'Sacred Performance'

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The term is an oxymoron. Sacrality implies (at least in the salvation religions dominant in Western and Near Eastern history), a meaning rooted in a cosmic frame that transcends any immediate sensed from. The sacred cannot, therefore, be “performed.” Any reduction of meaning to form deprives that form of meaning. To perform the “sacred” necessarily is to profane it. Yet the sacred becomes real only as embodied in form. (1990, 208)

This quote from Peacock in chapter three, page 119, of Rasmussen's book really intrigued me. It's sort of a different take than what I recently read in Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach by Rebecca Alpert and Jacob Staub. There's an entire chapter on Mordechai Kaplan's transnaturalist perspective that I was reminded of in this section. Kaplan's view was more so that God is found in the process, "God works through us rather than upon us" (Exploring Judaism, 20). I can't exactly remember if the phrase 'God as a process' came from Rabbi Alex Weissman, but I remember learning something similar in one of his Adult Education classes. 

I, personally, really like this view of God, so reading that you can't 'perform the sacred' is not necessarily something I agree with. Applying Kaplan's transnaturalism, wouldn't you feel God the most when you are performing something? Everyday life, in some ways, is its own sort of performance.  If God is omniscient, why isn't making a meal, playing music, or beautifully reciting the word of God not a performance to include God into your everyday life/space/home? 

This also reminds me of a discussion we had as a class last semester in JBK's Intro to the Hebrew Bible class. I think it was about God's instructions to build the Mishkan, which then developed into whether or not we thought art could be a tool of religion. If you use art (writing, music, painting, etc) as a method to get closer to the divine, then I wouldn't classify that as 'profane.' Maybe it's because I'm an artist myself, but there's a beauty and sense of fulfillment from the process of creation. If creating religious art is the best way for you to work through your feelings around God, then do it. Art is a multifunctional, multimedia experience that can encompass every emotion, every sense, every way to experience. Isn't that what God is meant to feel like? The sacred can, in my opinion, be performed. There are ways to find sacrality in the making, and in the actual finished performance. 

Qur'an recitation might not be music, but it is a performance. Maybe other people have different opinions, but the fact that it opens up dialogue with God cannot make this, or any related act of performance, anything other than sacred. It's not an "oxymoron." Performance can be sacred, and this is the perfect example. Even if artwork/performance is an entirely human construct (which is an argument you could make for why, then, it's profane, because it's of the mortal world and could therefore be imperfect), there are counterarguments stating that we're all reflections of God and so we do what God does, or what God wants. I think performance is multifaceted and an entirely beautiful, fulfilling method of interacting with the sacred. 

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMarch 29, 2022 at 7:43 AM

    You're preaching to the choir here. Of course artistic performance can be and often is an embodiment of "the sacred"! Indeed it's precisely the synthesis or even symbiosis of the interpreter's performance and the human or other-than-human subject of their interpretation that embodies the connectedness to the world that to me is fundamentally a sacred experience.

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