Response to Catherine Madsen

Abstract

Response to Catherine Madsen Randi Rashkover Let me begin with a “love letter to Catherine.” Dear Catherine, something happened when I read your essay—something cathartic because at this point in my life I have a good 35 (OK, let’s be honest), 40 years of bad synagogue experience under my belt. Sure I liked learning the prayers when I was a kid because I was good at memorization and I liked to sing, but I never enjoyed praying in synagogue. My first religious encounters were in nature. I read the transcendentalists. I became a philosopher because Emerson and Thoreau referenced Kantian idealism. I was masterful at synagogue tricks but felt nothing from them. A quick dalliance with orthodoxy during my courtship with my husband proved that I loved orthodox davening but was always seated on the wrong side of the curtain. Recent experiences with the twenty‐first century “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” school of Reform Jewish liturgical style have left me humming new tunes to the Aleynu after services but have done nothing for me existentially, ethically, intellectually, and even aesthetically. So when you ask why has contemporary Jewish liturgy aimed so low? And when you insightfully announce the dubitability of the confessionalism that in liberal schuls counts for religious sentiment and devotion, I’m with you. And here is where we really must begin. Eloquently and effectively you speak of the crisis of sincerity and say, “Fundamentalist religion… is quintessentially modern and savagely sincere: it retaliates against the disruptions of modernist protest by recreating them in full force from the opposing side. The totalistic nature of sincerity, whether on the right or the left, profoundly threatens the slow, patient courtesy of liturgical world construction.” Listeners might be surprised to hear you equate liberal Jewish liturgical life with “fundamentalism,” but the philosophical point cannot be disregarded; sincerity of emotion is not reproducible. Liturgical practice as you and Franz Rosenzweig have taught us is predicated upon repeatable action and demands a philosophical consistency. But raw emotion is fleeting. Frequently, the charge against subjectivism in liturgy regards its failure to be rendered publically expressible. Your point regards not only the general problem of a public expression of private emotion but the deeper problem that private emotion cannot be reliably reproduced and this is in part why it cannot be publically expressed. For sincerity, you tell us, “there is never enough evidence…” Honest emotion is always just shy of credibility. If as you argue, liturgy must be subject to evaluation, what would constitute “good liturgy?” Drawing from the classic Stanislavski guidebook for acting, you invoke the renaissance ideal of the refinement of sentiment, the education of the emotions. Liturgy you suggest presupposes the wedding of the Appollonian and the Dionysian through the inseparable nexus of form and content. And you conclude, liturgy is the setting for the production of exceptional work—exceptional because it evidences the warrant for its reproducibility over and over again and work because it must be first produced in order to be reproduced. The stakes of your mandate to “refine” our liturgical life couldn’t be higher. Liturgical bouts of emotional sincerity not only undermine the very authenticity they seek to express, they also forfeit the content or what in this case is the reference to the theological “what” which you openly announce as the ultimate object of our liturgical life. So, here is the challenge. How do we tackle it? For you, the answer lies somewhere in the transition from the subjective to the subjunctive—from the experience “as is” to the experience “as if.” I see this as our first point of difference. Undoubtedly, hypothesis and imagination are crucial elements in theological work (briefly stated I believe they operate mostly to correlate between our theological desire and the apophatic limits of our theological knowledge). However, to remain consistent to your account would mean to locate evidence for reproducible action. Here, the contents of the imagination fall short since they are themselves too changeable to count as reliable data. So, where can we find the “what” which constitutes evidence for emotion’s reproduction? There is a deep theological reason why your call for the education...