The practice of Judaism is the practice of ritual. While many Jews know how to participate in these, most of us don’t pause to ask other important fundamental questions about rituals, such as, what does ritual accomplish? Who benefits from it? How does it change us or the world around us? In Ritual: An Ancient Jewish Perspective, Naftali S. Cohn asks these questions and more through the lens of the rituals that appear in the Mishnah (200 CE).
As Cohn points out, the Mishnah can often feel like a jumble of writings on law and practice. Covering topics as diverse as agricultural law, ancient sacrifice, divorce, and Shabbat, it’s hard to find a unifying theory of ritual. As the Rabbis examine minutiae, they never take a moment to step back and explain what they are doing as they legislate behavior. Cohn believes that just because the Rabbis are not explicit about having a ritual worldview does not mean one cannot find one within the text. Using the language of ritual studies, Cohn is able to draw connections between disparate, seemingly unrelated sections of the Mishnah to unpack what the Rabbis believe about ritual.
Cohn opens the book by cataloguing the Mishnah’s detailed rules for ritual. He goes on to unpack a striking phrase from Mishnah Yoma 5:7, stating that if the High Priest makes a series of mistakes on Yom Kippur, such as spilling sacrificial blood or doing ritual actions out of order, “he has done nothing.” Cohn argues that ritual needs a broader goal or aim.
The book then goes on to examine those goals. One of these goals is that ritual creates habits for the body and patterns of movement, like covering one’s eyes before lighting candles. It also creates feelings; a person brings animals to the Temple and thus loves the Temple or Jerusalem more or feels more joy than they did before. This feeling can also be one of satisfaction, knowing that we have done a ritual correctly. Ritual can also bring people together; uniting as a group around a common practice can forge powerful bonds. More than anything ritual begets more ritual. It acts as a feedback loop of sorts. It creates obligations which we fulfil and make us more apt to seek out further obligations.
Towards the end of his book, Cohn examines cases of people, like women or those with disabilities, who are not obligated in the same way as able-bodied men in ritual, creating a kind of hierarchy. However, using theory from fields like gender studies, it was likely that people behaved differently than the texts state. The Mishnah creates an imagined “utopia,” setting a baseline for behavior but not a ceiling. From this, Cohn ends the book on a hopeful, forward-looking note: because ritual is so deeply tied to bodies and identity, it holds potential to become more inclusive going forward.
Ritual: An Ancient Jewish Perspective is an important contribution to the academic study of ritual in Judaism.
Rabbi Marc Katz is the Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is author of the books Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) chosen as a finalist for the PROSE award and The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort (Turner Publishing) which was chosen as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
