The Miriam Tradition: Teaching Embodied Torah

185 Pages·2010·0.79 MB·English

by  Cia Sautter

The Miriam Tradition

Cia Sautter
The Miriam
Tradition
teaching embodied torah
University of Illinois Press
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
© 2010 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sautter, Cia.
The Miriam tradition : teaching embodied Torah /
Cia Sautter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03577-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-07762-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Dance—Religious aspects—Judaism. 2. Miriam (Biblical
figure) 3. Jewish women—Religious life. 4. Women in Judaism.
5. Sephardim. I. Title.
bm729.d35s28 2010
296.4'6—dc22 2010024454
Contents
Preface: Why Movement Matters vii
Acknowledgments xi
1. Women and Sacred Power 1
2. Movement Matters 23
3. Miriam’s Dance 46
4. Miriam at the Wedding Celebration 77
5. The Rachel Tradition: Dancing Death 107
Conclusion 132
Notes 137
Bibliography 151
Index 165

Preface
why movement matters
This is a tale about women’s leadership of important Jewish
rituals that conveyed Torah truth, following in the tradition of Miriam
the prophetess. In many ways it is a forgotten story, perhaps because it
involves dance and women, two things that Western intellectual tradition
tends to deem inconsequential. Yet a high point of the Exodus story is
Miriam leading women in dance and music, after Israel crosses through
Yam Suf, the Red or Reed Sea.1 This image has always intrigued me, be-
cause Torah says that Miriam was a naviah—a female prophet. For that
reason, her performance seemed especially important.
It is possible to argue that Miriam’s celebratory leadership was in-
deed significant. The same might be said of the leadership of the Jewish
women of the past who followed in her tradition, leading life celebration
rituals for their communities. Some scholars maintain that their rituals
are “cultural” and “entertainment,” implying that they were not a part of
religious life. Yet religion is a part of culture that deals with deepest beliefs
and values. With this view, the dance of Miriam and her descendants may
be considered part of Torah tradition, as an enactment of Jewish values.
The Jewish women in this study were Sephardic, meaning that they
were of Spanish Jewish origin. Following in the tradition of Miriam,
they brought their culture of dance, drumming, and song to their Juda-
ism. They also brought their Judaism to their culture, performing dance
and music rituals for specific Jewish holidays and special occasions. I
explore this history as significant embodied text through a detailed cul-
tural analysis involving written and visual records, along with evidence
from dance and musical traditions.
viii Preface
Called tanyaderas, these women “taught” Torah values by leading
appropriate behavior for major life events. At first this may seem an odd
idea, but I purposely chose it to challenge limited definitions of Torah.
Through their dance performances, the tanyaderas taught their commu-
nity how to enact Torah through symbolic movement. By recognizing their
“teaching,” we can more fully include these women in Jewish history,
and write them back into the records as important leaders of the com-
munity. Much research and many publications in the past ten years have
dealt with this kind of recovery of women’s history. My study is slightly
different, however, as I seek more than the details of history. My empha-
sis is on practices of women outside the synagogue as a significant part
of Jewish religious life. Rather than featuring exceptional Jewish women
who entered the realm of rabbinic scholarship, I seriously consider what
more ordinary women accomplished in an extraordinary activity.
Sephardic women were teachers of Jewish Torah through their rituals
for celebrations marking holidays and life passages. My inclusion of stud-
ies on dance as a form of communication, cultural encoding, and teaching
shows how I am here establishing this point. In fact, the dance studies are
vital for understanding how Sephardic women’s rituals might serve as a
means of gathering evidence for the recording of religious history. Move-
ment creates meaning. Jewish women’s dance created and encoded specific
meanings of, and for, Judaism. Therefore, the overall purpose of this book
is to examine how embodied movement creates our deepest values, which
cannot be expressed through words alone: they must be performed.
Religious values are imparted to a community in many ways, but
perhaps especially through ritual and symbolic movement. Sephardic
women’s dance and music were simple in structure, and usually similar
to the dances and music of the surrounding culture. But the focal point for
their performances was often a time of life passage. If this type of ritual
activity was a basis for Victor Turner’s influential The Ritual Process,
should it not be significant enough to examine in more detail here?
In our present multicultural society, while we may recognize and
appreciate the many spiritually rich movement traditions in Eastern reli-
gions, we seem to have forgotten that Judaism and other Western religions
have them as well. I want to correct this inaccuracy. Along with current
theories of embodiment and performance, Judith Plaskow’s concept of
Torah as something lived provides me with a means of including the ritu-
als of Sephardiyot (Sephardic women) as part of Jewish tradition, and of
overcoming objections to Torah as more than written text. The concept
also allows me to expand the definition of religion, rather than limiting
it to philosophy or theology. There is nothing wrong with philosophy or
Preface ix
theology. Yet to confine religion to a thought process alone siphons the
spirit and culture out of the practice. So I join Plaskow’s idea of Torah
with the dynamic concepts of modern Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig.
Although his work is from the early twentieth century, his ideas on the
importance of ritual movement and revelation in Judaism still have much
relevance, and relate well to more recent ritual theories.
To better examine ritual performance, I have also incorporated the
ideas of ritual scholars Ronald Grimes, Catherine Bell, and especially Tom
Driver as they have outlined in detail the primacy of the body in creat-
ing meaning. Critically, I have included the work of George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson on the body basis of language, and in the process redefined
postmodernist views of dance as “text.” Rather then viewing dance as
a reflection of spoken and written language, I view the symbolic move-
ment of dance as a means of creating language.
I greatly appreciate the lessons I have learned from study of dance
about movement as primary; without movement, there is no life. This is
true especially in religious life. Movement is not tangential to religion,
for religious life is about performance. Unfortunately, much of the dance
history that I have studied in academic classes and personal research has
concentrated on stage dance or non-Western cultures. Some scholars even
complain that Western religion is antithetical to dance. However, dance
anthropology and dance therapy studies have provided me with rich re-
sources on the social and psychological impact of dance, and even a few
studies on dance and religion. Ethnomusicologists supplied even more
specific knowledge of dance in Judaism.
Studies on dance in religion are few, however, and in my research
it seemed that only ritual scholars pay attention to the body and move-
ment. I found that while postmodern thought produced some studies on
thinking about the body, they had little to say about lived, physical real-
ity. My intent is to begin to fill this gap in religious scholarship, provid-
ing a case study on the performance of religion. I look at dance as ritual
that prepares individuals to act out their beliefs in culture. If anything,
then, this is a study that examines “internal dimensions of performance,
symbolism, and intention” to “allow for an understanding of major meta-
phors employed in . . . ritual activity.”2
My study maintains that people live out their beliefs in action as
well as in words. In Judaism specifically, Torah is a prime example of
teaching that is deeper than can be expressed in words alone. Of course,
there is a physical Torah, composed of words and written in a scroll. But
because the Torah is a teacher of how one is to live life, it may also be
expressed without words. This might be seen in the visual, musical, and