Response to Catherine Madsen’s Paper, “A Heart of Flesh: Beyond ‘Creative Liturgy”’

Abstract

Response to Catherine Madsen’s Paper, “A Heart of Flesh: Beyond ‘Creative Liturgy”’ Caroline Rody The unexpected ending of Catherine Madsen’s paper stuns us with an extended experience of the strong poetry of the Bible. Given that “A Heart of Flesh” performs its critique of liberal liturgy by analogy with good and bad art, mostly in the form of theater, and because I come to this panel from the perspective of literary study, I want to speak about the extent to which she is and is not talking about a preference for good over bad writing. What makes good writing? It is notoriously hard to say. It was Emily Dickinson who famously remarked, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” More practical and somewhat more objective criteria can be assembled; one scholar who recently attempted to catalog the characteristics of the best poems made a good list: “creative daring, figurative reach, verbal dexterity, formal skill, historical responsiveness, social significance, psychological complexity, emotional richness, and the inventive engagement with” other written and unwritten verbal texts (Ramazani 2003, xxix). But the very length of this list suggests that the problem of defining literary quality could be revisited endlessly. For even to ask the question what makes writing good is to raise thorny issues. Any evaluative criteria will inevitably carry biases; they will differ in different moments, in different schools of thought, among different readerly populations. A circular reasoning may govern our evaluations, in which our unexamined values serve to identify greatness in a poem or a prose text, and that discovered greatness then confirms our preconceived notions. And so in an examination like Madsen’s of “creative liturgy,” one could argue that a preexisting bias toward biblical poetry, toward texts coded as sacred, and toward traditional liturgical structures, patterns, and language would make it unlikely that any New Age liturgical text could sound just right. But to respond to Madsen’s paper only on this level is to miss its point that what makes poetry good in liturgy is not the same as what makes it good under a tree or in the classroom. The ritual experience, she suggests, involves a kind of work—as in avodah, service—that is not meant to reap instantaneous rewards, but “yields its relevance gradually through participation.” It is a doing, she says, a “slow, patient courtesy of world construction,” and the language of ritual needs to work, too, to help us do that work of construction, of discovery, the discovery of a “private loyalty” which “we want to be held to.” Madsen’s is then an instrumental or extrinsic critique of liturgical writing rather than an intrinsic one; the question is not so much, “is the writing good in itself?”, but “what does it make happen?” Is it good for the purpose it is supposed to serve? Of course, literary readers do sometimes work with instrumental criteria as well; Dickinson, too, wants the writing to do something to her, to take the top of her head off. And when modern readers say we want literature to offer “figurative reach,” or “emotional richness,” suggestiveness or multivalence, we are also talking about something we want the language to do for us. We want it to send us off working to grasp its fullest resonances; or we want it to enable us to think in a variety of ways about it, at once. How does the poetic language that Madsen prefers for use in the synagogue do its particular kind of thing, make its particular change in us? Most obviously, the too‐easy poem (represented in her paper by poor Mary Oliver) renders its meaning well once and lacks luster afterward; therefore, it stops making us do the work, while the biblical lines she quotes are richer, more demanding, more re‐readable in the sense that they continually probe us to enter them anew. But it is important that they do this not through figurative difficulty, as in some of the most challenging or obscure modernist poems, but rather, as demonstrated in the striking figurative clarity of Madsen’s biblical patchwork, through what she beautifully...