Judaism to (1800)

In most of its historical forms up to 1800, Judaism was a halakocentric religion. The main religious activity was the performance of the 613 commandments, addressed to the God of Israel. Halakah, a central concept in traditional Judaism, stands for the regulations of the details of religious behavior. Made up of interpretations of biblical and then rabbinical discussions, halakah represents the most vast and influential literature in Jewish culture. However, while addressing the concrete aspects of performance, it rarely addresses the religious goals of this behavior—these questions are discussed in the speculative literatures. Until modern Judaism, halakic behavior was the basic skeleton of Jewish life, though the details—the customs and much more their meaning—changed over centuries.

The two main religious rituals performed in public, prayer and reading of the Torah, are paramountly vocal. The halakic regulation to recite them is an essential part of their performance. (Anthropologically speaking, any thick description of Judaism should pay close attention to the role played by the voice in the communal rites.) However, as far as the vast majority of members of communities are concerned, there is no reason to assume that an awareness of any of the above three models was instrumental in significantly shaping religious experience. What is described in the literature deals primarily with conceptualizations and experiences of small elites, rather than with widespread understandings of Jewish practices. Indeed, according to some few examples, in which the vocal aspects of prayer were conceived of as secondary, preference was given to the mental aspects of prayer, as implied for example by Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides; 1135–1204) and his followers. Adding important forms of spiritualized versions of Judaism, this Neoaristotelian thinker—and before him the eleventh-century Bahya ibn Paqudah—had a strong impact on some aspects of the internalization of religious life in Judaism.

Nevertheless, the more common experiences, based on vocal religious activities, created communities that were characterized, at least for those periods in which the rites were performed, by a shared sonorous ambiance. More than the praying, Jews were united by their sharing the same semantic world—they became a group by experiencing a rhythm of life punctuated by the same sounds. Eminent representatives of more intellectually inclined versions of Kabbalah and Hasidism even attributed a surplus role to loud recitation, rather than a mere compliance with a halakic regulation. This means that, despite the acceptance of axiologies, which elevated mental processes to a very high status, even outstanding representatives of elite Jewish mysticism (though not all of them) maintained the importance of vocal activities rather than devalue them, as some philosophers did. More interesting than this apotheosis of the loud study of the Talmud and the mouthing of the Torah, which continued classical rabbinic regulations, is the ascent of the loud study of kabbalistic books. For example, evidence has emerged regarding the loud study of the book of the Zohar in northern Africa beginning in the late sixteenth century.

Though there can be no doubt that loud study and prayer were intended to improve the memorization of the studied text—unlike the halakic reading of the Torah and prayer—the result was the same: sounds became an integral part of ritual in rabbinic academies as they were in synagogues. The active participation in the formation of a sonorous ambiance that encompasses the entire community with an actualization of canonical texts may be considered a formative experience for the group. The sonority created during these Jewish rituals distinguishes them from the greater solemnity that is characteristic of many rituals related to reading of sacred texts. The sonority is not a unison of coordinated voices that are consonant to each other. Musically speaking, it more often resembles cacophony than symphony. Indeed, the traditional study of the Torah or prayer, and even the ritualistic loud reading of the Torah, often took place in an ambiance dominated by discordant voices. This participation in very loosely coordinated vocal activity is characteristic of a community that cooperates in a major project, but allows, or at least bears, the individuals that study and pray in their own rhythms.