Judaism for the Thinking Person

Be Someone Else: Victor Turner and the Subversiveness of Ritual Performance

06.04.2023 - By Rabbi Nadav CainePlay

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The longest parashah of the Torah's is Numbers' Naso, which begins with the theme of the tabernacle of roving ritual performance, like a traveling theater group, and then describes four ritual dramas that take publicly:  the financial penitent, the jealous husband, the addict, and the arrogant prince.  What do these have in common?  Rather than seeing ritual function to impose comformity and social roles, I examine this through the theory of Victor Turner, who posited that rituals actually subvert conventional roles, and in a theatrical way, use fixed theater scrips and actions to subvert them, and you.

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