Re-Imagining Jewish Worship

Lawrence A. Hoffman

* Keynote on Worship delivered at the CCAR Convention, Monterey,
California, May 2001.

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN, Ph.D. (NY69) is professor of liturgy at the New
York campus of HUC-JIR and co-founder of Synagogue 2000.

George Waterford Howe, who died in Boston in 1821, was duly buried adjacent to his church, one mile from his home. Samuel Howe, his grandson, visited the site weekly on his way home from church, as, he thought, his own grandson would some day visit him when he came to lie there. By 1865, however, when Samuel breathed his last, burials had been banned in the narrow churchyard, partly because of urban crowding, but also in response to England's cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s, said to be a consequence of miasma, a gas that cadavers emit through the soil, poisoning the air. Samuel was, therefore, buried in far-off Mount Auburn cemetery, described at the time in post-Victorian vacuity as a "dormitory for the deceased."¹

The miasma theory conspired with railroad innovation to make suburban cemeteries possible. So, too, did the industrial revolution, which multiplied the wealth of the upper class. Rabbis in the year 2001 might not care, but for the fact that ever since, many of us have had to contend with interments far away from houses of worship, and the invention of an altogether novel chapel ceremony at a funeral home, invented originally for well-wishers who could not attend the graveside burial. Mass transit and even misguided medical theory on miasma are examples of technological competence that foments institutional revolution (in this case, a funeral industry) and creates sociological competence, the ability of societies to do things differently.

Re-imagining worship differently reminds us of Shakespeare's assignment of imagination to lunatics, lovers, and poets (you are allowed to choose any two of the three, I suppose).² But imagination has also been dubbed "the madness of poetry without the inspiration,"³ so we should exercise caution in what we imagine.

However poetic and lovingly, we want to think rationally as well, as tonight we project ourselves beyond the moment to launch a flight of nascent possibility.

Re-imagining the future is like re-imagining the past, something historians do regularly, though only the best of them own up to it. The futuristic enterprise is not an orphan to historical fancy but an extrapolation into tomorrow of what we think we know already about our yesterdays. I start, therefore, by re-imagining our worship as it began, in an oral culture; then as it changed to a written one; then look beyond the culture of print to the internet. Two interdependent concepts dominate my thinking: (1) technological and (2) sociological competence. Technology and sociology are the twin axes on which liturgical evolution turns.⁴

Technological competence is the outer limits of what science permits. Sociological competence is the human social configurations--the communicative possibilities, for instance--that depend on technological advances. In reconstructing history--in our case, tannaitic worship--according to these two criteria, we have both argument and evidence, which we should not confuse. The best evidence for widespread tannaitic creativity is talmudic uncertainty about the things we know for sure--such as the identity of the Great Hallel. That the Talmud is unclear on this and other "elementary" items is evidence for an oral-dependent, largely elusive, and elastic form of tannaitic prayer. An altogether separate argument for the same thing is the technological inability of an oral culture to copy, preserve, and disseminate one text over another, coupled with the related sociological incompetence in canonizing or enforcing such a preference--for that would have required an authoritative Central Conference of Palestinian Rabbis, a committee system, a newsletter, phone and fax: Dial 1-800-AKIBA, perhaps.

Tannaitic Judaism was not just a smaller start-up version of ourselves, though it was small. For much of their history, the tanna'im were probably a relatively tiny and unrecognized crew, bound together by social systems that parallel other oral cultures. That they were a textual culture (able to cite sacred text) does not make them a literary one (where everyone reads).⁵ Only 3 percent of the population of Eretz Yisrael could read and only 15 percent of the élite. Even if we assume a higher percentage of Rabbis--and one would have to demonstrate why we should--the social structure in which they operated was oral.⁶ Written records were the exception, not the rule. No wonder even amora'im cannot remember if it was Rav or Samuel, Abaye or Rava, who championed one view or another. Memorizers of tannaitic sayings provided amora'im with intergenerational continuity so that at least people thought they were citing older masters. However, the relative technological incompetence of the era makes us nowadays distrust named citations, and even suspect that attributions were invented after the fact, since in oral cultures, unlike print cultures where you can look it up in transcripts or minutes, assigning a statement to someone who likely would have said it was as close as you could come to knowing who really did say it. As for sociological competence, what does a committee do when there are no minutes to consult, no planes, trains, and cars to guarantee attendance at meetings (if there even are meetings), and no possibility for planning subcommittees, that is, meetings to plan meetings. No meetings! A current rabbi's dream! But a nightmare, if your goal is to organize society's worship around a single imaginative vision.

Early Jewish worship was akin to an African-American prayer rally, with a great preacher making it up as he goes along, according to assumed rules of what counts. What counts is citations of Bible (this was a textual culture, remember) interpreted midrashically. (I have begun thinking of liturgy, in fact, as a category of midrash.)⁷ The style is ritualistic, that is, filled with litanies, standardized rhetoric, and other devices that connect the prayer leader with the congregation because of the predictability with which it can anticipate the end of the lines--not unlike "da, da da, da, da,…da da." There is no musical evidence for this, because technological competence precluded recordings, but literary evidence includes simple piyyutim with repeated memorizable responses (hosha'na).

Theology is so far absent from my re-imagination, not because it does not matter, but because it is a secondary human activity that arises after the experiential fact, as an attempt to make sense of primary human experience. Think (mythically) of Abraham's putative observation of the sun and moon (said to produce monotheism), but also (realistically) of complex human experience such as love reciprocated (or not), and gratuitous kindness or violence, whence we get theories of grace, yissurin shel ahavah, and an olam haba. Theology posits global logic for "Aha!" and "Oh, no!" moments; but theology is only one of three "ologies" that do so. Theology, a doctrine of God, comes alongside religious anthropology (a doctrine of human nature), and cosmology (a doctrine of what is out there in the universe--or, whether anything is out there at all, or even if there is an "out there" altogether). Theology, anthropology, and cosmology: we live, existentially, where these three lines of imagination intersect with experience.⁸

At times, we have an elemental personal experience of a lover spurned, a child dying, a parent present (and so forth). At times, also, we have our own empathic involvement in other people's immediacies. And from time to time, we get to undeniably miraculous moments like looking deep into the Grand Canyon or a child's saucer-opened eyes. But normally, we live with pedestrian concerns such as finding a good plumber (hard), a good doctor (harder), or a good insurance plan to pay either one (impossible). We cannot live each day at spiritual frontiers like the majesty of Pike's Peak or the anomaly of teenage bonding. When winter hits, there are no flowers to smell, and as for childbirth--miracle or not-- a lot of women would just as soon not go through another labor. The immediately sacred is not usually immediately available.

It happens, however, that worship is an art, what philosopher Suzanne Langer describes as providing virtual reality--architecture (her best example) as an instance of virtual domain (step inside someone's home and you experience the domain they occupy) and so, too, music (an exercise in virtual time) and even painting (virtual space).⁹ Accordingly, I find it useful to think of worship as virtual spirituality: the Grand Canyon without having to be there. We intuit life as undeniably meaningful, or at least as not insufferable, through worship that engages us as its own virtual reality. When I arise from prayer, I should know with certainty that I live with purpose and that, when I die, I shall inherit life-after-death, not because of empirical evidence (what evidence could I have?) but because ritual artistry compels my assent even to the laughingly improbable.

So much, then, for my re-imagination of tannaitic origins and for the structural pattern of worship that it established: a ritual illusion--though not a delusion--of wholeness, and a tapestry of unprovable but unassailable truths to live by. As we move historically from tanna'im to ourselves, we find continuity and dissonance. The function and structural pattern of worship remain the same, even as the worshipping people, with its technological and sociological competence, changes.

We do depend on the tanna'im, but only the way today's e- commerce depends on yesterday's pushcart peddlers. Our worship follows from a lengthy process of technological advance that is first evident liturgically in the ninth century, reaches a breakthrough in the fifteenth century, but becomes normative only in the nineteenth century: I mean print.

Around 3200 BCE, the Sumerians invented writing on clay, a process that evolved into reusable wax tablets; in Egypt, papyrus (made from plant matter, and an easier surface for cursive writing) was the medium; and, for more lasting records, as our Torah, animal parchment, stretched into scrolls, was used. Early picture writing evolved into standardized signs and, in the first half of the second millennium BCE, the alphabet appeared, one example being the Phoenician system of 1700, to which the Greeks (c. 1100) added vowels. By 200 CE, people learned to cut up parchment and sew pieces together into a book (a codex), a distinct advance because you can thumb through it to find a page, or skip back and forth as in Gates of Prayer--or in Siddur Saadiah. By the ninth century, books were some seven hundred years old. Now Amram used the technique in the hope of standardizing Jewish liturgy.¹⁰ He was successful to a point, but our thirteenth- and fourteenth-century codes know less about unchangeable halakhot than they do minhagim that vary from place to place and even synagogue to synagogue. That is, again, because of technology and sociology.

Technologically speaking, a single siddur required the hides of one hundred fifty sheep or calves¹¹ --that's fifteen thousand animals for a start-up congregation of one hundred people--not to mention the labor for curing the hides into something to write on, and copying prayers letter by letter. Only in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did Europe's textile industry produce linen rag paper, and only two hundred years later was scribal art finally rendered obsolete by printing presses. Sociologically, the problem was the cultural lag by which an élite was writing, while culture at large remained oral; only prayer leaders had prayer books.

Only in the seventeenth century could some hypothetical Central Conference of European Rabbis have met to re-imagine worship, by noting the universal availability of books. They might have shown the prescience to predict that printing presses would stifle creativity; that, by sheer luck, the latest creative surge, Qabbalah, would be catapulted by printing into universal favor, even as later novelties would be cut off; that, some day, cheap paper and production would make many alternative siddurim the norm, but that their authors would have to be called Reformers because by then a standardized print tradition would have hardened into a virtual canon; and that traditionalists, emotionally or ideologically unable to change their text, would have to channel creativity into the performative art of conveying it--by niggunim, for instance, or by inventing rituals like a m'laveh malkah, for which no printed text yet existed. Thinking back, older members would have reminded younger ones that new ritual was nothing new--that a tiqqun leil Shavuot or midnight recitation of s'liÝot had emerged relatively recently, also as responses to technological advances--in this case, the invention of coffee that had conveniently reached the eastern Mediterranean, leaving people wired for nighttime activity.¹²

They would have looked at sociological competence too, noting that highly centralized societies standardize their texts. Living in the centralized Abbasid empire, Amram tried, but lacked a printing press. But from 1610 to 1617, the near-unification of Poland provided the near-canonization of a siddur by Shabbetai Sofer of Przemysl,¹³ and England's monarchic and Anglican structure produced a chief rabbi and a Singer Authorised Daily Prayer Book.¹⁴ By contrast, relatively disunited nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Germany fomented hundreds of books by Reform authors, each one certain that his book should become the standard. The nineteenth-century American invention of centralized denominations to transport recognizable religion to frontier communities¹⁵ made a Union Prayer Book possible, whereas parallel efforts in Germany failed. The downfall of the Union Prayer Book was also a matter of technology and sociology. Mimeograph machines made alternatives easily available, while simultaneously fueling the power of revolutionary subgroups like anti-Vietnam marchers and temple youth groups to distribute posters announcing a rally and a liturgy for it.

Were we living a century from now, we would be able to describe accurately what we should have predicted tonight. Whether today's predictions will materialize is unfortunately unpredictable.

But this we know: the computer is to printing as printing was to orality. The issue is not whether technology produces texts. Even oral societies have texts. The tanna'im wrote things down, as amora'im and ge'onim did, but for centuries, worship performance remained oral. Having a book, or knowing that others do, does not make a culture literate, because when new technologies first make their appearance, people relate to them the same way they related to the old ones.¹⁶ Movies, for instance, first filmed people doing what they used to do on stage, just the way they used to do it; only much later did Alfred Hitchcock put cameras at angles where the human eye had never gone before. Throughout the Middle Ages, then, traces of orality from a prior age mixed with cutting-edge literacy in the making.¹⁷ So, too, computers print books no less than printing presses do. But many people still treat computers like newer better typewriters. They miss the point. Despite trace remnants of print mentality, we are leaving the print culture. "Book" is a catchall term for handwritten manuscripts, Gutenberg rarities, mass products of cheap printing,¹⁸ and electronic printouts. But despite the common nomenclature, these are not the same thing, since technology impacts sociology and alters people's relationships to the books they use. We err terribly if we judge tomorrow's prayer books with yesterday's prayer mind-set. There can be such a thing as a post-book book.

To enquire about the ultimate liturgical impact of the computer era is like standing in the year 1500, when print was beginning, and predicting what it will be like in 1960, when print began to decline. Nonetheless, in the short run, anyway, some things are evident.

What is certain is that the new technology changes sociology by reversing the relationship of power between supplier and customer. In print cultures, people on the periphery depend on the centers of distribution to provide information. The CCAR and UAHC benefit because they alone supply materials to Reform Jews. That day is over. Already in the 1950s, MIT professor and inventor of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, predicted that dictators and censors would hitherto be unable to control the flow of information to the public.¹⁹ But what goes for dictators goes for us too. Now everything is available to everyone--and I do mean everything. You can log onto the counter-measures that the government uses to prevent hackers from breaking into the IRS computers and also find out how the hackers hacked in to start with. How much the more will the highly unclassified stuff of liturgy be at our universal finger tips! People at the periphery now surf the web and download whatever they want, manufacturing their own books, complete with music, art, and commentary. A book published centrally, whether three times better or two times worse than our current Gates of Prayer, is no longer the point. No book as we know it will ever satisfy the taste of all Reform Jews, who can match their own aesthetic at the click of their personal mouse.

But what if a book can be more than a book? To answer that, we need a foray into economics.

I said before that technology impacts sociology. In Marxist terms, technology is the economy and sociology the consciousness that economic change generates. But a feedback loop from society's new configurations impacts on how technology is developed. Another way of approaching the problem, then, is to observe the economy and see the interaction between economy and consciousness. On the model I am developing, the two work hand in hand. Yes, economy (which is institutionalized technological competence) determines consciousness, but consciousness instructs the economy where to go.

Economically speaking, industrialization reached maturity by 1900, but continued through 1950.²⁰ Artists such as Fernand Léger (1881-1955) painted cubist scenes of machinery and factories. The Bauhaus school of architecture glorified the factory look with visible pipes, ducts, and beams. The very concept of labor, a working class, and unions dominated consciousness. Steel had become king, along with the railroads that transported it. The Midwest, with its factories, was America's heartland,²¹ enjoying its day in the sun, even as the newly revised Union Prayer Book prayed for "those who dig far away from" it [the sun], that we might have coal to fuel our future. World War II, however, produced a shift to jet travel, so airlines and restaurant and hotel chains emerged--Holiday Inn in the 1960s; Hyatt and Marriott soon after. We had entered the service economy.

The synagogue's divine services took on new meaning: not just service to God, but to people, who treated synagogues like hotels, complete with caterers and social halls. Rabbis were now business professionals in the service industry, judged by their ready availability to congregants as clients. I will never forget a surprise call in 1964 from a stranger: a grandmother, wanting to hire [!] me to officiate with a doctor at a brit milah on the third day. When I declined, she said she would rent [!] someone else from the agency--by which she meant the UAHC, which had kindly given her my name.

But the service economy has morphed into something more: the experience economy.²² Iggy, the perfect cabdriver from TV's Taxi, sings Sinatra songs while serving his passengers food. At theme restaurants like Hard Rock Café or Planet Hollywood, customers go for "eatertainment." Thousands of tourists exit Northwest airplanes in Minneapolis to vacation at the Mall of America, where they go dancing and take in floor shows between purchases. Customers at Sharper Image or Brookstone play with gadgets. We have moved from industrial output to service to experience.

Industrial goods were standardized; services were customized; experiences are personalized. Goods were manufactured; services delivered; experiences staged. Commodities provide features; services deliver benefits; experiences evoke feelings. Will services become staged experiences that evoke personal feelings? Our self- consciously personalized world raises "expressive individualism"²³ to the level of the Constitution's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". We are entitled to it. It is our right. So news mounts daily of new "experiential happenings": first, seeker services in megachurches; then (for Jews) New York's BJ, LA's Friday Night Live, and Denver's Shabbat Unplugged.²⁴ "The sovereign self" where "the self is in process" is ubiquitous in everything we read.²⁵ So people attend synagogue now mostly for life-cycle liturgies to celebrate their selves in search of "more"; the bar/bat mitzvah minyan kidnaps the sanctuary. The mi sheberakh becomes the center of the service.

This is all part of the experience economy, some of it bad, but some good. And it is tied to a long-term trend that began five hundred years ago and still continues; it is what books and computers have in common: the nurturing of the modern self. Humans are a uniquely self-conscious species, and our evolution has systematically focused more and more on what that self is, what obligations it entails, and what rights it has. But not until the victory of printing do we get René Descartes's (1596-1650) quintessential isolation of the self--"I think, therefore I am"--and John Locke's (1632-1704) clarion call for individual liberties. True, by the end of the Gutenberg century (1500), 236 European towns already had printing presses; but only in the sixteenth century were books becoming the intellectual norm. The decision in 1597 to establish imperial censorship over the Frankfurt book fair was a sign that books had become standard fare among the élite.²⁶ Hitherto, reading had been a public, not a private, matter--from the sixth century on, for instance, Benedictine monks spent four hours daily being read to. But print cultures feature the ultimate self-satisfying pastime of reading privately. Hence the musings of Descartes and Locke about the private rights of private readers like themselves; hence also the first novel (Cervantes' Don Quixote), which came out in 1605. The next step was the flowering of the novel into its own genre, when the nineteenth century made book publishing inexpensive, thereby creating a middle class of "selves."²⁷ As literature increased, we decided our personal selves deserved servicing, and the service and experience economies followed.

The old industrial economy mass-produced everything all the same and depended on large-scale marketing. Not so books, however, which never obeyed these economic principles. Jason Epstein, the entrepreneurial inventor of trade books, the Anchor Bible, and the New York Review of Books (among other things) says book publishing was always a "small-scale highly personalized industry."²⁸ Personalized, mind you. From its inception, the book industry served the modern "self" with a backlist from which you could order anything you want. The experience economy just carries that logic to fruition, as you drop in on Borders' superstore for coffee, couches, classical music, and a soft-core intellectual ambience studded by bestseller authors who make cameo appearances to sign books. Service and experience are on the same spectrum, but in one you are served what you think you need, in the other you go for the happening you want.

Now we understand better the changeover of worship from Classical Reform to what we have today. Classical Reform prayer was a function of mass production, where everyone is the same. It used a mass-produced prayer book that everyone read together. Since reading is a private matter, however, Reform services had to homogenize proceedings to guarantee that "everyone was on the same page." Reform Jews rose together, sat together, read together, turned pages together. This was Model-T worship for an assembly- line population.

Post-World War II culture changed all that. Though the era began with The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a popular study of continued conformity, it quickly introduced individualistic rock- and-roll (as opposed to the big band sound), foreshadowing "bowling alone,"²⁹ with dancing alone. Still, in those days, the hardware of a single computer with less power than today's palm pilot filled a room. Money was still invested in Underwood typewriters, and the Li'l Abner comic strip parodied the big business of General Motors and the military-industrial complex by proclaiming, "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA." Prayer remained a book thing; the newly revised Union Prayer Book was declaimed in fresh suburban pulpits exactly as its predecessor had been read in urban centers.

Now, by contrast, "typewriter" is old English, General Motors has seen better days, and book-centered worship is gone for good. Megachurches that lack strict liturgical requirements do without the book altogether, as do our camps on occasion, where song leaders direct a purely non-literary worship experience. Still, we are a liturgical faith (unlike Baptists, say), so I expect synagogues will still use books. But the book is less text than pretext for the staging of an experience. Think of post-book books as open-ended liturgical scripts for experiences.

In a way, we are returning to the age of orality, where performance of prayer matters more than the fixed words. As long as books were the issue, all we needed was a good reader. Union Prayer Book passages were even labeled "Reader," and the Hebrew Union College, back then, taught students to read correctly. The question of worship leadership has expanded now, to include the theology and artistry of being a sh'liaÝ tzibbur--how to orchestrate the seating, fill empty space, provide the right acoustics, and honor individualism within the group experience. Computer people never talk about "being on the same page"; they multitask. Worship in an experience economy provides parallel options within services--a running commentary, perhaps, for people who prefer to study the prayer rather than say it; or differently designed pages that capture worshipers' attention.³⁰ Imagine, then, a prayer book designed with "multidaven" in mind--away for each individual within the group to retain personal experience and yet expand it with the certainty of community.

For the other side of individualistic expression is the yearning for community. Tomorrow's synagogue will allow heterogeneity of dress and participation; it will honor privacy and provide meditative silence; but it will also produce the spirituality of sacred community.

I have been arguing that computer technology provides its own unique worship. Computers do make books, but Microsoft is not just a better thing; it is a different kind of thing from Gutenberg. If the tanna'im and amora'im gave us prayer as orality, and print gave us prayer as literacy, computers provide prayer that is printed but post-literary. Books, for instance, separate us into privatized readers-you don't talk in libraries. Computers unite us in chat groups, information sharing, and instant e-communication. But that unification is virtual, not real. Televised evangelical prayer already unifies disparate worshipers in virtual community.³¹ Synagogue prayer can become the experience of real community as well as the mutual affirmation of personal individuality within it.

You should be asking if I am arguing for what will be or what ought to be, and the answer is "Both," the first on empirical grounds and the second on theological principle. I think Judaism inherently seeks compatibility with technology. I believe in a God who supports scientific progress and who, perhaps, is implicit within it.

To be sure, we can go too far, as Gene Borowitz presciently warned us way back in 1965, when he pictured a futuristic computer receiving pre-Shabbat calls from prospective worshipers and tailoring the evening's service to their momentary needs and moods.³² He was voicing a necessary caution. But there is no authentic Hebrew word for Luddite; Jews specialize in what is new: Greek Hellenism, for instance, gave us the Pharisees;³³ the European "service of the heart" produced British Methodism, but also its cousin, Polish „asidism.³⁴ Nineteenth-century romanticism became Reform Judaism.

The „atam Sofer understood what we were about when he denounced Reform Judaism with his ruling, heÝadash asur min hatorah, "novelty is forbidden by Torah." We should properly respond, heÝadash nove'a min hateva, "novelty follows necessarily from nature." But teva and torah are intertwined, for God created both. Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus all thought their science was deciphering the mind of God: "Galileo saw nature as God's second book" after the first one, the Bible.³⁵ We should agree. As scientists master the mathematical language of God's second book, so rabbis master the Hebrew of the first one, extending its domain to include the torah sheb'al peh, not just shebikhtav. As both come from the same divine author, however, both must be mutually consistent. It follows that heÝadash nove'a gam min hateva gam min hatorah- novelty is inherent in both these masterpieces of divine authorship. Technological innovation, then, cannot rightly be denounced for its potential excesses. It must be affirmed for what it can properly do, even as we remain wary of its misuse.³⁶

From the proposition "All things are possible," it does not follow that nothing is desirable. At some point we say, "Thus far and no farther," but this generation's thirst for spiritual experience is not one of them. No one is asking us again to sacrifice animals. Most people can distinguish experience as production, or even seduction, from induction-which is what they want-to the holy.

A theology for the internet, not the printed word, will follow. Buber's „asidic master who learned from the telegraph that "Every word we choose is counted," and from the telephone that "What is said here is heard there," is apt to learn from the internet that "We all share a single world together," in which case our liturgy would do well to revive the ethical universalism of Classical Reform, not just the particularistic revival that followed the Six- Day War. In Wall Street parlance, "The ideological market is long overdue for a correction." We should also think through the reality of a God who is present in virtual community-not just the community we physically establish in synagogues each Shabbat, but the one we intuit beyond the computer screen in e-mails from people we never heard of across the planet. As for religious anthropology, contrary to postmodern pessimism, I again expect a return to our Classical Reform heritage: an optimistic reassertion of what science can and does do for us, every day of our lives. And cosmology? Our prayers will reflect a cosmos that scientists describe as a participational universe where we do discover, but more, we determine the critical connections between things, where, as Hilary Putnam put it, "The mind and the world together make up the mind and the world," or (the same thing, rabbinically), "We are partners with God in creation."

Finally, a word about text and music. When all information is available to everyone, we quickly tire of the banal and distinguish the eternal from the transitory. Good liturgical writing need not- indeed, it cannot-deliver airtight theological truths, but it can and should confirm the larger-than-life realities that Judaism posits as the things worth living for. By contrast, much of what I find in alternative liturgies is banal; it is driven by dullards, politically conscious but conscious of little else. Author/editor Catherine Madsen cites this Aleinu:

"And then, and then, both men and women will be gentle,

And then, and then, both women and men will be strong…"

She comments, "To learn this jingle at the same time that I learned its original, the Aleinu, was barely conceivable. 'And then, and then, all the children will be above average,' I muttered, grinding my teeth."³⁷ A public relations expert told me long ago, "Getting the word out does not guarantee getting the message through." Especially in a postprint era where experience is the key, the liturgical message, not the word, is what counts. We need true poetry that points beyond itself, inviting our attention to those truths that language cannot compass.

And we need English, not just Hebrew. I fully support the Hebrew renaissance that the last several decades have promoted in Reform circles, but "davening" traditional Hebrew alone can be an escape from the far harder challenge of poetic invention in the vernacular. Imagine what would happen if every Jew were suddenly to understand every Hebrew word of the traditional liturgy. Would we, on that account, mandate the traditional service and only the traditional service as their daily prayer regimen? Surely not. To begin with, we would omit much of the inherited service because its very character of being historically conditioned makes it unfit for our historical moment. But more than that, we would want to add prayers with sentiments that even the most brilliant of medieval scholars-Rashi, the Maharam, and even the Rambam, say-could never have imagined, for their imagination too was historically constrained. Vernacular prayer is not a fallback position for Hebrew illiterates. It is a response to the recognition that people think most productively and best in their native tongues. We are woefully out of touch with the deepest yearnings of North American souls if we ignore the North American English idiom into which such yearnings are naturally framed.

I plead also for rabbinic attention to Jewish music. If the law of retailing is "location, location, location," the law of worship is "music, music, music," especially when a postprint culture underinvests us in a page's bare words. I hold that, nowadays, much of our modern art repertoire is more appropriate for concerts than for worship. I believe also that our most urgent need is to let congregations find their voice. But I believe with no less fervor that rabbis, no less than cantors, have a moral and theological obligation to teach congregants the music of Jewish tradition. Educated congregants who can tell Beethoven from Bach should be able to distinguish the Great Aleinu from the everyday version. Listeners who regularly anticipate the sound of American Christmas are not so musically incompetent that they cannot learn also to expect (and to get) the leitmotif of our holidays. The fully Jewish liturgical experience of which I speak presupposes knowledge of nusaÝ and Ýazanut, to which a full gamut of modern sound should be added, and not just with yesterday's instrument, the organ, but with flute, cello, brass, and so on-not for their own sake, but because the full experience of prayer demands all the human spirit has to offer.

We cannot hope to re-imagine Jewish worship if we ourselves are not reimaginative. So we need, above all, clergy who can feed a people's liturgical imagination in ways competitive with e-mail, cell phones, and hundreds of other jangling bytes of data that vie for our attention. The art of public prayer is indeed an art, in which too many rabbis still lack training. Tomorrow's successful worship will depend less on any book than on the people who lead it.

A personal note: In 1984, or thereabouts, the Conference surprised me by publicly thanking me for my work, in a brief walk- on convention moment; Gates of Understanding II was about to come out, and I happened to have with me a galley copy of my acknowledgments, which I carried to the dais in hope of reading aloud its dedication page. Alas, the honorees who came before me said nothing personal, and I concluded (faultily) that such a note of my own would be inappropriate. Temerity overcame me; I said nothing; I just accepted the honor and walked off. Now, seventeen years later, I know better. Let me read to you the dedication that I wrote then and that means all the more to me now:

[My work] reflects the searching minds and loving hearts of generations of rabbis whose diligent commitment to Jewish study has long been my ideal…. To all my students, whom I love dearly, and for whom I research, write, and teach, this book is [yours].

So too, the future is yours, not just mine, to make, insofar as God grants us life to make it. I thank you for bestowing on me another honor: that of addressing you tonight.

Shakespeare was probably right: Imagination is for lunatics, lovers, and poets. We should re-imagine our future, then, with love and with poetry, and maybe with the creative edge and caring that come only with lunacy. We are, after all, a lunar people.

^Notes

1. My precise family case is imaginary, but the data and analysis are correct. Cf. Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 40-48; and Susan J. White, Christian Worship and Technological Change (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1994), pp. 71-80.

2. A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Act 5, Scene 1.

3. Letters of Junius, Letter 7.

4. My system simplifies reality, but not unduly. Frederick G. Kilgour (The Evolution of the Book [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 5) uses five criteria: (1) societal need for information; (2) technological knowledge and experience; (3) organizational experience and capability; (4) the capability of integrating a new form into existing information systems; and (5) economic viability. The final four are certainly apt here, but the first may also obtain, though the kind of "information" prayer books provide differs. As what Peter Berger calls the "plausibility structure" of belief changes, worshipers seek new information to satisfy a changing sense of self, identity, and what I call the three "ologies"-theology, anthropology, and cosmology.

5. Brian Stock (Listening For The Text [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990]) defines textual community as "a microsociety organized around the common understanding of a script." I prefer, "common understanding of an informally authoritative text."

6. See Joanna Dewey, "Textuality in an Oral Culture: A Survey of the Pauline Traditions," Semeia 65 (1994): 43-45.

7. See Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Psalms in Jewish Liturgy: Hallels, Midrash, Canon and Loss," Tercentenary Address at, "Up With A Shout," Yale University's Conference on Psalms, January 2001; forthcoming in Harold W. Attridge and Margot E. Fassler, eds., Biblical Texts in Community: The Psalms in Jewish and Christian Tradition (2002).

8. Others have suggested that I add psychology to the mix, but so far I think of psychology as a separate kind of thing. Psychology impacts on my three mentioned considerations in that one's psychology skews our perception of God, the universe, and human nature. It is idiosyncratic, therefore, unlike the same set of items as the three mostly cultural categories I name. Catholics, in particular, would have me add ecclesiology, which is a similar item. I could technically have added it and elsewhere I might, depending on the nature of the problem addressed. One's choice of categories is somewhat heuristically determined, after all, and even though the term is not common among Jews, there is a genuine Jewish sense of ecclesiology: the theory of Israel, chosenness, and covenant. But Jews tend to subsume these considerations under theology and whereas I thought it useful to separate out anthropology and cosmology, I did not think it so useful to stipulate ecclesiology as a separate entity. Admittedly, the choice is arbitrary.

9. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953).

10. Stefan C. Reif first puts together the technological breakthrough of the Codex (the book) and Amram's Seder (Judaism and Hebrew Prayer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], pp. 148, 184). But, contrary to his implication that the codex is new to the ninth century, the Koran had been printed in book form all along. Kilgour (The Evolution of the Book) dates its widespread use in the West to no later than 200 CE.

11. See White, Christian Worship, p. 44.

12. Elliott Horowitz, "Coffee, Coffeehouses, and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry," AJS Review 14:1 (1989): 17-46.

13. Stefan C. Reif, Shabbethai Sofer and his Prayerbook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

14. The official liturgy for Orthodox Jews in Great Britain, named for its editor, Rabbi Simeon Singer (1848-1906); first published in 1890.

15. On the connection between transportable religion and Reform, see Alan Silverstein, Alternatives to Assimilation (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1994).

16. My thanks to Joel Hoffman for this insight and for the examples that follow.

17. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)-a point reiterated throughout Chapter One.

18. In the process of printing, from the very beginning, manuscripts were sent to compositors who set them in type, at first by hand; after 1884 (and the invention of linotype machines) and 1887 (monotype), lead could be melted, cast as type, and used to set copy mechanically. In any event, the type was fitted into a form, then placed on a press that produced printed sheets, These were folded, gathered into signatures, sewn together, and then bound. The mechanical advances of the nineteenth century include steam presses (1810) and stereotype plates (1846), which produced larger runs at less cost per copy. See Jason Epstein, Book Business (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), pp. 94-95.

19. Reported as personal conversation to Epstein, Book Business, p. 149.

20. On which, along with the changeover to the "new economy," see Robert B. Reich, The Future of Success (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

21. The very metaphor "heartland" implied the spatial connectedness of a centralized pumping zone (where production occurs) and arteries (railroad lines) that supply the rest of the body (the extremities like the east coast). With the computer revolution, there is no heartland, precisely because of the reversal of power relationship caused by the absence of a single centralized supplier. The extremities are no longer distant from their multiple sources of supply.

22. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, "Welcome to the Experience Economy," Harvard Business Review (July/August 1998): 97-105.

23. Term coined by Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 27.

24. Elsewhere, too, religion is being marketed experientially. Dallas's Hillcrest Church has invested in a performing arts center, along with special interest groups such as a gourmet dining club. New York's Marble Collegiate Church provides the "New Spirit Café," akin to

New York's Makor for Jews, except that Makor adopts Jewish patterns of ethnicity/secularism as an option to religion, and so takes place outside synagogue auspices. See Allison Stein Wellner, "Oh Come All Ye Faithful," American Demographics (June, 2001), p. 54.

25. See, e.g., Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 42.

26. See Kilgour, Evolution of the Book, p. 93.

27. Novels are now the ultimate experience of a private self. Thousands of people read the New York Times Book Review section, then steal off privately to buy a bestseller, which they read equally privately at home. They buy it and read it in what they consider "personal private time," not during work hours, for instance, but evenings, weekends, or on vacation.

28. Epstein, Book Business, p. 8.

29. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Putnam traces the privatization of the self away from communality of all sorts to the 1960s.

30. Cf., e.g., Shira Milgrom, ed., Entrances to Holiness Are Everywhere [Prayer Book For Jewish Community Synagogue of White Plains, N.Y.], 1993; Paul M. Yedwab, ed., Shema Yisrael, Hear O Israel: The Temple Israel Siddur [Prayer book For Temple Israel, West Bloomfield, Mich.], 1998.

31. Robert Wuthnow, The Struggle for America's Soul (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdman's, 1989), pp. 115-41.

32. Eugene B. Borowitz, "The Individual and the Community in Jewish Prayer," in Arnold J. Wolf, ed., Rediscovering Judaism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965). Reprinted in Lawrence A. Hoffman, Gates of Understanding, vol. 1 (New York: UAHC Press, 1977), pp. 67-68.

33. The Rabbis were well aware of mathematical and scientific theories of their day; they accepted the atomistic physics of the Epicureans, though they stopped short of their metaphysics and morals.

34. Ted A. Campbell, Religion of the Heart (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).

35. Werner Heisenberg, Tradition in Science (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), p. 9.

36. Think of liturgy as the script for ritualized social consciousness; Jewish liturgy as the script for Jewish social consciousness. Insofar as it is consciousness, it will share the impact of whatever technology society in general enjoys, and be indistinguishable from the ritual of anyone else. For instance, in the oral culture of early synagogue and church, when exact texts varied daily, both Jews and Christians depended on liturgical order for the sense of liturgical predictability. The Talmud calls it seder; church fathers name it ordo-two technical terms that mean the same. Similarly, sacrifice is a technology, and after 70 CE, both Jews and Christians found themselves "technologically challenged" as the possibility of that technology ended.

Consider prayer a new technology: it is worship without the cult. Since, for some time, new technologies are treated like old, both Jewish and Christian prayer are likened to sacrifice-avodah for Jews and the eucharist for Christians. Liturgy itself comes from the Greek leiturgia, meaning "public work"-again, avodah-the work of pacifying the deities. A later example is illustrated manuscripts, which arise roughly simultaneously in Jewish Haggadot and Christian Bibles. And once book-making dominates consciousness, European Jews and Christians alike depend on books. But avodah for Jews differed from the eucharist for Christians, and book dependency for Catholics differed from that even of Anglicans, all the more so of Jews. So technology dominates, but it dominates differently depending on the historicity of each religion's consciousness.

37. Catherine Madsen, "Kitsch and Liturgy," Tikkun 16:2, p. 42.

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