emotions and by their limited knowledge (folk-psychology). An entity is an agent in an ontological sense (not to confuse with the thematic role called agent), if it is self-propelled, performing goal-directed motions: typically humans, but also including animals and “intelligent” robots. Moreover, the human mind is also able to represent entities that violate some of the ontological expectations; these are referred to as counterintuitive, in a technical sense. Thus, fairy tales and mythologies, but also modern sciences are replete with counterintuitive concepts. Spirits and some elementary particles violate folk-physics because they are not impenetrable, whereas immortal mythological heroes and fabled

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animals that beget kids of another species violate folk-biology. From a cognitive point of view, deities are (culturally postulated) counterintuitive agents. In a word, religious concepts employ the same mental structures used to represent everyday entities, but there is again a twist: they may be counterintuitive. This ontology also influences the action representation system. A filter ensures that only agents (in an ontological sense) may fill in the agent slot of actions. In the case of a giving action, the ontological category of each of the three roles is fixed: both the giver and the receiver must be agents, whereas the patient tends to be an object (including food). This constraint is also satisfied by giving actions with a religious twist, that is, by sacrifices: the giver is a human agent, while the receiver is a superhuman counterintuitive agent. Similarly, and here I am diverging from the opinion of Lawson and McCauley, prayers can also be seen as a general cognitive phenomenon, namely the action of communication, with a religious twist.20 Parallel to the giving actions, the speaking actions also have three roles: an agent (the speaker), a patient (the message being uttered) and a receiver (the addressee). In order to turn a simple giving action into the religious ritual of a sacrifice, we needed to add religious restrictions to who can be the giver, what can be the given and, most importantly, by stipulating a counterintuitive givee. Similarly, prayers are primarily actions of communication with a counterintuitive addressee; secondarily, and as a consequence, the religious conceptual system also restricts the speaker, the utterance, the time and the location of the action. To sum up, Lawson and McCauley have suggested a theory of religious rituals that is given for free, as a bonus coming with a general cognitive model. Independently of religion, the cognitive sciences need an action representation system, such as the thematic role theory introduced for the sake of linguistics. Second, the idea of counterintuitive agents is also derivable from a general cognitive ontology consisting of five categories: natural objects, man-made artefacts, plants, animals and humans. Only a single minor twist is needed to explain the cross-culturally recurrent phenomenon of beliefs in deities. This minor twist is the only stipulation the cognitive science of religion adds to our understanding of the human mind, and so everything religious can be explained. Last, the theory of rituals comes for free, without any further stipulations, simply by combining the idea of counterintuitive agents with the already existing theory of an action representation system.

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•T A M A S B I R O • Emotions and Rituals

In their 2002 book, McCauley and Lawson reformulate the Modes Theory introduced by Harvey Whitehouse in 1995, another early seminal work in the cognitive science of religion. McCauley and Lawson suggest analysing rituals along three dimensions: the frequency of the ritual, the emotional arousal—or sensual pageantry—associated with the ritual, and its form. The negative correlation between frequency and emotions is self-evident: infrequent events tend to involve more emotions. However, McCauley and Lawson argue that an even better predictor for the emotions is the form of the ritual, a notion that we can now better define. The form of a ritual in their approach concerns the thematic structure of the action. They distinguish between special agent rituals, on the one hand, and special patient/special instrument rituals, on the other. The former type is characterized by the agent slot being fulfilled by a counterintuitive agent, whereas the same agent appears in a different slot (such as the patient or the instrument) of the latter type. In a more elaborate version of the theory, a counterintuitive agent may also be replaced by another entity that has previously undergone an enabling ritual. Thus, priests may act on behalf of the counterintuitive agent because they have been ordained. A rite of passage, with a priest “acting upon” the congregant, who in turn is a passive undergoer (patient) of the ritual, is typically a special agent ritual. The deities, through the priests, their intermediaries, are the actors and bring about superpermanent changes in the world, changing the status of the patient. By contrast, special patient/special instrument rituals involve human agents in their agent slot, while counterintuitive agents are only present—directly or through “representatives”, enabled people or objects—in other slots.21 With this second type of ritual, humans bring about temporary and reversible changes, by acting upon patients related to the superhuman, or using instruments related to the counterintuitive. Actions that do not involve counterintuitive agents at all in their description may be religious actions, but are not considered rituals within this framework (Lawson and McCauley 1990). Our key question is why special agent rituals involve more emotions than other rituals. A number of answers—and in fact, a number of different types of answers—can be given to such a why-question (Tinbergen 1963). One train of thought refers to the transmission of the rituals, and is teleological-evolutionary by nature. The superpermanent changes brought about by the acting counterintuitive agents are irreversible, and so these special agent rituals need not be frequently repeated. Yet, if they are infrequently performed, then their details may be forgotten, and so they may

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not be faithfully passed on to the next generations. In order to secure the longterm stability of a special agent ritual, it must come with high emotional arousal, causing a flashbulb memory (cf. the cognitive alarm hypothesis of McCauley and Lawson 2002, 78). Low-arousal and infrequent rituals will be sorted out from the ritual system of any culture, since neither frequent repetition nor flashbulb memory helps memorising their technical details. At the same time, high-arousal and frequent rituals may be unnecessarily too costly, exceeding the sensory overload ceiling (McCauley and Lawson 2002, 191). Thus, considering ritual systems as dynamic systems, 22 cognitive scholars of religion have concluded that rituals are organized around two attractor positions: infrequent, high-arousal special agent rituals, and frequent, lowarousal special patient/special instrument rituals. Ritual form and emotions are correlated because counterexamples will not persist in the community over the long run. A second type of answer to the same question pertains to the underlying mechanism: What mental processes cause the congregant to display emotions in rituals? Why do special agent rituals—when the congregant undergoes actions of the divine—come with higher emotions than special patient rituals, during which the congregant is the one doing something to the (postulated) superhuman? My speculation—to be turned into a testable formal model in the near future—is that mental representations violating ontological expectations are not as “good” (or as “harmonic”) as the representations satisfying all constraints. Hence, the presence of counterintuitive representations triggers mental processes that we experience as the folk-notion of emotions. These mental processes, in turn, cause feelings of disgust or happiness, and lead to increased heart rate or motor hyperactivity. Maybe ontological violations create some sort of “tension”—a term to be developed into a formal model of the mind, and ideally to be identified as some feature of the brain23—which subsequently launches psychosomatic reactions. Moreover, the agent role is more prominent than the other roles, and so the counterintuitive item fulfilling the agent role will magnify the “tension”, triggering more intensive emotions. The special status of the agent role is well-known in linguistics: agents have primacy in fulfilling the subject position in all languages of the world. An alternative explanation is related to the Hyperactive Agent Detection Device (Guthrie 1980, Barrett 2000): the human mind has an increased susceptibility to situations with another agent performing an action that may cause danger to me. Hence, an increased mental activity in my mind,

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whenever I turn to be the patient of an action performed by a powerful, unknown agent. Although the precise causal-mechanistic relation in the mind/brain between rituals and emotions is still an open question, empirical data are being collected regarding the different measurable aspects of emotions. Dimitris Xygalatas, working on fire-walking rituals in different countries, has observed various aspects of emotional arousal: personal phenomenological reports, observable motor hyperactivity and dehydratation, the effects on the subjects’ recall and interpretation of their own experiences (Xygalatas 2011), as well as objectively measured heart rate (Konvalinka, Xygalatas, et al. 2011). It has turned out that the heart rate of fire-walkers synchronized with the heart rate of related spectators, but not with unrelated bystanders. These and future data may on a longer term contribute to a better understanding of how rituals are performed, what meanings and interpretations people associate to them, how the brain processes their social context, and how the different aspects of emotions relate to the rituals. To summarize, actions—including rituals, that is, actions with a counterintuitive agent in their structure—trigger various mental mechanisms, including emotion-related ones. Given a situation, mental computations influence the heart rate and bodily movements. They also determine the memory trace to be added to the autobiographical memory: its character and its strength (cf. the flashbulb memory effect), as well as the influence exerted by the memory of this event onto future decisions. A number of factors pose constraints upon these emotion-related mental mechanisms, including the rarity of the event (cf. stage fright, rites of passage, etc.), its eventual consequences (e.g., the probable reaction of other human and superhuman agents), but also the thematic structure of the event (am I doing something to others, or are others doing something to me?). The violation of ontological expectations by counterintuitive agents and other religious concepts add some sort of “tension” to the mental computations, eventually inducing more intensive emotions. The Dynamics and Stability of Rituals-and-Emotions Systems As a consequence of the mental computations, some rituals will be remembered and repeatedly enacted, while others will be forgotten. A faithful memory of the technical details is as important for the ritual to remain part of the religious system as is the motivation to repeat the ritual (in cognitive terms: a favourable “attitude bit” influencing action planning decisions). Note that this cognitive theory, developed with a village in Papua New Guinea in

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mind, has been amended by all scholars who work with religions that are characterized by literacy and more complex social-institutional structures. So the human mind needs not remember a lengthy and rarely performed liturgy if institutions supply those minds with prayer books. And yet, the theory may provide a novel approach to Judaism, as well. It predicts that a balanced ritual system contains two types of rituals: lowfrequency, high-arousal special agent rituals, and high-frequency, low-arousal special patient/special instrument rituals. If special agent rituals dominate in the ritual system, then the religious practice becomes emotionally too loaded, and it breaks down. If, however, special agent rituals are missing from the system, the ritual system becomes “boring”: McCauley and Lawson call it the tedium effect, and this is the phenomenon the title of my chapter refers to. If a ritual system is dominated by high-frequency, hence low-emotional rituals, then this unbalanced, “tedious” system will produce splinter-group outbursts with high-emotional special agent rituals. The prototypical example is the cargo-cult splinter-group movement observed by Harvey Whitehouse during his field work in Papua New Guinea. Hence, rituals and emotions form a single dynamical system, which we shall refer to as the “rituals-and-emotions system”. As discussed above, the dynamics is better understood from a teleological-evolutionary perspective than from a causal-mechanistic one. Given the state of the dynamical system at time t, what are the forces that determine the state at time t+1?24 The tedium effect, which this article focuses on, suggests that the mind requires a certain—not too high, and not too low—level of “tension”. The presence of counterintuitive agents, especially in the agent role of actions, would provide it. Too many special agent rituals would provide too much of such a “tension”, whereas too few such rituals would not satisfy the brain’s needs. We also must be able to explain the “splinter group outbursts” along similar lines. What happens in the brains of the charismatic leaders who come up with new special agent rituals if there are too few of them in the community? And what happens in the brains of their followers when they decide to join the new group? There may be “random fluctuations” in the human brain that suddenly create the representation of a new ritual in the innovator’s mind. The followers’ minds decide to adopt the innovation. But what are the exact processes that make them decide to adopt the new ritual? And why does the mental computation of other people in the group rather decide not to join the splintergroup? All these questions will hopefully be answered, once a fuller model of the human mind will be able to describe the mental representation of rituals, the emotions associated with them and the processing thereof.

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•T A M A S B I R O • The Mccauley-Lawson Theory Applied to Post-Temple Judaism

We have finally reached the main question posed in this chapter: how do Jewish rituals relate to the three dimensions of the Mccauley-Lawson theory? Jewish rituals vary enormously in terms of frequency, ranging from the Asher yatzar blessing recited several times a day (for example, after a visit to the toilet) to Birkat ha-chamah, the blessing over the Sun, recited once in twentyeight years. Are emotions proportional to the rarity of the event? Not necessarily. I was more moved by the twenty-eight times more frequent Neila service in 2004 (as mentioned in an earlier section) than by the recitation of the blessing over the Sun in 2009. Is, therefore, ritual form a better predictor of the emotions, as argued for by McCauley and Lawson? It turns out that most of the mitzvot are hardly rituals—let alone, special agent rituals—according to the definition of Lawson and McCauley. Therefore, their theory predicts the emergence of the tedium effect. Is the theory deficient, incomplete, or are the consequences of the tedium effect indeed discernible in the history of Judaism? This section discusses why Judaism lacks proper rituals according to this theory, and where the theory needs revision. 25 The next section will identify trends in Jewish history that can be interpreted as consequences of the tedium effect. Negative commandments, such as the laws of kashrut or the prohibition of certain activities on Shabbat, are central in Jewish religious practice, but do not fit into the model. Unless we extend the original theory to “non-actions”, comparable to negated sentences in language, these are not actions, and so we cannot discuss them within the framework. This fact is certainly regrettable, because prohibitions do induce emotions and most probably contribute to maintaining the “tension” required by a rituals-and-emotions system. Future research ought to amend this aspect of the theory. Let us turn to the positive mitzvot. Living in the sukkah is not so much an action in the narrow sense but a state. In a broader sense, however, it can fit in the model: the “action” of living (including eating and sleeping) has an agent-role (the observant Jew) and a location-role. Shaking the lulav is certainly an action. At first glance, these two mitzvot could be said to be special location and special instrument rituals, respectively. And yet, it is problematic to see where in their mental representation a counterintuitive agent is hidden: neither the sukkah nor the lulav have undergone special enabling rituals, as expected by the Lawson-McCauley model. Both must conform strict halakhic rules, but these are physical specifications. None of them are “consecrated” in the way religious tools are often consecrated in other religious traditions. The best I can say is that the sukkah and the lulav meet the criteria set by the

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counterintuitive agent, and that is what makes them special location or special instrument rituals. There is no anterior enabling ritual connecting them to the divinity, but an anterior enabling fact, a criterion stipulated by the superhuman agent. Most positive commandments in Judaism follow the same scheme. 26 Rabbinical commandments introduce an extra twist: the agents stipulating the enabling facts are humans (rabbis) who satisfy another enabling fact, namely, that they are connected to the superhuman agent by a chain of ordination. As argued above, and contrary to the opinion of Lawson and McCauley, I can see prayers as special addressee rituals. Still, in this case, we must generalize the original model of actions with agent, patient and instrument roles to other types of actions that have new thematic slots. In the case of prayers, the speaking action (not to confuse with speech acts) is an action that has an utterance role and an addressee role, alongside the agent role. Note, however, that the inclusion of new types of actions is not a big step, once we have already acknowledged that negative commandments require the inclusion of non-actions, whereas many positive commandments require us to generalize from enabling rituals to enabling facts. It is only after such a revision of the model of Lawson and McCauley that we can reconstruct the full Jewish rituals-and-emotions system. Otherwise, we would exclude a large number of practices in Judaism from our approach. One may decide not to consider them rituals, which is theoretically fine, but then we will not be able to account for much of the emotions in Judaism, and the obtained rituals-andemotions picture will be skewed. At the same time, these revisions will not augment the number of special agent rituals. We may introduce special addressee rituals, to include prayers; special location rituals enabled by an enabling fact, to include the sukkah; non-actions with a human agent, to include prohibitions. And yet, hardly any of them will be special agent rituals. (The single exception might be the priestly blessing in the repetition of the Amida prayer.27) To save the balance of the ritual system, many scholars would point to the rites of passage in Judaism. Indeed, circumcision and bar mitzvah are often presented as special agent rituals, as rites of passage with the boy undergoing these rituals as the patient of the action. Lay people often consider these actions as changing the status of the patient, similarly to rites of passage in other religions. However, halakhic sources reject the idea that a baby becomes Jewish after the circumcision and a boy becomes adult due to the bar mitzvah ceremony.28 Cognitive models of religions focus primarily on the intuitive representations in the mind—which in turn are related to emotions—and not on the theologically correct representations (Barrett 1999) corresponding to the halakhic sources in

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Judaism. Thus, it is fair to say that these rites of passage can contribute to the emotions required by a balanced ritual system. Perhaps this is not the case with regard to the circumcision ritual performed at the age of eight days, but certainly the bar mitzvah ceremony is a once-in-life event that determines the memories and feelings of the boy for the rest of his life. But are these rituals indeed represented mentally as special agent rituals by the participants, as expected by the theory? The mohel is the person who circumcises the baby—even the linguistic structure of this sentence reflects who the logical subject (the agent) and who the logical object (the patient) is. Thus, the baby is indeed the patient, and the mohel is the (supposedly special) agent. The relatively new bar mitzvah ceremony is a more complicated situation, because strictly (halakhicly) speaking the bar mitzvah is not a ritual at all, but a state-of-affairs: the fact that the boy has turned thirteen and may act as a major. The ceremony itself is a reading action, with the boy as the agent and the Torah-scroll as the instrument—no third party involved. This is not a special agent rite of passage, but a frequently performed special instrument ritual, provided that an enabling fact has made the Torah-scroll a special instrument. And yet, as already mentioned earlier, many people (and the bar mitzvah boys are often among them) view the situation as the boy undergoing a change in status by the power of the rabbi, probably transmitted by the means of his blessing. Hence a constellation—not in the halakhicly correct, but in the intuitive reading of the situation—with the rabbi acting as an agent and the bar mitzvah boy undergoing the action as a patient. Nonetheless, for both these rituals to be special agent, we must demonstrate that the agent (the mohel, the rabbi) has been enabled, or is perceived as being enabled, to act on behalf of the counterintuitive agent. Is it really the case? A mohel is nowadays certified technically, but not ordained ritually. The chain of contemporary rabbinical ordinations does not go back to the culturally postulated superhuman agent, either. Their past learning, their knowledge, their skills, or simply their social status and the source of their salary make them a rabbi and a mohel—none of these factors can be interpreted in the Lawson-McCauley model. Probably many lay people have the intuition that rabbis, but also mohalim, are empowered by formal rituals (Malley and Barrett 2003). Yet, they would not know for sure that a chain of ordination connects the rabbis and the mohalim to the counterintuitive agent, and therefore, they cannot entertain a special agent kind of mental representation of these rituals, as proposed by Lawson and McCauley. Where do the emotions come from, then?

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History of Judaism As a Constant Fight for a Balanced Ritual System Summarizing, we can say that neither the original model of Lawson and McCauley, nor its eventual revisions and generalizations can satisfactorily explain how counterintuitive representations in the action representation system account for the necessary—not too few, not too much—”tension” in the Jewish rituals-and-emotions system. Therefore, we predict the emergence of the tedium in the technical sense, as explained in an earlier section. The standard reaction to the tedium effect—according to McCauley and Lawson, and based on the personal experiences of Harvey Whitehouse during his fieldwork in New Guinea—is splinter group outburst: the emergence of a new movement led by a single or a few charismatic leaders that introduces highemotional special agent rituals. As New Testament scholar Risto Uro (e.g., 2011, esp. p. 124) has argued, the emergence of Christianity can be seen as such an outburst. The introduction of baptism, a new special agent ritual, helped various second temple sects, and the Jesus-movement among them, to create a more balanced ritual system. The charismatic leaders of the splinter groups are culturally postulated to be empowered (directly) by the superhuman agent(s). Therefore, the new rituals, such as baptism, can be represented using a short chain: I am baptised by a person who has been baptised by a person baptised by Jesus. This short chain of special agent rituals certainly involves more “tension” than the rites in second temple Judaism, having very complex structures. Thus, a Passover sacrifice in the Temple would be a special patient instrument with the following representation: I [agent] eat the sacrificed lamb [patient, which is related to the counterintuitive agent because] it was sacrificed by a priest, who had a father who had a father [etc.] who had a father who was Aaron, who was consecrated by Moses, following divine orders. This representation involves a recursive structure of indefinite length (the “etc.”), and enabling facts instead of enabling rituals. Therefore, the first century charismatic movements introducing the new ritual of baptism perfectly illustrate the splinter group emergence phenomenon with “more exciting” rituals, as predicted by McCauley and Lawson. New Testament scholar István Czachesz (2007) has demonstrated that the representation of Jesus that has finally eclipsed alternative images in mainstream Christianity is the one that corresponds to a cognitive optimum. Being too counterintuitive would impose too heavy computational load, whereas being hardly counterintuitive would not be sufficiently attracting. In sum, the success of Christianity among late antique Jews can be explained as it having found a cognitively more balanced set of rituals and representations.

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Beside Christianity, other charismatic movements come immediately to one’s mind, such as Shabbatai Tzvi’s and others’ messianic movements, as well as Hasidism. Sent by the divine, the messiah is expected to create a world with a direct link to the superhuman, thereby refilling Judaism with more “tension”. False messiahs emerged whenever the need for this refilling was desperate.29 Being in direct contact with the divine, the rebbe, the charismatic leader of the Hasidim, also offers a more direct link to the counterintuitive agent. The introduction of new rituals can again be observed: think of the blessings given by the rebbe, of the Hasidic tish (the followers eating at the rebbe’s table) and of prayers at the rebbe’s grave.30 We can easily see that these rituals invite the Hasid to participate in an action that involves the divine within a single step. First, remember that the rebbe can directly communicate with the divine. Hence, he has been involved in a special agent speaking action, where the speaker is counterintuitive, and the addressee is the rebbe. Thus, the rebbe blessing a Hasid is a special agent ritual: the Hasid [the addressee] undergoes a speaking action whose agent has been enabled directly by the counterintuitive agent. The same applies to the tish, when the Hasidim receive bits of food from the rebbe’s plate: they [the receivers] undergo a giving action whose agent has been directly enabled by the counterintuitive agent. Praying at the rebbe’s grave is a special addressee ritual performed at a special location. The tish, the rebbe’s grave and the rebbe’s blessing are probably the closest situations that an average believer can ever get to the counterintuitive agent—not only in Judaism but in any religion in general. And these rituals certainly bring the Hasid much closer to the counterintuitive agent in the chain of rituals than any mainstream Jewish ritual. Beside expecting “splinter-group” outbursts, we may also search for other forms of experiencing the divine more directly. Such an alternative is the way offered by spiritualism and mysticism. The esoteric experience in the heikhalot-literature and merkavahmysticism, as well as the poorly understood mystical practices by the Talmudic rabbis themselves accompany the Biblio-centric mitzvah-Judaism of the late antiquity. In the early Ashkenazic Middle Ages, the intellectual achievements of Rashi, the Tosafists or the Rosh were paralleled by the emergence of the Hasidei Ashkenaz. The Shulchan Arukh coincided in space and time with the naissance of the Lurianic Kabbalah, an important source of the already discussed Sabbatianism and Hasidism. Indeed, the rise of the Kabbalah from the thirteenth century onwards had certainly been another reaction to the tedium effect in mainstream Judaism. It is not a coincidence that the extreme

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rationalism represented by Maimonides had a tremendous intellectual influence on a huge number of individuals, but could not really become a popular movement. The idea that a Jew must follow each of the commandments just because they have been commanded by God is a crystalclear theological construct, but it hardly fits the action representation system in one’s mind. This divergence of intellectual theology from the effects of unconscious mental setup has been already discussed as the dichotomy of theological correctness versus intuitive knowledge (Barrett and Keil 1996; Barrett 1999). The same applies to the similar approach of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and mutatis mutandis, to Mordecai Kaplan’s reconstructionism: intellectual Judaism may be influential on a theological level, but will lack the modes of religiosity required to launch a popular movement. Further methods also lead to a shorter chain connecting the human agent and the counterintuitive one. The Karaites emphasised the role of the Torah text, which itself is the product of an action directly involving God. Their refusal of the rabbinic interpretation and their return to the “original meaning of the text” can thus be interpreted as seeking to reduce the chain of enabling actions to the counterintuitive agent compared to the contemporaneous gaonic Judaism. Aggadah and folklore, throughout two millennia of Jewish history, have filled Judaism with “spirituality” and emotions to counterbalance the dry halakhic system. They offered alternative interpretations of rituals that fall closer to the intuitive forms of religiosity. Take the example of the ritual bath (mikveh): women are required to immerse in it following menstruation, whereas certain groups have the minhag (tradition) that men purify themselves regularly, for instance, before Shabbat. Thus, the halakhic construct of ritual immersion is very complex to the uneducated person, involving the cryptic menstrual impurity, as well as a distinction between men and women, between law and minhag. Now, I was told the following explanation by a non-Jewish person in charge of maintaining the old synagogue building in Makó (SouthEastern Hungary), formerly the base town of the Makover rebbe and his Hasidim: “The men went more often (weekly) to the mikveh than the women (monthly) because men were involved in trade in public and so had more opportunity to sin than women, who stayed home.” Is this explanation not much more logical-sounding? It is built upon a single assumption, namely, that the ritual bath purifies someone from moral sins. The rite is therefore directly connected to interpersonal ethics, a domain beyond rituals, with implications to social cognition. Hence, this folkloristic interpretation of the ritual bath opens the door to emotions from the social sphere, which may then refill the batteries of a tedious ritual system.

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In the nineteenth century, the study-centric yeshivah movement gave rise to the practice-centric mussar movement, copying thereby the balance achieved by Hasidism less than a century earlier between mystics-influenced philosophy and mystics-influenced religious practice. Coming to modern times, the reform movement, which grew out of enlightenment and philosophy, was looking for nineteenth century musical ideals and adopted organ music at its inception, and by now it has been dominated by a constant search for spirituality. Why did this rationalist movement turn into a spiritual one, if not because rationalism cannot provide the “tension” needed by a balanced religious ritual system? At the same time, Shlomo Carlebach-fan Jewish hippees, the followers of Nachman of Breslav and Lubavitchers adopting popular culture have entered the orthodox scene. Countless examples can be added to demonstrate how the friction between two forces has constantly shaped the history of Judaism. These two forces are, to repeat ourselves, two different ways of connecting oneself to the superhuman using the commandments. On the one hand, we have a consciously formulated theology according to which the very fact that God gave the commandments to the Jewish people links the Jew to the superhuman. Yet, this seemingly very simple idea does not fit the mental structures responsible for religion, namely, the action representation system. This idea is theologically correct, but the cognitive constraints constantly fight for a different form of religion. Thus, on the other hand, the history of Judaism witnesses a constant search for forms that fit the action representation system in the human mind, and which realises a chain of enabling rituals as short as possible between the congregant and the divine. Summary: What Are Emotions and What Role Do They Play in Rituals? I have presented the Lawson-McCauley model of rituals (as introduced formally in their 1990 book) and applied the McCauley-Lawson theory (as discussed in their 2002 book) to Judaism. It turned out that adopting the model raises problems. Therefore one may wish to reject the whole model, as being falsified by Judaism. Instead, however, I have pointed to a number of details that should be revised in order to improve the model so that it can also accommodate Jewish rituals. My introductory example, the Avinu Malkenu recited at the end of a Yom Kippur Neilah, raises another problem: this high-arousal moment is not a special agent ritual, and so it falls outside the predicted two attractor positions (high-arousal special agent rituals and low-arousal special patient/special instrument rituals)—provided that it is a ritual at all, which the authors of the

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model would deny. We nevertheless would like to include this religious action within the cognitive theory of Judaism, since prayers are so central to Jewish practice. Maybe the key to the answer is that this is an action performed in order to coax a superhuman-reaction, and so the performer is willing to invest a “higher price” to guarantee the positive reaction.31 Thereby, he also refills his rituals-and-emotions system with the necessary “tension”. In fact, as we have seen it, rabbinical Judaism lacks proper special agent rituals, and therefore it is predicted to display the tedium effect. Is Jewish religion saved from “boredom” by the high-arousal events that are not special agent rituals, such as a Neilah service? Do the large amount of low-arousal rituals filling up every day of the observant Jew compensate for the lack of high-arousal rituals? Are certain mitzvot represented mentally as special agent rituals, despite their representations being “halakhicly incorrect”? Or is the tedium effect indeed discernible in the halakhic system, and developments all along the history of Judaism—aggadah, folklore, mysticism, Hasidism—can be viewed as responses to this “tedium” in a technical sense? The answer is probably a little bit the mixture of all of these possibilities. Yet, the answer also needs a refinement of the concepts of the theory: beside revisiting the definition and the typology of the rituals, as discussed above, we also must be able to tell how to measure emotional arousal. McCauley and Lawson present it in a series of figures as if it were a onedimensional quantity. But do we know what it is? As mentioned earlier, my guess is that emotion is a folk-psychological concept, which can be decomposed into various (related, but very different) processes. The McCauley-Lawson theory refers to emotions in a number of contexts, and it is quite probable that these contexts require slightly different aspects of the term. First of all, emotions were used by McCauley and Lawson (2002) in order to ensure memorability, hence, the transmission of the rituals. High arousal helps remembering infrequent rituals in illiterate societies. Yet, Judaism comes with a highly literate culture. The blessing of the sun ritual (Birkat ha-chamah) occurs only once in twenty-eight years, but there is no need for arousal creating flashbulb memory traces. Written artefacts, such as a siddur or a rabbinic source can help maintain the ritual across generations (see, e.g., the end of the responsum of the Hatam Sofer, OH 56). At the same time, my arousal during Avinu Malkenu will not help me remember the entire text of this long prayer. Thus, the kind of emotions needed for the memorability of, prototypically, initiation rites may be irrelevant in the context of Judaism. Second, emotions are also referred to when explaining the breakdown of excessively arousing ritual systems: a sensory overload ceiling stops the

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intensification of this kind of unbalanced rituals systems (not discussed in the current paper). Are these dynamics related to the same aspects of emotions as the memorability of the rituals? Third, the lack of emotions causes the tedium effect, the reactions to which are, supposedly, splinter group outbursts. But once we identify the neuralcognitive bases of emotions, are we going to find the tedium effect and the sensory overload ceiling on the two ends of the same scale? My intuition is that the sensory overload ceiling is related to the many physiological aspects of emotions: pain, excessive laughter, hunger, altered state of consciousness, heart rate, etc.32 Whereas the tedium effect is rather related to something else, to another component of the emotion phenomenology, to what I have called “tension”. Maybe we should call it temporarily XB22, to avoid any association related to the everyday language word tension. Maybe, it will turn out that XB22 is the level of some enzyme in the brain; or a pattern of activation of certain neurons; or the energy level of some cells; or something else. Maybe it is an abstract concept introduced by a formal model of the mind: a parameter of the algorithm, a target function optimized by a connectionist network or a hidden component of the representation. Many disciplines have been successful only after they introduced concepts that are directly not observable: force and energy beside place and time in mechanics, social classes beside groups of people in sociology, beat and cadence beside tones in musicology, phrase structure beside word order in syntax, and so forth. Maybe XB22 is such a hidden concept needed to explain rituals. Maybe XB22 is the neural correlate of Rudolph Otto’s Holy. The human brain, for some reasons unclear so far, desperately thirsts for XB22 (Psalm 42:3). At this moment, “tension XB22” is a non-definable concept of our theory, which in turn postulates the following: (1) Humans seem to aim at a relatively high (but not too high) level of XB22. (2) Rituals increase its level, and special agent rituals increase its level more than other rituals. The shorter the chain of enabling rituals, the more of it the ritual provides. (3) On a phenomenological level, one’s amount of XB22 becomes visible as emotion-related phenomena. These three axioms reformulate the main results of the McCauley-Lawson theory, while keeping hidden what the emotion-related concept of XB22 is. Maybe a detailed analysis of the history of Judaism will bring us closer to this mystery. But for sure, a better understanding of emotions will bring us closer to a better understanding of Judaism.

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Acknowledgments The author is grateful to the editors of this volume for inviting him, for pushing him to reconsider his research from the perspectives of the emotions, and also for countless valuable comments on the manuscript. He also acknowledges the support of various funds, including the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (project number: 275–89–004). Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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See primarily the oeuvre of Daniel Boyarin, and the ensuing literature. For an evaluation of his ‘new historicism’, refer for instance to Schwartz 2002, 108. See also Gereboff’s discussion of the recent scholarship, including the works of Michael Fishbane, Daniel Boyarin and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. See Lawson and McCauley 1990 and McCauley and Lawson 2002. For a detailed discussion and references, see Whitehouse 2004, 63ff. Most of them are discussed in my article, which should serve as a complement to this chapter, Biró, in press, as well as in my book under preparation. In the cognitive science of religion, see, for instance, Keijzer 2011. “Cognition”, in Oxford Dictionaries, at http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cognition. Oxford University Press, 2011. Refer to the large body of literature on ‘social cognition’. For various examples about how computational cognitive science can approach social phenomena, see Sun 2006. The term “emergence” is a keyword here. Cognitive scientists do not deny social phenomena, but derive them from phenomena on an individual level. The classic analogy is the temperature of a gas in physics, which is a macro-level phenomenon, meaningless on the molecular level, and yet, derived from the average kinetic energy of the individual molecules. Similarly, social phenomena are not seen any more as macro-level primitives of the theory, but as derived notions that emerge from the micro-level interactions of a large number of individuals, each with a specific mind/brain. On the role of the social network in the context of the cognitive science of religion, see the work of István Czachesz, for instance, 2011. More on it in Gabriel Levy’s chapter in the current volume. Note that the same applies to the notion of ‘religion’, an umbrella term for certain forms of behaviour, certain beliefs, specific institutions, artefacts and a more or less well definable section of the literary canon. Such a general umbrella term did not exist in most non-Western non-modern cultures. Unlike numerous theories of religion, most scholars in the cognitive science of religion school do not aim at providing a single general definition of the term ‘religion’; we rather aim at explaining separate phenomena that are together called ‘religious’ by the modern Western societies. Such an “irrational” bodily reaction has a clear evolutionary advantage by guaranteeing that a substance that caused nausea in the past will not be consumed again in the future. It is irrelevant whether the person himself experienced sickness in the past, or someone else had undergone the experience, and this person has learned this piece of information from the community. Thanks to cultural learning and its effects similar to personal learning, each of us need not undergo all possible unpleasant situations. As a by-product, we obtain “irrational” bodily reactions even in the case of food taboos that are culturally acquired

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•T A M A S B I R O • and the external observer would know that the food does not cause sickness in other cultures. Here I allude to the distinction frequently made in the cognitive science of religion literature between theologically correct forms of religious concepts, as opposed to their intuitive forms; see Barrett 1999. The former are more complex, requiring the violation of cognitive constraints, and therefore, available to the believer subjects only “when one is slowly and carefully reflecting on one’s knowledge” (338). The latter are used by the same subjects in experimental tasks with greater processing demands. They conform to the cognitive constraints, and therefore the mind can process them more easily, probably in a faster, automatized way. Thus, the distinction between the two types of observable forms reveals some secrets of the mental operations. Remember that most Jewish services do not petition for such direct consequences. Unquestionably, a person praying for a sick relative or a Hasid awaiting the coming of the Messiah would be similarly moved. Yet, most of Jewish liturgy is recited for the sake of being recited, without petitions at all, or with extremely general petitions, which many congregants simply cannot relate to. For a distinction between human-action-only rituals and superhuman-reaction rituals, and the explanation of their different emotional dynamics, see Biró 2011. See Martin 2003; cited by Saler 2009, 46. Martin quotes Guthrie 1980, 181. A slightly more technical and detailed introduction to the same topic is Biró, in press. The reader is encouraged to study the two chapters in parallel, since they significantly complement each other. Here I skip over certain linguistic details to keep the terminology standardly used in the cognitive science of religion. See also Tamás Biró, “Sacrifice in mind and language: A preliminary cross-linguistic survey,” in preparation. At this point, I would like to express my thanks to Risto Uro for fruitful discussion and suggestions. If a counterintuitive agent is present in more slots, then we take into account the one that has the shorter “enabling chain”. For more details, see McCauley and Lawson 2002, 33f. Many textbooks of statistical mechanics provide good introductions to dynamical system theory and attractors. A less technical introduction—focusing on cognition, culture and society—is Mainzer 1997. The classical reference from a philosophy of science perspective is of course still Prigogine and Stengers 1986. The word tension must not be understood either as a physical concept, or as a vague metaphor, but as a well-defined technical term in the model. In the first case, I would make unjustifiable ontological claims about the brain, since I cannot know yet what the postulated notion corresponds to. In the second one, I would rely on the reader’s subjective understanding of the word, losing thereby the chance to connect it one day to objectively demonstrable brain structures. Biró 2011 presents a preliminary attempt to give an answer. Note also that McCauley and Lawson (2002) discuss the role of “growing and widespread preoccupation with theological and intellectual concerns among participants in a religious system. The resulting arrangements involve […] drastically diminished levels of sensory pageantry associated with these systems’ non-repeated, special agent rituals” (208). Although sharing their intuitions, I certainly expect future generations of cognitive scholars to work out the details of the mechanisms “resulting” in the described “arrangements”. Thus the top-down approach

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initiated by McCauley and Lawson may dig deeper and meet with bottom-up approaches, as described in the introduction. A more elaborate paper on this issue, substantially complementing the current chapter, is Biró, in press. Further examples are discussed by Biró, in press. See the detailed discussion of the priestly blessing in Biró, in press. The newborn baby is Jewish if born from a Jewish mother, and this is why he must be circumcised on the eighth day. The baby remains Jewish even if he is not circumcised for whatever reason. A boy becomes legally adult the day after he turns thirteen, independently of whether he gives a party, reads from the Torah scroll and receives a blessing. In the terminology of the McCauley-Lawson theory, false messiahs can be viewed as the perturbations induced by the tedium effect in the stable stage of unbalanced systems (McCauley and Lawson 2002, 185). Some of these rituals also exist in non-Hassidic groups, especially in the Sephardic folkreligion under Kabbalistic influence. There, the same train of thought can be repeated: alternative (charismatic-imagistic) forms of religion are developed in order to counter the “tedium” characterizing mainstream (routinized-doctrinal) religiosity. Biró, “Optimal Religion”. Classical examples are the ethnographies of Harvey Whitehouse and Dimitris Xygalatas.

Bibliography Barrett, J. L. 1999. “Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraint and the Study of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 11, 4: 325–339. ———. 2000. “Exploring the natural foundations of religion.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 1: 29– 34. Barrett, J. L., and Keil, F. C. 1996. “Conceptualizing a Non-Natural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concept.” Cognitive Psychology 31: 219–247. Biró, T. 2011. “Optimal Religion: Optimality Theory Accounts for Ritual Dynamics.” In Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages, edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biró, 155–191. Leuven: Peeters. ———. In press. “Is Judaism Boring? On the lack of counterintuitive agents in Jewish rituals.” In Mind, Morality, and Magic: Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies, edited by I. Czachesz and R. Uro. London: Equinox. Boyer, P. 1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2001. Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spiritsand Ancestors. London: Vintage. Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and Word Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Czachesz, I. 2007. “Early Christian Views on Jesus’ Resurrection: Toward a Cognitive Psychological Interpretation.” Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift 61: 47–59. ———. 2011. “Women, Charity and Mobility in Early Christianity: Weak Links and the Historical Transformation of Religions.” In Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages, edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biró, 129–154. Leuven: Peeters. Damasio, A. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

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Gereboff, J. 2008. “Judaism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, edited by J. Corrigan, 95–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 95–110. Guthrie, S. E. 1980. “A cognitive theory of religion. Current Anthropology” 21, 2, 181–203. Kazen, T. 2011. Emotions in Biblical Law: A Cognitive Science Approach. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Keijzer, F. 2011. “Meaningful Meaning: Changing Relations between Science and Religion.” In Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages, edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biró, 53–73. Leuven: Peeters. Konvalinka, I., D. Xygalatas et al. 2011. “Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking ritual.” PNAS 108, 20: 8514–8519. Lawson, E. T., and R. N. McCauley. 1990. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindquist, K. A. et al. 2012. “The Brain Basis of Emotions: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 35, 3: 121–143. Ludwig, A. M. 1968. “Altered States of Consciousness.” In Trance and Possession States, edited by P. Prince, 69–95. Montreal: R.M. Bucke Memorial Society. Martin, L. 2003. “Cognition, society and religion: A new approach to the study of culture.” Culture and Religion 4, 2: 207–231. Mainzer, K. 1997. Thinking in Complexity: The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind. Berlin: Springer, 3rd revised and enlarged edition. Malley, B., and J. Barrett. 2003. “Can Ritual Form be Predicted from Religious Belief? A Test of the Lawson-McCauley Hypotheses.” Journal of Ritual Studies 17, 2: 1–14. McCauley, R. N., and E. T. Lawson. 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prigogine, I. and I. Stengers. 1986. La nouvelle alliance: Métamorphose de la science. Paris: Gallimard. Saler, B. 2009. “Anthropomorphism and animism: On Steward E. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds (1993)”. In Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, edited by M. Strausberg, 39–52. London: Routledge. Schwartz, S. 2002. “Historiography on the Jews in the ‘Talmudic Period’ (70–640 CE).” In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by M. Goodman, 79–114. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stausberg, M., ed. 2009. Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion. London: Routledge. Sun, R. 2006. Cognition and Multi-Agent Interaction: From Cognitive Modeling to Social Simulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tinbergen, N. 1963. “On Aims and Methods of Ethology.” Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 20, 4: 410–433. Uro, R. 2011. “Towards a Cognitive History of Early Christian Rituals.” In Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages, edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biró, 109–127. Leuven: Peeters. Whitehouse, H. 1995. Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ————. 2004. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.

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Xygalatas, D. 2011. “Firewalking in the Balkans: High-arousal rituals and memory.” In Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages, edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biró, 193–209. Leuven: Peeters.

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here has been surprisingly little research on emotion in Jewish texts, and especially the rabbinic corpus. The most well known analysis of emotion in rabbinic texts is Neusner’s (1987). However, as he admits, he came to the topic “emotion” toward the end of the research process, after being pushed by a student to recognize that there is not an easy divide between reason and emotion (xi). In addition, his is not a systematic treatment of the subject. As if such a thing was possible. My present task, nevertheless, is to try to develop a systematic way of approaching emotion in late Biblical and rabbinic texts. Despite the fact that such texts are eclectic and probably do not represent a single point of view or worldview, many scholars nevertheless think that we can describe some centers of gravity with regard to emotion for the tradition as a whole. While a treatise on the understanding of emotion for a particular ancient rabbi is certainly worth pursuing, for my purposes in this chapter I am interested in characterizing the nature of the discourse about emotion as it applies to particular texts. In other words, my goal is to understand both the Judaic minds/hearts behind such texts, in addition to how the language within such texts could activate the emotions of readers. Let us think of my methodology as a kind of textual experiment. I use the model of emotion developed by the Swiss Center for Affective Science, and in particular, Klaus Scherer, as guide throughout. I have used Scherer’s theory to build a data-mining program that can analyze the use of emotions within any text, including descriptions of physiological “symptoms” that are tied directly to emotion through the theory. I then apply this program to a few Judaic texts as a kind of “proof of concept” that can be replicated and expanded by other scholars. The main outcome of the chapter is thus to build a new computer-assisted hermeneutic method that focuses on emotions within texts. I suggest that such an approach can tell us something new about the role of emotion in ancient Judaism. A key assumption of this approach, needless to

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say, is that some basic human emotions are universal. They are not necessarily innate, meaning inborn, but they are universal in the sense that they develop over time in every human group due to the nature of human groups. In other words, they pop up in every human culture throughout the world with the same basic physiological “symptoms”. Of course, there are always differences, and these are very important. However, in general, though the causes of what makes someone angry, content, fearful, or embarrassed may be quite different across cultures, all humans nevertheless express these emotions, and often in similar ways (for a good discussion of the debate about the universality of some facial expressions, see Ekman 1999). This notion of the “expression” of emotions may lead us in the wrong direction. Emotions, according to the scientific research that guides my understanding, are complex phenomena made up of five component parts. Within this framework, emotion is defined as “an episode of interrelated, synchronized changes in the states of all or most of the five organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism (Scherer, 1987, 2001)” (Scherer 2005). Each “organismic subsystem” is connected to an emotion “component.” Specifically, the five component parts are 1) a subjective feeling component, i.e. a “feeling;” note that though this “feeling” has often been considered the core of emotion, in Scherer’s model it is only one component; 2) a motor expression component; this can include either vocal or facial expression; 3) a motivational component; by this Scherer means that emotions tend to produce behaviors, or action tendencies—for example, fight or flight; 4) a neurophysiological component; this includes bodily and other neurological symptoms; 5) a cognitive component; Scherer calls this “appraisal.” Appraisal plays a crucial role in driving the emotional process: these subsystems function independently most of the time, yet “the special nature of emotion as a hypothetical construct consists of the coordination and synchronization of all of these systems during an emotion episode, driven by appraisal (Scherer, 2004[b])” (Scherer 2005, 698–699). In other words, appraisal unifies all of these components. Scherer notes a few of what he calls “design features” of emotions that he thinks differentiate them from other types of affective processes, such as preferences or moods, though all of these are related. First, emotions are “eventfocused” in the sense that they are in response to particular “triggers.” These can be external events, like thunderstorms, or “internal” triggers, either in the form of memories or images, but also neuroendocrine or other physiological changes. Emotions are triggered in the sense that we cannot decide to have particular emotions, and nor do they describe long-term characteristics of a

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person. Second, emotions are “appraisal driven.” In this sense, Scherer regards emotions as “relevance detectors.”1 The appraisal component is rather vague in the model, but ranges from automatic and implicit to conscious evaluation with regard to the “concerns of the organism.” In other words, emotions focus the body in particular ways that are significant to the wellbeing of the organism, broadly understood (though, of course, emotions can lead an organism astray for a variety of reasons). Third, the next “design feature” is “response synchronization,” by which Scherer means that there is coordination among these various components and subsystems to generate a unitary response. Fourth, emotions are rarely “steady states,” rather they can change very rapidly depending on the appraisal process. Fifth, emotions have a very strong behavioral impact that, in some cases, may have adaptive benefits. Sixth, emotions can be differentiated from moods based on their intensity (emotions are usually more intense than moods). Seventh, emotions are relatively short lived—again differentiating them from moods (emotions are usually shorter in duration). The final important theoretical point to make before moving on to Jewish texts is a useful distinction Scherer (and others) make between “utilitarian” and “aesthetic” emotions (2005, 706). The former are “utilitarian in the sense of facilitating our adaptation to events that have important consequences for our wellbeing. Such adaptive functions are the preparation of action tendencies (fight, flight), recovery and reorientation (grief, work), motivational enhancement (joy, pride), or the creation of social obligations (reparation)” (706). Aesthetic emotions are not as easily tied to functional effects. These are the kind of emotions experienced during music or other arts. Some examples of such aesthetic emotions are “being moved or awed, being full of wonder, admiration, bliss, ecstasy, fascination, harmony, rapture, solemnity.” There is a distinct bodily component to such emotions, but they are distinguished from utilitarian emotions because they are not “in the service of behavioral readiness” (706). Based on this understanding of emotion, Scherer has developed a model of the “semantic space” of emotions in Western languages (707–709). For our purposes in the analysis of text, we may think of the semantic space as belonging to the “appraisal” level of emotions. As noted, within a particular emotional process, the component levels are synchronized and coordinated. Appraisal, we saw, was the predominant cognitive component of emotion; we can think of this as the reflective level of emotion that has the effect of unifying the emotion as a singular experience for the organism. Scherer has developed an EXCEL Macro program called GALC that can analyze small

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sections of text according to this model to determine the emotion presented (or a mixed emotion). The question I pursue is whether it is possible to import some of these tools from the science of affect into the analysis of Judaic texts. In what follows I utilize GALC in an analysis of Song of Songs to show that this is indeed possible. I select Song of Songs because it is probably the most emotionally resonant text in Judaic and Biblical literature. It also has a long history of analysis of its emotional and erotically charged elements. GALC is designed to handle relatively small sections of text, since it is used as a tool to analyze the emotional character of survey answers; in this way, the small chapter lengths of Song of Songs makes it ideal. I then go on to build a tool to analyze larger sections of text using the text data-mining program Automap. I use the tool to analyze the main rabbinic commentary on Song of Songs, known as Song of Songs Rabbah. Since we do not have ancient rabbis around anymore to study, the text is basically all we have to go on in trying to understand their hearts/minds. But I think this model—analyzing the semantic space of emotion in texts using the latest research on emotion—is very promising. In addition, the model does us a favor in tying the body directly to textual representation, by outlining the typical “physiological symptoms” associated with emotion. The physiological symptom, we saw, was one of the five components of emotion. My analysis below will focus in particular on these bodily “symptoms” within rabbinic texts, though any of the component parts could serve as a hermeneutic key. In an attempt to quantify this semantic space, Scherer’s model of emotion has led to the development of what he calls the Geneva Emotion Wheel. This is an image used to study emotional appraisal in subjects without leading them to specific outcomes. In general such wheels either have two or three axes (see Klein’s chapter in this volume). Scherer’s wheel has three dimensions of emotion appraisal: 1) positive/negative and 2) high control/low control, in addition the emotions are evaluated in terms of 3) intensity on a scale of 1–5. The wheel provides a scientifically tractable way to visualize the semantic space of emotions in particular contexts. My plan is to take specific rabbinic texts and sugyas and use the physiological “symptoms” noted before and the semantic space analysis to parse them and then plot the results on the emotion wheel. This will give us a picture of the emotional flavor of the text in question. Of course this model can be exported to texts outside the rabbinic and Jewish corpus. In what follows, I present a “proof of concept” by analyzing Song of Songs and the commentary on it.

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GALC Analysis of Song of Songs Song of Songs originates from the love poetry and songs of the ancient near east, and was originally written down in Hebrew. Since the GALC program is not yet available in Hebrew, we must make do with a translation. I have selected the English Standard Version to analyze. GALC takes small pieces of text and analyzes the semantic content to determine the dominant emotion. If there is a mixed emotion, the program will output two emotion concepts. I input each of the short eight chapters of the Song. Here was the output: Chapter 1: Anger Chapter 2: Anger Chapter 3: Anger Chapter 4: Amusement Chapter 5: Anger Chapter 6: Admiration/Awe Chapter 7: Anger Chapter 8: Anger So we see something truly fascinating, and perhaps informative, emerges out of this analysis. Six of the eight chapters register a dominant emotion of anger. All of the emotion outputs register only one emotion (Admiration/Awe counts as one). This finding is perhaps counter-intuitive to our expectations about a love poem, but perhaps we can make sense of it. Part of the problem is that the text as it stands now is a composite of a number of smaller poems. Roland E. Murphy, in his entry on the Song for the Anchor Bible Dictionary, notes that scholars have suggested there are anywhere from 6 to 25 distinct poems within the text. He suggests a compromise of ten units to the Song (Murphy 1996). When we use his structure a remarkably different emotional pattern emerges: 1:2–6 Anger//Feeling Love 1:7–2:7 Anger//Feeling Love 2:8–17 Anger//Feeling Love 3:1–5 Feeling Love//Hatred 3:6–11 Anger//Boredom 4:1–5:1 Amusement//Anger 5:2–6:4 Admiration and Awe//Anger 6:5–12 Admiration and Awe//Anger 7:1–8:4 Anger//Contempt 8:5–14 Anger//Boredom

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In this case we have mixed emotions for all of the units. Anger is once again the dominant emotion, but it is mixed with others, suggesting a much more complex picture. The fact that “anger” is an underlying emotion of such a classic love poem is surprising, but perhaps is to be explained by the fact that aggression (and anger) is the negative emotion that always comes along with any form of attachment, and love in particular. In other words, part of loving something is the thought that it could be taken away (or is in fact already absent, such as a distant lover; see Kernberg 1991 for a classic description in psychoanalysis). This association perhaps helps us make more sense of the famous climax of the song in Chapter 8, Verse 6: ‫ִשׁפֵּי אֵשׁ ַשׁ ְל ֶה ֶב ְתיָה‬ ְ ‫ְשׁפֶי ָה ר‬ ָ ‫ִשׁאוֹל ִקנְאָה ר‬ ְ ‫ָשׁה כ‬ ָ ‫ִשׂי ֵמנִי כַחוֹתָם עַל ִל ֶבּ ָך כַּחוֹתָם עַל זְרוֹ ֶע ָך כִּי ַעזָּה ַכ ָמּוֶת אַ ֲהבָה ק‬ [Set me like a seal on your heart, a seal on your arm, for love is fierce as death, jealousy hard as Sheol; its flames are flames of fire, a divine flame.]

More recent study of moral and emotional psychology echoes the intuition developed in psychoanalysis about the relation between anger (or aggression) and love. For example—in Scherer’s three dimensional model of emotion with the categories of positive/negative, high arousal/low arousal, and high control/low control—anger and love are both high arousal and high control, though of course they differ on the positive or negative axis. This close relation between the flames of love and anger is also expressed in the classic characterization of God in the Judaic tradition as a jealous god who manifests himself in the form of fire (see Geller 1994). Automap Analysis of Song of Songs Automap is a data-mining program that can handle extremely long sections of text, such as the whole of Talmudic literature. Using the GALC methodology above and Automap together we can characterize the emotional flavor of individual sugyas, sections, or the text as a whole. Automap and data-mining programs like it thus have the potential to revolutionize the study of texts. For now, I simply ran a word-frequency analysis. When analyzed by word frequency, the 40 most used words in the text are as follows: beloved, love, Jerusalem, beautiful, young, breasts, daughters, myrrh, Lebanon, eyes, found, sister, wine, Behold, Solomon, bride, flock, fragrance, garden, heart, lilies, soul, adjure, gazelle, gold, head, house, lovely, loves, spices, tree, vineyards, voice, women, cheeks, fruit, give, gone, hand, lips. Though these words are remarkable in their mundanity, or presence, and thus ground the poem in a distinctive way, it is perhaps surprising that so little

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of the language in the poem is specifically about emotions. As we saw above, two component parts or levels to emotion are its physiological symptom and motor expression. For the former, for example, we have feeling cold shivers or hot flashes on the neck or chest, sweating, weak limbs, growing pale, stomach pain, and heart-rate changes, among others (see Scherer 2005, 710). For the latter, we have smiling, mouth tensing, frowning, tears, volume changes of voice, speech disturbances, and moving forward or backward, among others. Using this type of language in literature and narrative is both expressive and evocative of emotion. Though the Song of Songs is deeply descriptive when it comes to showing how wonderful the lovers are in the five basic senses, it is not descriptive in an experiential sense concerning emotion. Song of Songs Rabbah I have selected Song of Songs Rabbah to analyze as final illustration because it is the canonical commentary on Song of Songs in the rabbinic tradition. The text is very much longer than Song of Songs, and thus gives us the opportunity to put a program like Automap to work. I am particularly interested in analyzing in terms of the physiological and motor symptoms noted above. When these are analyzed in terms of frequency we get the following data: Eye …. around 100 times Mouth …. around 100 Heart …. 118 Voice …. 84 Breasts …. 29 Face …. 30 Neck …. 36 Lips …. 28 Cry …. 20 Tremble …. 17 Belly …. 5 Breath …. 5 Pale …. 4 Sweat …. a few In subsequent research I will examine the verse in which these symptoms appear in detail and attempt to “code” the rabbinic corpus according to Scherer’s model of emotion. The Automap output allows us to get a global

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picture of what aspects of the physiology of emotion the commentators focused on in Song of Songs and on what aspects they did not focus. Conclusion In this brief chapter I have presented what I think is a plausible way to incorporate methods from harder sciences into the study of religious texts. These methods could be quite useful with regard to other kinds of texts and can be easily replicated. I have argued that current research in the affective sciences can help us be more precise when talking about emotions in ancient texts. This may help us better understand the emotions both of the authors of ancient texts, in addition to the emotions elicited through reading them. I have done so without falling into the fallacy that human emotions are always the same across time and space; emotions are understood differently primarily because human reflection on emotion differs across time and space (what Scherer calls “appraisal”). Some emotions, however, and their physiological symptoms are consistent across the human condition, and these are the elements in the text on which I have focused. Combining a sophisticated (5 component) model of emotion with computer assisted data-mining techniques provides us with a new tool for analyzing Jewish texts. In presenting these methods I want to be clear that they cannot replace traditional methods of literary criticism and analysis of these texts. In general I find that both “scientific” oriented scholars and anti-scientific scholars misunderstand one another quite deeply. I lot of the distrust between ‘scientists’ and ‘humanists’ relevantly has a lot to do with emotions at a very personal level: scholar A feels slighted or underappreciated by scholar B. While the scientific approach may bring us more precision and clarity in talking about emotions, because it tends to strive towards the impersonal, it does a poorer job in accessing the personal level at which emotions operate— the deep dynamic and interpersonal level of emotions we are constantly a part of as social beings. This chapter, to a large extent, addresses the question of how we can get at this complexity of emotion. Another important misunderstanding seems to be with regard to vocation— that is, one’s calling. Methodological and theoretical lines between humanities and sciences are quite a bit more blurry than either side is usually willing to admit; what does distinguish the two, rather, concerns purpose. Humanists are not interested in producing knowledge for its own sake; rather, the goal is enlightenment or self-knowledge. Humanists are interested in the limits of knowledge. Science by contrast, in this rather idealized picture, has as its goal the production of public knowledge. These two projects should not be

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threatened by one another, but rather compliment one another. The tendency thus far in cognitive approaches to traditional humanities fields such as the study of religion, has been to attempt to explain religion based on methods and theories imported from the sciences. In contrast, I hope a future humanities will utilize methods and theories from the sciences to carry out its traditional aim: enlightenment or self-knowledge. Notes 1

I do not think Scherer means “relevance” in the same sense as Sperber and Wilson’s “Relevance Theory,” though the parallels are intriguing. Sperber and Wilson (1995) consider relevance an evolutionary calculation of the cost of processing information, but perhaps an emotional model of relevance would augment their theory.

Bibliography Automap. (c) 2001–2012. Kathleen M. Carley—Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), Institute for Software Research International (ISRI), School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA. All rights reserved. Ekman, Paul. 1999. “Facial Expressions.” In Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, edited by T. Dalgleish and M. J. Power, 301–320. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Geller, Stephen A. 1994. “Fiery Wisdom: Logos and Lexis in Deuteronomy 4.” Prooftexts 14, 2: 103–139. Kernberg, Otto F. 1991. “Aggression and Love in the Relationship of the Couple.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39, 1: 45–70. Murphy, Roland E. 1996. “Song of Songs.” In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David N. Freedman. New York: Doubleday. Neusner, Jacob. 1987. Vanquished Nation, Broken Spirit: The Virtues of the Heart in Formative Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scherer, Klaus R. 1987. “Toward a Dynamic Theory of Emotion: The Component Process Model of Affective States.” Geneva Studies in Emotion and Communication 1: 1–98; available at: http://www.unige.ch/fapse/emotion/genstudies/genstudies.html ———. 2001. “Appraisal Considered as a Process of Multi-Level Sequential Checking.” In Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research, edited by K.R. Scherer, A. Schorr and T. Johnstone, 92–120. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. “Feelings Integrate the Central Representation of Appraisal- Driven Response Organization in Emotion.” In Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium, edited by A.S.R. Manstead, N.H. Frijda and A.H. Fischer, 136–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. “What are emotions? And how can they be measured?” Social Science Information 44: 695–729. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

 

Index Numbers 1984 (Orwell), 96

A Abot de-Rabbi Natan B 16, 49 acoustic form of emotions, 9–10. see also music action representation, 131–133 Adam Kadmon, 113 additional soul defined, 108 departure of Shabbat, 112 admiration/awe, 157 Adonai Malach prayers modes, 106 rhythms of Shabbat, 109–112 aeolian minor mode defined, 106 rhythms of Shabbat, 110 aesthetic emotions, 155 Agape meal, 24–25 agents defined, 131–133 special agent rituals, 134–136 aggadah, 143 Ahavah Rabah defined, 106 departure of Shabbat, 112 rhythms of Shabbat, 110 Akiba, Rabbi, 50 Alexander, Sharon, 100 Aleynu, 114 “all your heart”, 50–51 Al-Suadi, Soham Bloch on, x Hellenistic meal, 21–42 introduction to texts, 17–19

Ross on, 10 Amidah, 110 amusement, 157 analyzing emotions, 10, 153–161 Anchor Bible Dictionary (Murphy), 157 Anderson, Gary A., 7 Anenu, 74–75, 77–80 anger, 157–158 “answer us”, 74 appraisal of emotion, 154–156 aranan, 107 Aristotle, 46 arousal of emotion in music, 11 in cantorial recitative, 76–81 in Carlebach Nusach, 85–88 circumplex model, 72 in Judaism, 68 theories of, 92 arousal of emotion in ritual measuring, 145 special agent rituals, 134–136 Ashkenazic synagogue music Carlebach Nusach, 81–82 functions of, 89 production of emotional excitement in, 69–70 Ross’s introduction, 11 two traditions, 68 asor, 107 attitude, 128 auditory form of emotions, 11. see also music Automap analysis of Song of Songs, 158–159 defined, 156 experience introduction, 121 autonomy of the heart, 52–54 aversion, 8 Avinu Malkenu, 129–130, 144–145 Avodah Sheba-Lev, 67–68

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164 B

The Babylonian Talmud, 102 balanced ritual system defined, 137 history of Judaism as fight for, 141–144 baptism, 141 bar mitzvah creating mood of Carlebach Nusach, 84 special agent rituals, 139–140 Barsalou, Lawrence, 103 Bavli, 102 beauty, 10, 24 Bell, Catherine, 35, 37 bema, 108 Benedict, Ruth, 124 Berakhot 9:5, 50 Bereshit Rabba 27:4, 52 Bereshit Rabba 34:10, 51 Bereshit Rabba 46:2, 45–46 Bereshit Rabba 61:6, 47–48 Bereshit Rabba 8:3, 52 Berlin Shabbat, 108 Berridge, Kent C., 64 Bible all your heart, 50–51 Automap analysis of Song of Songs, 158– 159 concept of heart, 43–44 emotion in the heart, 48–50 emotional significance of music in Judaism, 68 emotions in, 7 GALC analysis of Song of Songs, 157–158 heart as separate entity, 52–54 Shabbat and music, 107 Song of Songs Rabbah, 159–160 wisdom in the heart, 45–48 biology cognitive science, 125–126 defining emotion, 9 bipolar models of emotional experience, 72, 77 Biro, Tamas Judaism and emotions, 123–151 Levy on, 121 Ross’s introduction, 11–12

Blacking, John, 103 Blass, Friedrich, 27 blessing of the sun, 145 Bloch, René, ix–x body analysis of Song of Songs, 159–160 analyzing emotions, 156 cognitive science and, 127 concept of heart, 43–44 emotional components, 154–155 experience of emotion, 130 interaction with environment, 35 irrational reactions, 147–148 primal man, 113 as text, 43 body and blood of Christ, 31–32 Book of Genesis commentary on, 45–46 emotions in heart, 49–50 boredom, 124, 137 Bourdieu, Pierre, 35 Boyarin, Daniel, 100 brain balanced ritual system and, 137 emotions in, 127–128 location of intellect, 44 traditional cognitive science, 125–127 bread, 32 Bringing Ritual to Mind (McCauley and Lawson), 4

C cantorial recitative Chazanut overview, 73 cultural context, 89–90 defined, 11 emotional arousal, 76–81 emotional mood, 73–76 introduction, 68 production of emotional excitement in, 69–70 cantors emotional states, 76 importance of, 93–94 supplication, 74 cargo cult, 123

•I N D E X •

165

  Carlebach, R. Shlomo creating mood of Nusach, 83–85 cultural context of music, 90 origins of Carlebach Nusach, 81–82 significance of music in Judaism, 69 Carlebach Nusach cultural context, 89–90 defined, 11 emotional arousal, 85–88 emotional mood, 82–85 introduction, 68 overview of, 81–82 production of emotional excitement in, 69–70 categorical theories of music and emotion Carlebach Nusach, 86–87 defined, 71–72, 92 celebratory mood, 83–85 ceremony. see also rituals creating mood of Carlebach Nusach, 83– 85 service of the heart, 67 charis performance in Hellenistic meal, 38–39 values of Hellenistic meal, 10, 24 charismatic movements in response to Judaism, 141–142 splinter group outbursts and, 124 Chazanut, 69, 73. see also cantorial recitative Chilton, Bruce, 26 Chinese opera, 89 Christianity creation of identity, 25 development of Christian meal, 26 emotions in New Testament, 21 heart as separate entity, 53 Lord’s Supper, 38–39 origins in Hellenistic meal, 18–19 religious identification in Lord’s Supper, 31–33 as splinter group outburst, 141–142 circumcision, 45–46, 139–140 circumplex model, 71–72 Clarke, E., 107 Clayton, M., 100 cognitive processes defined, 125 defining emotion, 8

emotional components, 154 emotional forms, 9–10 of heart, 45–48, 54–55 cognitive rhythms in Jewish music. see rhythms in Jewish music cognitive science contradiction in terms?, 124–125 emotions and, 127–128 musical expectancy, 115–116 Ross’s introduction, 11–12 traditional, 125–127 cognitive science of religion emotion and, 4 experience and, 121 history of Jewish emotions, 123–124 Judaism and science of emotion, 7 on rituals, 130–131 texts and, 17 commandments fourth commandment, 101 McCauley-Lawson theory and, 138–139 rationalism and intuition, 143–144 communication with divine, 142 community in 1 Corinthians 11, 27–33 acting as representative, 129–130 cultural context of music, 90 expressed in Hellenistic meal, 10 in Hellenistic meal, 23–24 personal experience, 129 synchronization with, 116 composers, 71 computational perspective, 125–127 computer-assisted method for analyzing texts Automap, 158–159 defined, 153 GALC, 155–156 conceptualizing emotions, 9–10 congregation creating mood of Carlebach Nusach, 83–85 emotional arousal in Carlebach Nusach, 86 emotional connection to liturgy, 113–114 conscience, 48 conscious emotions, 64 Corinthians emotional variety in, 27–33 Hellenistic meal in, 19, 22

•I N D E X •

166 Corrigan, John, 103 defining emotion, 7 Judaism, 5 on religion, 2 cosmic religion, 1–3 counterintuitive agents balanced ritual system and, 137 defined, 130, 131 emotions and rituals, 134–136 in Hasidism, 142 representation of actions and entities, 132–133 crescendo, 77 Crump, Eric, 2, 5, 103 crying, 74–75 cults, 25–26 culture cognitive science and, 125–126 concept of heart, 43–44 defining emotion, 9 defining Nusach, 105 divisions within community, 28–29 expressed in Hellenistic meal, 21–22 musical context, 89 rhythms in Jewish music, 99 role of symposiarch, 33–34 texts of Judaism and, 18–19 Czachesz, István, 141

D Damasio, Antonio, 125 dance, 85 data mining, 153, 158–159 David Melech, 85 death of the Lord, 31–32 Debrunner, Albert, 27 Deeley, Peter, 103 dehydration, 130 deipnon, 23 delight defining emotion, 8 Shabbat and music, 107 DeMaris, Richard Hellenistic meal, 22–23 ideal vs. real, 36 design features of emotions, 154–155 Destor, Adriana, 7

Diaspora Jews, 89–90 Dibben, N., 107 dimensional theories of music, 71–72, 92 disciples, 25 dishonesty, 55 dissonance, 80 divine, 25. see also God divine logos, 53 divisions within community, 27–29 doctrinal mode, 124 dynamics and stability of rituals-andemotions systems, 136–137

E Ecology, meaning, and religion (Rappaport), 37 Einstein, Albert, 1–3 Ekman, P., 104 Eleazar, R. Isaac bar, 102 Eliezer, Rabbi location of intellect, 47 supplication, 74 embodied and embedded cognition, 125 emergence, 147 Emotion and Religion (Corrigan, Crump and Kloos), 2, 5 emotional rhythms in Jewish music. see rhythms in Jewish music emotions defining, 8–9 dynamics and stability of rituals-andemotions systems, 136–137 in Einstein’s conception of religion, 2–3 in heart, 48–50 induced by music, 64 Judaism and, ix–x. see also Judaism and emotions mood. see mood in music. see music music and, 70–72 new method for analyzing in texts, 153– 161 in New Testament, 21–22 religion and, 3–4 rituals and, 134–136 role in ritual, 144–146 significance of music in Judaism, 68–69 variety in 1 Corinthians 11, 27–33

•I N D E X •

167

  The Emotions (James and Lange), 4 enabling facts defined, 139 in Judaism, 141 enabling rituals in Christianity, 141 defined, 139 shortening chain of, 144 XB22 and, 146 entity representation, 131–133 entrainment defined, 106–107 “Talk to Universe”, 113–116 environment, 35 episodic memory, 115 equality, 10, 24 eros, 99 eschatological meal, 24–25 ethics, 6 Eucharist, 24–27 evil in the heart, 49–50 excitement in synagogue music, 69–70 expectations, musical, 114–116 experience cognitive science of religion, 11–12. see also cognitive science of religion emotions in New Testament, 21 introduction, 121 new method for analyzing emotion in texts, 153–161 experimentation with social alternatives, 34– 36, 38–39 explicit emotions, 64 expressed emotions behavior, 8 components, 154 induced by music, 64 in New Testament, 39 expression theories, 92 external feelings, 8

F fasting, 130 fear, 1–2 A Feast of Meanings (Chilton), 26 feelings. see also emotions defining emotion, 8–9

emotional components, 154 vs. emotions, 9 induced by music, 64 felt emotions, 64 fire-walking, 136 Fishbane, Michael, 123 flashbulb memory defined, 145 special agent rituals and, 135–136 folklore, 143 folk-notions defined, 127–128 special agent rituals and, 135 form of ritual, 130 four world model, 113–114 fourth commandment, 101 frequency effect in balanced ritual system, 137 emotions and rituals, 134–135 personal experience, 129 Freygish, 106 Friday prayers, 108–110 Friedmann, Jonathan, 63 friendship, 10, 24 Frigyesi, Judit, 104–105, 112

G Gabrielsson, A., 86 GALC defined, 155–156 Song of Songs analysis, 157–158 gemara, 54 generosity, 10, 24 Genesis commentary on, 45–46 emotions in heart, 49–50 God’s work, 101 Geneva Emotion Wheel, 156 Gentiles, 26 Gereboff, Joel history of emotions, 123 Judaism and emotion, 5–7, 104 Gesetzesreligion, ix giving, 132–133 Gnostic dimension of ritual, 37 God Einstein on, 1–2

•I N D E X •

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heart as separate entity, 52–53 heart of, 58 as jealous, 158 Jewish connection with, 109–110 of pathos, 6–7 Shabbat as day of rest, 101–102 “Talk to Universe”, 113 “The Golden Age of the Cantorial Art”, 73 Goodman, Mark S., 106 grace, 10, 24 Great Assembly, 90 Greeks, 44, 46

H halakhic system folklore and, 143 vs. intuitive understanding, 129 tedium effect, 139, 145 happiness, 82–85. see also joy Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge and Well-Being (TiroshSamuelson), 6 harmonies, 83 Hasidism, 142 Havadalah, 112 head vs. heart, 44 location of intellect, 46–47 heart all your heart, 50–51 bibliography, 58–59 concept of, 43–44 conclusions, 56 defining, 57–58 emotion in, 48–50 as intention, 54–56 introduction to texts, 19 notes, 56–58 prayer and, 67–68 in Rabbinic Literature, 10 as separate entity, 52–54 wisdom of, 45–48 heart rate, 136 Heh, 113 height of pitch, 77–80 height of tonic, 80

Hellenistic meal bibliography, 41–42 defined, 18 emotional variety in 1 Corinthians 11, 27–33 Eucharistic vs. socio-historical interpretations, 24–27 experimentation with social alternatives, 22–24 idion vs. kuriakon deipnon, 34–36 Lord’s Supper, 38–39 notes, 39–41 overview of, 21–22 Ross’s introduction, 10 social alternatives, 36–38 symposiarch and his duties, 33–34 Herrenmahl und Hellenistischer Kult (Klauck), 25 Hershman, Cantor Mordechai, 74 Heschel, Joshua, 6–7 higgayon, 107 Hippolytus, 25 history fight for balanced ritual system, 141–144 of Jewish emotions, 123 studies on Judaism and emotion, 5–7 Hiyya bar Rab, 102 honesty, 55 Horodezky, Samuel A., ix Hosahna-Raba, 84 human action representation system, 130– 131 humanism, 12, 160–161 Huna, R., 102 Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, 135

I iconic theory of music and emotions, 9–10, 84 Ideas and Opinions (Einstein), 1 idion deipnon in 1 Corinthians 11, 27 defined, 29 vs. kuriakon deipnon, 34–36 IIdelsohn, Abraham Z., 110 imagistic mode, 124 implicit emotions, 64

•I N D E X •

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  inclinations of heart all your heart, 50–51 changing features of the heart, 48–50 defined, 44 instruments creating mood of Carlebach Nusach, 85 human action representation system, 131–133 in Jewish music, 95 intellect, 44, 45–48 intensification process emotional arousal in cantorial recitative, 76–81 emotional arousal in Carlebach Nusach, 85–88 production of emotional excitement in synagogue music, 69–70 in ritual music, 68 supplication and, 95 intention, 54–56 internal feelings, 8 intuitive knowledge defined, 148 personal experience, 129 search for balanced ritual system, 143 Isaiah, 107 isonomia, 10, 24 Israel, 89–90

J Jacob, R. Nahman bar, 102 James, William, 3–4 James-Lange-Theory, 4 jealousy, 7 Jellinek, Adolf, 63 Jerome, 50 Jerusalem meal, 25–26 Jesus in balanced ritual system, 141 meal as critique of temple, 26 participation in Hellenistic meal, 25 religious identification in Lord’s Supper, 31–33 ritual alternatives and, 38 as symposiarch, 27 symposiarch and his duties, 33–34 Jewish Renewal, 104

Johannine community, 26 joy in Carlebach Nusach, 81 evoked by ritual music, 67–68 mood of Carlebach Nusach, 82–85 Philo of Alexandria on, ix–x Shabbat and music, 107 as symbol of cleanness, 7 Judah, Rabbi, 46 Judaism Christianity as social movement within, 26 emotional significance of music, 68–69 foreword, ix–x Ross on religion and emotion, 4–7 studying emotions in, 9–12 Judaism and emotions acknowledgements, 147 bibliography, 149–151 cognitive science and emotions, 124–125 cognitive science of religion on rituals, 130–131 dynamics and stability of rituals-andemotions systems, 136–137 emotions and cognitive science, 127–128 emotions and rituals, 134–136 history of, 123–124 history of Judaism as fight for balanced ritual system, 141–144 McCauley-Lawson theory applied to posttemple Judaism, 138–140 notes, 147–149 personal experience, 129–130 representation of actions and entities, 131–133 summary, 143–146 traditional cognitive science, 125–127

K Kabbalah search for balanced ritual system, 142 Shabbat and music, 107–108 “Talk to Universe”, 113 Kabbalat Shabbat defined, 107 prayers modes, 106 rhythms of Shabbat, 109

•I N D E X •

170

Kaddish, 110 Kalib, Sholom, 105 Kant, Immanuel, 5 Kaplan, Mordecai, 143 Karaites, 143 Kazen, Thomas, 123 kelayot, 48 Kernberg, Otto F., 158 Kessler, Chazzan Jack, 100, 105 kidneys, 57 kinnor, 107 Kiperwasser, Reuven concept of heart, 43–59 introduction to texts, 17 Ross on, 10 Kister, Menahem, 53 Klauck, Hans-Josef, 25 Klein, Amit emotional excitement in ritual music, 67– 97 introduction to performance, 65 Ross’s introduction, 11 Klinghardt, Matthias Hellenistic meal, 23 introduction to texts, 18 social values of ritual, 37 Kloos, John, 2, 5, 103 kneeling worshipper, 37 knowledge heart as, 54 intuitive, 148 science vs. humanities, 160–161 Koheleth Rabba 12:10, 55 Koheleth Rabba 4:13, 50 koinonia, 10, 24 Koskoff, Ellen, 103 kuriakon deipnon in 1 Corinthians 11, 27 defined, 29–30 Eucharistic interpretations, 24 vs. idion , 34–36

L Lange, Carl Georg, 3–4 The Law of Jealousy: Anthropology of Sotah (Destor), 7 laws, ix

Lawson, E. Thomas, 4 emotions and rituals, 134–135 history of Jewish emotions, 123–124 history of Judaism as fight for balanced ritual system, 141 human action representation system, 130–131 post-temple Judaism, 138–140 representation of actions and entities, 132–133 ritual systems in Judaism, 12 summary, 144–145 “Lecha Dodi”, 109 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 143 lev. see also heart concept of heart, 43 emotion in the heart, 48 levav, 50–51 Levy, Gabriel Bloch on, x emotional and cognitive rhythms in Jewish music, 99–118 experience introduction, 121 new method for analyzing emotions in texts, 153–161 Ross’s introduction, 11–12 Lietzmann, Hans, 24–25 Lindstrom, E., 86 litany, 93 liturgy Carlebach Nusach, 81 cultural rhythms, 99. see also rhythms in Jewish music music in, 69 two types of meal practices, 24–25 living action, 138 lordly, 29 Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, 27, 29–33 characteristics of, 23 Eucharistic interpretations, 24–26 Hellenistic meal, 38–39 The Lord’s Supper and the Hellenistic Cult (Klauck), 25 love, 157–158 lulav, 138

•I N D E X •

171

  M Ma’ariv prayers modes, 106 rhythms of Shabbat, 109–111 Mack, Burton, 35 Magen Avot, 106, 109–112 Maimonides, 143 major scale Adonai Malach, 106 emotional connection to liturgy, 114 Shabbat rhythms, 109–110 Yishtabach Maneuver, 112 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Scholem), 6 Mamelak, A. N., 99 Martin, Luther, 130 Mass and Lord’s Supper (Lietzmann), 24 McCauley, Robert N., 4 emotions and rituals, 134–135 history of Jewish emotions, 123–124 history of Judaism as fight for balanced ritual system, 141 human action representation system, 130–131 post-temple Judaism, 138–140 representation of actions and entities, 132–133 ritual systems in Judaism, 12 summary, 144–145 McCauley-Lawson theory applied to post-temple Judaism, 138–140 history of Judaism as fight for balanced ritual system, 141 introduction, 123–124 summary, 144–145 meals, 111. see also Hellenistic meal meaning, 23–24 melodic simplicity, 82–84 memorial meal, 24–25 memory cultural rhythms in music, 99 dynamics and stability of rituals-andemotions systems, 136–137 emotional arousal in ritual and, 145 episodic, 115 special agent rituals and, 135 synchronization with community, 116 Menuha Shelama, 111

Messe und Herrenmahl (Lietzmann), 24 messiah, 142 Midrash, 67 Midrash Mishlei, 47 mikveh, 143 mind vs. heart, 44 traditional cognitive science, 125–127 Minha, 111 minhag, 143 Minhah, 108–109 minor scale, 110, 114–115 minyan, 7 The Minyan as the Psychological System (Scheidlinger), 7 Mishna, Terumot 3:8, 54–55 Mishnah Berakhot 9:5, 50 mitzvah, 84 mitzvot, 138 mixolydian mode, 106 Mizmor Shir, 107 modes of music emotional connection to liturgy, 114 emotional/musical tools, 104–106 rhythms of Shabbat, 109–113 Modes Theory, 124, 134 mohel, 140 mood in cantorial recitative, 73–76 in Carlebach Nusach, 82–85 vs. emotion, 154–155 evoked by ritual music, 68 in music, 11 prayer modes, 105–107 rhythms of Shabbat, 111–113 morality evolution of Jewish scholarship, 5–6 religion and, 1–2 of time, 101 morning service, 113–114 motifs, 105 motor expression of emotion, 8, 154 Motza’ei Shabbat, 111 Murphy, Roland E., 157 Musaf, 111 music bibliography, 96–97 cantorial recitative. see cantorial recitative

•I N D E X •

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Carlebach Nusach. see Carlebach Nusach concluding words, 89–90 emotional and cognitive rhythms in. see rhythms in Jewish music emotional excitement in, 69–70 emotional significance in Judaism, 68–69 emotions and, 70–72 folk-notion, 127 introduction to performance, 63–65 musical tools, 104–107 notes, 90–96 perceptions of time, 103 Ross’s introduction, 11 service of the heart, 67–68 musical expectancy, 115–116 mussar movement, 144 mutatis mutandis, 143 mysticism evolution of Jewish scholarship, 6 of Jewish music, 107–108 as search for balanced ritual system, 142– 144

N Neilah, 129–130 Neshama Yeterah beginning of Shabbat, 109 departure of Shabbat, 112 Shabbat and music, 107–108 Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, 147 neurons, 99 neurophysiological component of emotion, 154 Neusner, Jacob, 153 nevel, 107 New Testament Hellenistic meal, 21–22. see also Hellenistic meal introduction to texts, 17–19 The New Testament in its Ritual World (DeMaris), 36 nous, 44 Nusach Adonai Malach, 109 Carlebach. see Carlebach Nusach defined, 63, 91

emotional/musical tools, 104–106 origins of, 81–82 perceptions of time, 103 synchronization with community, 116 Nussbaum, Martha, 6

O Od Yishama, 87–88 ontological categories, 132 ontological expectations, 132, 135–136 orlah, 45–46 orlat levavhem, 46 oscillation between musical modes, 114–116 Oshaya, Rabbi, 54 Otto, Rudolph, 146 The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (Corrigan), 2–3, 5, 104

P Pagan cults, 25 Pagan meal. see Hellenistic meal Papua New Guinea, 136–137 participation in ritual music, 83–85 Passover vs. Lord’s Supper, 25 ritual tension, 141 patient, 131–133 Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Stendahl), 26 Paul on Hellenistic meal. see Hellenistic meal peace, 110 performance Carlebach Nusach, 81 emotions and music, 71 intensification process of Carlebach Nusach, 87–88 kneeling worshipper, 37 Ross’s introduction, 11, 63–65 of taking Lord’s Supper, 31–32 Pestalozzistrasse, 108 phase locked, 99 philia, 10, 24 Philo of Alexandria, ix–x physical form of emotions defining emotion, 8 emotional forms, 9

•I N D E X •

173

  interaction with environment, 35 traditional cognitive science, 126 physiology analysis of Song of Songs, 159–160 analyzing emotions, 156 arousal of emotion, 8 effects of fasting, 130 emotional symptoms, 153–154 emotions and rituals, 136 entrainment and timing in Shabbat, 101– 104 expressions of emotion, 104 importance of heart, 44 irrational bodily reactions, 147–148 rhythms in Jewish music, 11 of rhythms in Jewish music, 99 study of emotional rhythms, 101 traditional cognitive science, 126 pitch, 106 pitch density, 77–80 pitch height, 77–80 Pitts, S., 107 piyyut, 109 Plato, 46 political values of ritual, 37–38 power relationships, 35–36, 38 prayer. see also music alleviating loneliness, 7 functional music, 89 joy, 81 modes, 104–106 religion and emotion, 4 ritual of Lord’s Supper, 31 service of the heart, 67–68 supplication, 73–74 through music, 63 preferences, 154 priests, 134 primal man, 113 prohibitions, 138 prophets, 68 The Prophets (Heschel), 6 psalms Kabbalat Shabbat, 109 Psalm 92, 107 Psalms of David, 2 rhythms of Shabbat, 111

psychology cognitive science, 124–125. see also cognitive science defining emotion, 8 of emotion, 128 of Judaism, 5 of music, 64

R Rabbinic Judaism all your heart, 50–51 commandments, 139 concept of heart, 19, 43–44 heart as intention, 54–56 heart as separate entity, 52–54 introduction to texts, 17–19 new method for analyzing emotions in texts, 153–161 rhythms of social life and Shabbat, 102– 103 Song of Songs Rabbah, 159–160 tedium effect, 145 wisdom in the heart, 45–48 yetzer, 48–50 Rapaport, Cantor Yakov, 74–75 Rappaport, Roy, 37 rationalism, 143–144 rebbe, 142 Rebling, Jalda interviews with, 100 Minha service, 111 rhythms of Shabbat, 109 Shaharit service, 110 reconstructionism, 143 recording of cantorial recitative, 73 Rehkopf, Friedrich, 27 relevance, 161 religion analyzing emotions in, 160–161 defining, 147 Einstein on, 1–3 emotion and, 3–4 identity, 31–33 meal as part of, 23–24 perceptions of time, 103

174

•I N D E X •

repetition in cantorial recitative, 74–76 emotional arousal through, 77, 80 representation of actions and entities fight for balanced ritual system, 141–144 theories of, 131–133 representation of emotions in music in cantorial recitative, 76 joy in Carlebach Nusach, 83 mood of Carlebach Nusach, 84 theories of emotions and music, 70–71 representatives, 129–130, 134 response synchronization, 155 rhythms in Jewish music bibliography, 117–118 entrainment: “Talk to Universe”, 113–116 introduction, 99–100 method, 100–101 mood of Carlebach Nusach, 82–84 musical tools, 104–107 notes, 116–117 rhythms of Shabbat, 108–113 Ross’s introduction, 11 Shabbat and music, 107–108 Shabbat in Berlin, 108 in the wilderness, 101–104 rites of passage, 129, 134, 140 ritual bath, 143 ritual music. see music ritual theory analysis of Hellenistic meal, 23 role of symposiarch, 34 social counter settings of Hellenistic meal, 34–36 ritualization, 35 rituals dynamics and stability of rituals-andemotions systems, 136–137 emotions and, 134–136 emotions in music, 72 evolution of Jewish scholarship, 6–7 Hellenistic meal, 18. see also Hellenistic meal history of Judaism as fight for balanced, 141–144 McCauley-Lawson theory applied to posttemple Judaism, 138–140 performance of Lord’s Supper, 38–39

personal experience, 129–130 religion and emotion, 4 representation of actions and entities, 132–133 ritual systems in Judaism, 12 Shabbat. see Shabbat social alternatives, 36–38 of taking Lord’s Supper, 31–32 what role do emotions have in, 144–146 Rosh Hashana, 68 Ross, I. B., 99 Ross, Sarah Bloch on, x emotional and cognitive rhythms in Jewish music, 99–118 introduction to performance, 63–65 routinized forms, 124 Russell, James A., 71–72 Rutishauser, U., 99

S The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a different order of time (Shulevitz), 101 sacramental meal practices, 24–25 sacred, 36–37 sacred time, 109–111 sacrifice, 132 sadness in cantorial recitative, 76 Magen Avot, 110 music and, 70–71 Sager, R., 100 scales emotional connection to liturgy, 114–115 Nusach modes, 105 Scheidlinger, Saul, 7 Scherer, Klaus R., 64, 153–156 Scholem, Gershom, 6 Schuman, E. M., 99 Schweitzer, Professor, 130 science, 2, 160–161 secular time, 109–111 self-control, 51 semantic space of emotions, 155–156 semiotic theory of musical expression mood of cantorial recitative, 76 mood of Carlebach Nusach, 83–84

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  sensory feelings, 8 sensory overload ceiling, 135, 145–146 separation in community, 28–29 “separation-ritual”, 112 Serapion, 25 serenity, 110 Seudat Shlishit, 111 Shabbat in Berlin, 108 emotional/musical tools, 104–107 entrainment and timing in, 101–104 introduction to performance, 65 music and, 107–108 negative commandments, 138 overview of study, 100 personal experience, 129 rhythms of, 108–113 Ross’s introduction, 11 “Talk to Universe”, 113–116 Shaharit, 107 prayers modes, 106 rhythms of Shabbat, 110 “Talk to Universe”, 113–114 sheliach tzibbur, 129 Shema , 48 Sh’ma, 114 Sh’ma Yisreal, 114 Sh’moneh Esre, 110 shofar, 68 Shulevitz, Judith, 101–102 Sifre Devarim 296, 55 sighs, 76 simple melody, 82–84 slavery, 101 slichot service, 74 Slobin, Mark, 103, 104 Smith, Dennis, 18, 23 Smith, J.Z., 36–37 social alternatives to Hellenistic meal, 22–24, 36–38 social counter settings, 34–36 social grammar, 32–33 social morality, 1–2, 101 social movements, 26 social responsibility, 30–31, 38 social values. see values

socio-historical method interpretations of Hellenistic meal, 24–27 looking at texts with, 17–19 sociology of emotion, 8–9 song cantorial recitative. see cantorial recitative Carlebach Nusach. see Carlebach Nusach emotional significance in Judaism, 68 Shabbat and music, 107 Song of Songs Automap analysis, 158–159 GALC analysis of, 157–158 Rabbah, 159–160 soul departure of Shabbat, 112 location of, 48 Shabbat and music, 108 speaking, 133, 142 special agent rituals in balanced ritual system, 137 defined, 12 emotions and, 134–136 in Judaism, 139–140 summary, 145 XB22 and, 146 special patient/special instrument rituals, 134 speech vs. intention, 54–56 speed, 86–88 spiritualism, 142–143 splinter group outburst balanced ritual system, 137 Christianity as, 141–142 defined, 123–124 summary, 146 Steiger Ahava-Raba, 80 Stein, Hans Joachim, 24 Steinsaltz, R. A., 111 Stendahl, Krister, 26 Stoics concept of heart, 44 defining emotion, 8 understanding of emotion, ix Stravinsky, Igor, 103 subjective feelings, 8, 154 sugyas, 158 sukkah, 138 Summit, Jeffry, 103

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superhuman creating tension, 141–142, 144 emotions and rituals, 133–134 in post-temple Judaism, 139–140 superlative, 28 supplication in cantorial recitative, 73–76 intensification process, 77–78 persistence and, 93 in ritual music, 67–68 Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, 121, 153 symposiarch defined, 23 duties of, 41 Jesus as, 27 ritual alternatives and, 38 special duties of, 33–34 symposion, 23 Synagoge Pestalozzistrasse, 108 synagogue music. see also music Carlebach Nusach, 81–82 excitement in, 69–70 syntactic theory, 131 Syriac Christianity, 53

T “Talk to Universe”, 113–116 Talmud concept of heart in, 46 emotions in, 7 heart vs. intellect, 44 prayer ceremony, 90 rhythm of social life, 102 tamim, 45–46 tannaitic doctrine on the nature of evil, 50 Tarsi, Boaz, 105 Taussig, Hal characteristics of Hellenistic meal, 23 Christianity as social movement, 26 political values of ritual, 37 tedium effect balanced ritual system and, 137 defined, 12, 124 history of Judaism as fight for balanced ritual system, 141–144 in Judaism, 138 summary, 145–146

temple, 26 tempo creating mood of Carlebach Nusach, 82– 84 emotional arousal in Carlebach Nusach, 86–88 expressing happiness, 95 musical modes, 106 tension, 137, 141 defining, 148 summary, 145 XB22, 134 terminus technicus, 24, 33 Teshuva, 68 texts 1 Corinthians 11, 27–33 body as, 43 emotional forms, 10 introduction, 17–19 literary expression and feelings, 104 new method for analyzing emotions in, 153–161 prayer, 67 thematic roles, 131 theological correctness, 143, 148 theta theory, 131 theta wave, 99 Third Meal, 111 thought cognitive science. see cognitive science heart as intention, 54–56 heart vs. head, 44 wisdom in the heart, 45–48 time rhythms in Jewish music, 99–100 in Shabbat cycle, 101–104 transition from sacred to secular, 111 transition from secular to sacred, 109– 110 A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in the Israelite Religion (Anderson), 7 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 6, 123 tonal mode, 80 tonic height, 80 Torah, 100, 130 Karaites, 143 rationale for Sabbath, 101

•I N D E X •

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  rhythms of Shabbat, 110–111 Shabbat in Berlin, 108 Tractate Shabbat 69b., 102 trend line, 94 triggers, 154

U unconscious emotions, 64 universal human emotions, 154 Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Nussbaum), 6 Uro, Risto, 141 utilitarian emotions, 155 utopian character, 36–37

V valence circumplex model, 71 emotional arousal in Carlebach Nusach, 87 entrainment, 107 values in 1 Corinthians 11, 27–33 expressed in Hellenistic meal, 10, 18–19, 21–22 in Hellenistic meal, 24 realization through Lord’s Supper, 38–39 Vav, 113 verbal form of emotions emotional forms, 9–10 vs. intention, 54–56 verbs, 131 virtue, 6 vocal abilities, 73, 86 vocation, 160 Volk des Buches, xi volume, 86–88, 114

W Weber, Max, 124 Weidenfeld, Sarah, 81 Werner, E., 73 Whitehouse, Harvey balanced ritual system, 137

representation of actions and entities, 134 splinter group outburst, 123–124, 141 Will, U., 100 wine, 32 Winkielman, Piotr, 64 wisdom of heart, 45–48 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 5 word-frequency analysis, 158–159 work, 101–102

X XB22, 134 Xygalatas, Dimitris, 136

Y Yehoshua, Rabbi, 47 yeshivah movement, 144 yetzarim, 53 yetzer, 48–50 Yishtabach Maneuver, 112 Yochanan, Rabi, 90 Yohanan, Rabbi, 54 Yom Kippur, 129 Yud, 113

Z zemirot, 104, 111 zvuvei mavet, 49

Studies in Judaism Yudit Kornberg Greenberg | General Editor

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