By Martin Jaffee, JTNews Correspondent
Has anyone heard of Horace Miner? He was a professor of anthropology whose main claim to fame, as far as I know, was a marvelous, satirical essay, written in 1956, titled “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” Miner’s fieldwork revealed that each Nacirema home has a “shrine” set aside for the performance of bizarre oral rituals. Especially fine homes may have two or even two-and-a-half such shrines. Here, according to Miner, is what happens in them:
The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics.
For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children, which is supposed to improve their moral fiber. The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite.
“Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures,” he writes.
Have you decoded the prank yet? Of course you have! Nacerima is American spelled backwards, and Miner is spoofing our obsession with oral hygiene. But his real purpose is to puncture the arrogance of his fellow anthropologists, who claimed to know the “real meaning” behind the rituals of “primitive peoples.”
I am reminded of all this by my 9-year-old, Aviva. She has suddenly discovered herself as the heir of a culture that is transparent to her but thoroughly foreign to others. It all started when Kelly, one of our neighbors, expressed an interest in attending our “candle-lighting ceremony” for Hanukkah. Aviva thought the term “candle-lighting ceremony” a scream — far too solemn and “official” for the simple act of fulfilling a commandment!
But Kelly’s curiosity inspired Aviva to invent her own dictionary of Jewish religious practice. So now, of a Shabbos evening, Aviva wishes us “a peaceful and joyous Sabbath,” looks forward to “kindling the Sabbath lights,” and, increasingly longs to celebrate the autumnal “Feast of Booths” in our very own “festival hut,” about which her classmates have read in the “Holy Biblee” (as she pronounced it when discovering her first motel Gideon). “Do they mean Humish?” she wondered.
At this, her day-school-tuition-saddled abba kvells. Aviva has internalized a fundamental reality of daily Jewish consciousness — that no amount of translation and explanation can ever convey the inner meanings of Jewish life to those who don’t share in it day to day and year to year. The meanings of our tradition are mediated in the doing, not the explaining. Every translation out of our idiom of tradition into another vocabulary introduces false notes even as it attempts to communicate. But, what Aviva has yet to realize is that her traditionalism lands her smack in the middle of a basic human irony; one generation’s false note can become another’s cultural tuning fork!
And this brings me inevitably to meditate upon the Latin verb, benedicere, “to utter a good word.” It once applied to incantations offered by pagan Roman priests. Later it was adopted by Roman Catholic theologians to describe formulas that transformed things like bread and wine into the Christian Messiah’s flesh and blood.
No room for a word like this in the Jewish tradition, right? Not exactly. Benedicere is also the ancestor of the English word, “benediction.” English speaking Jews — like us — use it to render the Hebrew noun, b’rachah, “blessing.”
Now, I’m sure that the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews who migrated from Italy northward into the Rhineland sometime around 1000 CE didn’t pick up their Latin at Mass. But they sure knew what benedicere meant!. How do we know? Because, over centuries, nothing became more distinctively Ashkenazic than the idea of bentchn — the Yiddish word for making a blessing. Like “benediction” in English, bentchn has its ancient ancestor in that Latin verb!
What do we learn from all this? For one thing, we gain a little perspective on the idea of Jewish “authenticity,” that shibboleth by which Jews have divided the culturally kosher from the culturally treif for the last two centuries of modernity. Some Jews claimed nothing of Judaism can be borrowed from Gentile cultures or translated into their terms without contaminating the source of authentic Jewish tradition. But let’s not ask after the genealogy of the very term Orthodox in Greek Christianity! Others claimed everything can and must be translated, so that the source can flow into new tributaries. But they ignore how the original “Reformation” turned Christendom into the playland of subjective, dogmatic anarchy. Others advised us to pick and choose, and let history separate the wheat from the chaff. Who guessed that the customers would want to conserve the chaff and dump the wheat?
In a strange way, we Jews have become Nacirema to ourselves. At some moments we feel like insiders to our Jewish lives, sharing rich meanings that seem incapable of transmission into any other idiom. We sense at such moments our primordial difference from the rest of humanity: our authenticity.
At other times, we are illiterate anthropologists of ourselves, browsing among the various Jewish “authenticities” marketed to us by the hidden hand of Jewish identity politicians, choosing, in our monumental lack of cultivated taste, exactly the most sour notes as the themes for our compositions.
Depressed? Don’t be. The first Roman Jew to interpret a b’rachah as a “benediction” was probably howled out of shul by the authenticity squad on the Religious Practices Committee. But for anyone who has ever bentched likht, bentched gomel, or simply felt gebentcht by the joy of Jewish living, that radical reformer has ultimately become the most authentic Jew in the neighborhood.
So does any of this tell us how to be Jewish tomorrow morning when we get up? Probably not. Except for Aviva. She’ll wash her hands and prepare to recite her “morning benedictions upon waking from my slumbers.”
Martin Jaffee is Chair of the Comparative Religion Program at the University of Washington, and he teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs. When not masquerading as a journalist, he writes on the history of Talmudic literature as well as theoretical problems in the study of religion.