Catherine Madsen Responds

Abstract

Catherine Madsen Responds Catherine Madsen I am most grateful for these five attentive—and very differently attentive—responses to my essay. Vanessa Ochs’s anthropological approach is appropriately open‐ended and nonjudgmental, and raises entertainingly a number of criteria for evaluating liturgy. Conspicuously absent from these criteria—because they are not the province of anthropology, and because, not being on the seder plate of most contemporary liturgists, they cannot even be studied as other people’s criteria—are aesthetic competence and moral weight. Naturally these are contentious factors, but some combination of them is necessary for a ritual to gain currency and staying power across generations. Possibly the central question of liturgy is “What kind of people are we trying to make?” The anthropologist can just wait and see what happens, but the liturgical innovator must either have some instinct or learn to take some thought for consequences. Steven Kepnes takes a harder theological line than mine; I do not insist that it is God “before whom you stand.” I do insist that liturgy be congruent with our experience of obligation. In the most important moral sense, it may well be mom and pop, grandma and zeidi, one’s friends and the rabbi, among others, before whom we stand—not in their capacity as familiar faces and known quantities, but in their capacity as the stranger, the Other. The vulnerability of the face, as Levinas says, commands us; if we are never sure whether we stand before God, we stand always before the poor and destitute, and before the nakedness and fragility of every face we encounter. A case could be made that the service leader should indeed face and serve the congregation. Yet I agree with Kepnes and Cantor Feffer that in practice this puts a false emphasis on the leader, who cannot genuinely serve every face in the group at once and is therefore put in the position of a performer, a “personality.” To scale back the personality, to return it to the plain offer hineni, “here am I,” it is helpful for the leader to address the face we cannot see. Leah Hochman has been generous with my ingratitude; the intuitions of an insistent layperson must seem to a professor in a rabbinical seminary to originate in left field. I agree with Hochman about the power of a good tune, and as a service leader I seek tunes and pursue them; in fact it was music that brought me over the line of conversion after several years of philosophical ambivalence. Still, a tune can misdirect one’s experience of a prayer. If the best‐known Aleinu tune were based on something more reflective than “Itsy‐Bitsy Spider,” it would convey something more complex than a “reification of Jewish superiority through divine justification.” Is it a convert’s naïveté that reads the Aleinu in a minor key, as a resolute acceptance of a difficult and tragic fate and a difficult God? The Itsy‐Bitsy tune is finally a little endearing for its sheer inadequacy to the occasion, but that does not quite excuse it. The heart‐opening properties of the late Debbie Friedman’s songs are best appreciated by hearts that open easily, while hearts seeking to be broken and contrite will find in her music no hard edges to break on. The interesting juxtaposition of Lech lecha and Lechi lach becomes unfortunately vacuous when set to a tune that recalls the slighter pop efforts of 1958. We await a pop‐inflected liturgical music with the moral urgency—indivisible from the aesthetic urgency of instruments, lyrics and voices—of the Four Tops’“Reach Out, I’ll Be There” (whose meaning, not incidentally, is hineni). Randi Rashkover’s complex and wide‐ranging discussion offers many points of entry. I am agnostic on the relationship of truth and beauty, at least as Mendelssohn presents it: his Euphranor, like Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood or Kierkegaard’s aesthete in Either/Or, is an aesthetic consumer, not a producer, and has only the dimmest sense of the role of judgment in artistic creation. What the authors of Ritual and Its Consequences mean by “as if” is not at all this kind...