Chapter Two - Aspects of Meaning in Kabbalistic Ritual: With Special Reference to the Case of Shabbat

Summary

A PROGRAMMA TIC INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTERS 2 THROUGH 4

In recent years anthropologists and historians of religion alike have devoted much energy to the study of ritual: its symbolic structure, societal function, and the reasons for its powerful ability to mobilize desire and create belief. For it is through such concrete acts that religious conviction generally emerges. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz has noted, “[people] attain their faith as they portray it.” Within the study of Judaism, new attention has been drawn to the activity of the theosophical Kabbalists, who have been well-known for their creativity in symbol-making and exegesis, and increasingly, for the extraordinary richness of their ritual life. In the ensuing three chapters we shall discuss some of the theoretical issues informing Kabbalistic ritual in general, and Sabbath ritual in particular. We shall focus on two broad hermeneutical questions throughout: what do these rituals mean, and how do they work? To wit: how does a given ritual create a certain sacred order and project it onto the cosmos and into the life of the devotee? What sorts of meanings, explicit and implicit, are stored in the myths that underlie the ritual? What sacred stories are told about society and cosmos, about the nature of being Jewish? What performance factors influence the ritual's meaning and efficacy, its transformative power? In fine, how does ritual construct a world that seems uniquely real to the devotee and legitimate his role in it?

Viewed as a whole, chapters 2 through 4 constitute a kind of triptych, an extended meditation on the nature of Sabbath ritual and the problematics of its interpretation. The chapters assume the following structure. In chapter 2, to orient the reader, a kind of typology of Kabbalistic ritual is provided, placing special emphasis on the Sabbath-setting. Kabbalistic ritual is distinguished, briefly, from its Rabbinic precursors, as innovations and subtle shifts in emphasis are noted; then, the ontology underlying the life of mizvot is elucidated and the consequences of ritual activity, charted, all as seen by the Kabbalists themselves.

The next two chapters are more concentrated and form the heart of our inquiry.