Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy

by Lawrence A. Hoffman

Book Overview

This book is about a household activity, if not a household word; an activity that engages us all with that very degree of regularity which breeds indifference: liturgy, or, to be more precise, worship, or, to be more precise still, the variety of rituals in which religious people, particularly, engage.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253311993
• ISBN13: 9780253311993
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An important book on Jewish liturgy, but is its own worst enemy

I've been reading this book for a course in Jewish liturgy at a Conservative seminary. Hoffman is an important scholar of liturgy [see his "Canonization" book], and this book captures his particular approach, so it's worth a careful read. The book goes far deeper than, say, Hammer's "Entering Jewish Prayer." Problem is that whoever edited the book let us [the readers] down: my fellow students are having a very difficult time trying to figure out what Hoffman's approach really is. I had years of graduate work studying Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz, so when Hoffman states that his "holistic" approach to liturgy is inspired by their methodologies [though he doesn't describe, nor distinguish them from each other], I had a foothold in what he was talking about. Hoffman accurately claims that the study of Jewish liturgy has been based on the Wissenschaft approach of describing the historical development of the texts, and then by tracing the development back to an identification of the origins of prayers, we, by axiom, arrive at the discovery of an Ur-text, or of an Ur-experience, which delivers the "true" meaning of the prayer, and hence the goal of scholarship. To be fair, I think that's what I wanted out of a course on liturgy, and Hoffman's book has been an important corrective in my thinking. For example, perhaps the greatest Jewish liturgy scholar, Elbogen, claims that the Havdalah originated as part of a meal setting, where the spices "originated" as a way to cover up the smells of the cooking, and the fire was the cooking flame. Hoffman, by contrast, wants to approach liturgy in what I take to be two ways, though he never explains himself at all on the matter. First, he wants to take a Geertzian, cultural anthropologist, thick description, holistic approach: what is it like to participate in the havdalah ritual? What are people experiencing? What moods and thoughts are cultivated as one goes from step to step through a liturgical experience? What distinghuishes a wink from a blink during a prayer experience? [For example, when we sing the Kedushah, what is it like to mimic the angels? How does the participant feel it? What does each successive verse accomplish?] Second, he wants to take a Douglas/Turner quasi-structuralist approach, whereby each prayer devides up the world categorically. So, one the one hand, Hoffman tells us that really he's looking at "the field of meaning for those engaged in praying" the havdalah prayer. Two paragraphs later, he tells us that his thesis is that "havdalah functions as a presentation of the Jewish categorization of reality." [Page 31] He doesn't seem to understand that these are two different things, unless I am wrong and you can see them being the same thing. (I am giving the best possible example here, since one might see the experience of holy and profane categories as the experience of the havdalah ritual, but, again, I see a Douglasian approach and a Geertzian approach