Ritual

A comprehensive study of the Mishnah that argues it manifests an implicit theory of what performing rituals accomplishes

Jews are known for having many ritual practices. Many of these come from the Bible, but Jewish ritual practice as we know it today is as much a product of the earliest rabbis who lived in the late-second and early-third centuries. These rabbis created the text known as the Mishnah, which collects, develops, and records in great detail rules about the proper way to carry out traditional rituals, what the text terms mitsvot. Naftali S. Cohn’s book is a comprehensive study of ritual in the Mishnah, focused especially on the fundamental questions of the nature of ritual, what ritual does or accomplishes, and what motivates people to do rituals, all according to the Mishnah’s authors.

Reading the text of the Mishnah closely and drawing widely from the analytic toolbox of ritual studies, Cohn argues that ritual, in the perspective of the Mishnah’s authors, has multiple effects. Performing mitsvot—and refraining from the mitsvot “not to do”—shapes individual bodies by choreographing a person’s interactions with the objects, spaces, times, and other bodies that form the environment in which they act. It shapes collective bodies by enabling social life and creating group identity, even as it establishes differences between people and social hierarchy. Doing mitsvot also activates cultural ideas, connecting the people of Israel to their God, their past, their place, and each other. Repeated ritual action, further, forges body habits and generates the powerful feelings of obligation and, at times, even joy and love, which move people to continue to carry out these rituals. Mitsvot, according to the Mishnah, have the power to shape Israeliteness, or Jewishness, in its every facet. By focusing so much attention on ritual behavior, Cohn shows how the Mishnah can also be understood as a rumination on the fundamental nature of activity itself, of doing, being, moving, and engaging with the world.