On Swimming Holes, Sound Pools, and Expanding Canons
LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN
Retrospect
The essays in this book have issued from people with various points of view. Musicologists, composers, and liturgists; Catholics, Protestants, and Jews; men and women: all have cooperated in producing a volume that might, perhaps, in retrospect, be subtitled with questions—Sacred Music: Is There Such a Thing Anymore? If So, What Is It? To be sure, not every Jewish or Christian tradition in America is represented here. Echoes of ethnic churches go unexamined. We have no chapters on Pentecostals, Catholic Charismatics, or Evangelicals (neither the storefront variety, nor the TV ministries, whose massive Billy Graham style crusades depend so heavily on choirs). And a book on sacred music with no mention of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Omitted too is Orthodoxy, both Christian and Jewish. The chavurah, womenchurch, new age, and other manifestations of what were once, and sometimes still are, countercultural religious phenomena are also missing except in passing. Given these and other lacunae, we can hardly claim to have considered the whole phenomenon of sacred sound in our time.
Adopting a metaphor that is in keeping with our book’s topic, we might conclude that we have captured only part of the contemporary orchestra of American sacred sound. What we do have, however, is hardly random, and not at all insignificant. We have the orchestral ensemble that has played center stage in the churches normally going by the name mainstream through the last century of Christian life; and within Jewish life we have focused on Reform Judaism, which is to say, the movement that has most appreciated the “mainstream” musical heritage.
The term mainstream is hardly descriptive of the way things are—indeed the bulk of Americans belong these days to ethnic, storefront, evangelical, new age, nonwhite, and other alternatives. Mainstream is a cultural holdover from an earlier imperial era, when it was assumed that the European religious migrants come to roost in the New World would do for North America what they had done for Europe, namely, “civilize” it; holdout enclaves of colonial culture were not to be taken seriously. Nonetheless, I use mainstream throughout this essay as a term designed to remind us all of two presuppositions: first, the peculiar delusion by which we who inhabit “mainstream” religious institutions imagine that we are central to history; second, the parallel assumption that our cultural constructs, from cathedral spires to organ preludes, must enjoy a privileged status in the evolution of the species. As I proceed, my very high regard for these things will become evident. I do not want to see them come to an end. But I do not on that account imagine myself to be a curator of my culture, to be charged with ringing it ‘round with barbed wire fences to keep out the philistine predators of the surrounding wilderness. We are not the Roman Empire, and those “others” out there are not barbarians. The purpose of this conclusion is not to discuss good music over against bad, but to help us think about change, particularly as we prepare to welcome the twenty-first century. I want to suggest some metaphors that will function productively, not destructively, for us, in order that debates on music can be recast in a way other than “Us against Them.”
So this book is about the ensemble of sacred music apt to be sung, played, and heard in “mainstream” churches and synagogues. More than a survey, however, it reads like a report by a team of physicians called upon to diagnose the ensemble’s health. Like any good medical team performing an examination, we have prefaced our report with a statement of the patient’s history, in this case, the musical strains out of which our current ensemble’s repertory and style have developed (part 1). Part 2 gave us a recent etiology of the patient’s condition, explaining how the sixties to the nineties have differed so markedly from the period prior to the Second World War. Part 3 presented a sampling of sacred sound as it is being composed today—as if we had invited our music in the form of those who write it to amble around the examination room while we listen for signs of musical health. The three essays in part 4 provide somewhat conflicting reports by attending physicians: a generally despairing outlook by Samuel Adler, who emphasizes the corrosive effect of secular culture in general, and its pervasive entertainment industry in particular; a more sanguine diagnosis by Virgil Funk, who classifies the changing sounds of the sacred in our time without negating the spiritual health of those who use them; and a call from Jon Michael Spencer to take seriously the connection between sacred music and that other sacred item we call justice.
Patients come to their physician for all sorts of reasons, not necessarily because they think they are sick. Quite commonly, they arrive in the doctor’s office with no particular complaints in mind but are drawn there by the recognition of how much has transpired since they paid their last visit. Change may be good or bad, but by definition it is not uneventful—neither for human beings nor for human culture. The one starting point from which the analysis of our musical state begins, then, is the recognition that change has been endemic to our century and has accelerated steadily, particularly from the sixties on, such that the most apt way to sum up the rapid succession of sounds through which North Americans have passed, in both their secular and their religious life, is with the label popularized by Alvin Toffler: future shock. Hence our title: Sacred Sound and Social Change, with an accent on social change.
Swimming Holes and Sound Pools
We do not even recognize the phenomenon of change, unless we first have experienced equilibrium. Molecules of air continually shaken, heated, and otherwise randomly disturbed in a paper bag cannot be said to undergo recognizable change if the bag is turned upside down, just as human rollercoaster riders overtaken by vertigo will have little sensation of change when the train they are on dips one way rather than the other. What has prompted worshipers in the “mainstream” churches and synagogues here to recognize significant social change, therefore, is the fact that we had achieved musical equilibrium. A colleague of mine speaks of us as inhabiting a sound pool, akin to the local swimming hole.1 For as long as we or our parents can remember, we have gone there daily to float languorously on our backs, the sun shining warmly on our faces in the hot afternoons. Swimming about in a sound pool with its soothing notes hallowed by tradition is not all that different. Who can blame the people who frequent the swimming hole for imagining that this body of water has always been here, perhaps even planned for our comfort from the ice age on, when mountains reared up just so that cool streams of sparkling water made from melting snow could annually flow to this very spot? And who can blame us for imagining that the same is true of our music? Streams of sound have watered our consciousness for centuries, coming together in a pool of familiar sounds that flow over us and through us whenever we go to pray. The swimming hole on one hand and the music pool on the other are two of a kind: comfortable fixtures of daily life, taken for granted as having always been there.
That is bad geology, of course, and even worse musicology. Expert scientists, whether of rock formations or of music, know that time and change are far more complex than that. Generalizations are appealing, however. We like to think of our sound pool as having been formulated through the centuries by the harmonious happenstance of a single musical chain running vertically through time, stretching as if with some teleological end in mind to our own era, which, in and of itself, must be the right way to sing. Christian church-goers therefore dimly imagine an ancient monastic chant becoming appropriately Gregorian somehow; the introduction of polyphony and then hymns; and a classical heritage spanning the gamut from Lutheran chorales to grand Anglican anthems. Go the old and stable churches like York Minster and that is what you hear—selections from what is loosely called the Western musical heritage, all “good stuff’ demanding an educated ear, triumphal pride, and the lurking suspicion that there really is such a thing as destiny.
On the New York Stock Exchange, different investors amass different portfolios; so too, different “mainstream” churches feature different aspects of Christianity’s common musical heritage. But from the perspective of a stock broker, a thousand shares of CBS, Coca Cola, and General Electric differ little from a thousand shares of ABC, Pepsi Cola, and General Motors. Whatever shares people actually buy, they are purchasing stock in the same system and the same market rather than (for example) frequenting art auctions or betting on horses with their investment dollars. So too, the musical portfolios of “mainstream” churches may well vary in their preferences: Catholics have favored chant, Lutherans like hymns, Calvinists went for psalmody. But bluechip is bluechip, whether in stock or in music. Over the years, all “mainstream” Christians have frequented the same sound pool and have learned to recognize sacred music when they heard it.
If the swimming hole is sufficiently surrounded by protective foliage, the swimmers float about in blissful ignorance of other people doing the same thing elsewhere—in a nearby lake, perhaps, or at the beach a few miles away. So too, cultural foliage—the preference for our own way of doing things—successfully prevents our attention from being diverted to alternatives. Swimmers in the “mainstream” sound pools did not easily notice that other Christians were singing other songs-Shaker folk melodies, Black spirituals, Blue Grass favorites, northern city Gospel tunes. Sacred music meant bathing in the sound pool watered by the coursing melodies of Western church and Western culture, our end of the “evolutionary” spiral that included the likes of Mozart, Haydn, Bach, and Brahms.
Something seemed both old and right about it. A sort of “givenness” to the pool of sound greeted Christian worshipers every Sunday morning. Until very recently, it was widely held, if only on an unconscious level, that the “right people” were rooted in Western church antiquity and that they sang the “right stuff.”
“Wie es christelt sich, so jüdelt es sich” (“What goes for Christians goes for Jews”). So runs an old and trenchant proverb attributed to various wags, not the least Heinrich Heine (1797–1856)—who probably did not say it first, but would no doubt have wished that he had. Heine was a Jew who opted for baptism, which he described as his “admission ticket to European culture.” Already in Heine’s day, Jewish salon society was attracting philosophers, aesthetes, and artists of all kinds—everyone from Schleiermacher to Heine himself. For Jews, this was a generation of immigrants whose migration was not between countries or even continents but between entire worlds: the world of the ghetto and the world of Christian society. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), whose successful foray into Christian cultural circles heralded the move, still lived as a traditional Jew. His son, Abraham, left Judaism for Christianity; and Abraham’s son, Felix—who was baptized even before his father—was integral to the sound pool of Christian Europe. Among other things, Felix Mendelssohn’s fame rests on his successful revival (in 1892) of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and his own oratorio (six years later) entitled St. Paul. On a very grand scale, grandfather Moses and grandson Felix personify the Jewish transition from their own traditional sound pool, to the pool of Western culture.
Between the two extremes were those “enlightened” Jews of taste who reformed their synagogue’s sacred sound rather than abandon it. They had come from a parochial milieu, half enforced from without, half chosen from within, in which educated worshipers had come to adopt their own Jewish version of the myth of musical correctitude. They posited some ancient chant, some very old melodies labeled misinai (from Sinai); and some moderately old but very traditional ways of singing things, cantorial favorites perhaps, or old-time melodies parents had got from grandparents and then handed on. No less than Christians, these Ashkenazi Jews cultivated their own cultural foliage to block out musical accomplishments elsewhere. Knowing that they themselves had not made it to the guild that churned out the great Christian music, they assumed no Jew had, whereas, in fact, a long line of Jews in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mantua (best exemplified by Salamone de Rossi, c. 1589–1628) had successfully adapted the sound of the court to synagogue melodies. Ashkenazi Jews ignored the existence of Rossi, as they did Sephardi chant and any number of Ashkenazi localisms as well, preferring the comfort of their own official sound pool, which was, of course, their own “right stuff’ rather than the “wrong stuff” that some other Jews may have been singing in Turkey or in Egypt.
The point is we are unhappy with an untidy picture of cultural accomplishment. We like the mythic metaphor of sacred streams coursing carefully together into a neat pool of sound that is our own and is intended as such from the very beginning. We enjoy the construct of musical homogeny through time; it gives us equilibrium. When Jews were ushered into the modern world of Western culture, so that their musical equilibrium was unbalanced, they did exactly what every Jewish author of this book has emphasized: they diverted the stream of Western cultural sounds into the Jewish sound pool, altered their myth to include the newly admitted foreign culture, and paraded on the sidewalks of Vienna or Berlin, New York or Chicago, secure in the knowledge that Jews, too, could have the “right stuff.”
An Open Canon
How then do we evaluate a claim to having the “right stuff ‘? Part 1 of this book explodes the myth to some extent, since it demonstrates the incredible variety of music that has filled the annals of church and synagogue. Whatever the “right stuff” is, it did not grow linearly along a single privileged cultural track. It arose here and there, was engaged by a variety of influences, and came only in retrospect to be accepted as inherently connected with what came before. Whatever our official musical heritage may be, it is very much more diverse than we thought, and if we include the unofficial music of our faiths, the sounds blocked out by cultural protective foliage, we encounter the marginal notes that expand the canon of the past even further.
The history of music turns out to be remarkably like the histories of sacred text and sacred space. Once upon a time, we thought we had unidimensional evolution in our prayer texts too; now we know the norm was immense diversity, until authorities canonized one set of texts at the expense of others, and then established the myth that their creation too was the “right stuff,” a natural evolution from biblical bases, church fathers, canonical councils, or rabbinic proclamations. So too with architecture—ancient synagogues, for instance, which we once thought had developed naturally from early Galilean to Byzantine models. No such thing! Synagogues sometimes faced Jerusalem, sometimes did not; sometimes were long and narrow, sometimes square, sometimes neither; some had mosaic floors, some had wall paintings, some had inscriptions in Greek, and some had no such ornamentation. There was no singular archeological plan, and there was no single line of development—not, at least, until scholars decided to invent one. Nobody walks out of worship humming an architectural plan, however, so the architectural scholarly hypothesis, now discredited, matters little to anyone but the scholars. By contrast, the parallel musical hypothesis matters a great deal to people who like to hum, who know that what gets hummed are tunes, and who want the tunes they hum to be the “right stuff.”
The theory of the “right stuff” however is not altogether without value. You can explode the evolutionary myth and discover long-lost alternatives in history’s corners without thereby abandoning the right or even the obligation to maintain whatever it is that you have been doing for as long as memory serves. Take the texts of prayer, for instance. Granted that once upon a time Arian and “Orthodox” texts parried for prominence, and only eventually did the latter win; that after the fact, the Catholic church should now adopt Arian prayers for its liturgy does not follow. Similarly, take the Jewish equivalent. Of late, we have discovered that some precanonical Jewish material now known as Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha was written by and for Jewish audiences. But eventually, the Hebrew scriptures were put together (for whatever reason) without Jubilees, or Maccabees, or Ecclesiasticus. Discovering Jewish prayers in Maccabees does not necessarily imply that synagogues today ought to feature them in the structure of their service. Once a canon has been agreed upon, it does not go out of business automatically the minute we discover that it was not always the “right stuff.” To some extent, a successful authoritative decision to make something the “right stuff” automatically makes it so, even after we unmask the pretensions by which it came into being.
Thinking of music as a canon can be very helpful, therefore, especially since canonical criticism is not a new exercise for us. In the field of biblical studies we find critics reminding us that even the fixed text of the canon is always coming into being, in that “traditions are received and accepted by a later generation for reasons quite different from the original intention.”2 Canonical criticism thus “focuses on the believing communities at every stage along the way.”3 Canonical criticism applied to liturgy watches how accepted canons are treated, what parts are read, attended to, subjected to exegesis, embedded in favorite prayers, proclaimed as lectionary, and singled out as paradigms for action and faith. This will come as no surprise to feminist critics, certainly, who know, on the one hand, that the fixed biblical text has omitted women’s voices and, on the other, that the selective liturgical perception of the Bible in both lectionary and prayer corpus has only exacerbated the damage.4 A more malleable view of canon allows us to value our inheritance from our past but at the same time to use it selectively and wisely, so that the past is not some toxic waste endangering our future.
The Bible, however, is a closed canon, in that its actual contents are not open for revision from year to year. Only its utilization varies with user selectivity—Christians who tote their Scofield Bible to church find the future writ large in Daniel and Revelation; those more apt to cite the new Revised Standard Version do not. More germane to our understanding of music as canon are examples where the actual canonical contents vary constantly. The “Great Books” is such an instance, as we recognize from the current debate about the loosely defined canon of literature that cultured people are supposed to recognize (maybe even read?). As with the Bible, we encounter the claim that the literary canon is selectively prejudicial against minorities and women. Where are the women authors, African-American heroes, South American writers, and so forth? I do not advance the radical argument in favor of chucking out the whole corpus: Shakespeare, Melville, Shaw, and all. But I can think of good reasons to ransack the rejection slips of the centuries to locate women and minority authors of substance; and I think too that the concept of open canon can be infinitely expanded in the future to include at least a fair sampling of writers plying their trade today and tomorrow.
Another example of an open canon is the liturgy itself—the texts that have evolved and found a place as sacred literature to be proclaimed as prayer. Here too, neither Jew nor Christian has closed the canon. For some it is more pliable than for others, but we all agree that the gold mines of old texts uncovered by historians in liturgical rejection piles may yet find posthumous acceptance. Mark Twain may not be the only one to be able to boast that the story of his death has been greatly exaggerated. Lots of old and buried texts bear silent witness to the truth of resurrection. And lots of contemporary authors who are not white, Christian males have further expanded the mix of what we say when we worship.
Sacred sound is like a literary or liturgical canon. To begin with, some items are widely regarded as central—Shakespeare for literature, the Lord’s Prayer or Shema Yisra ’el for liturgies, Bach’s B Minor Mass or Yom Kippur’s traditional Kol Nidre for music. Other entities in each canon take turns being central and then, as tastes change, they are replaced; I don’t think people read Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë as much as they used to, but Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights do not on that account cease being in the canon—they are just temporarily out of favor. So too there are prayers on which we were raised that are not said with the same relish or frequency as they were; but they are still canonical. And with music, even if Sunday mass or Shabbat services fail to feature the same songs we used to hear fifty years ago, those missing melodies have not necessarily been dropped from the canon.
Of course some things do get dropped. These open canons of literature, liturgy, and music are not like the Bible, which includes books and lessons we might love to drop but cannot. Offended sufficiently by stories, prayers, or hymns, however, we readily let them pass into desuetude. I doubt that we shall read Little Black Sambo any more; Christian prayers to convert the Jews will probably not return; I hardly think Reform Judaism will again embrace the daily Tefillah prayer’s malediction against heretics. The good thing about open canonical decisions is that they are made beyond the whim of any one person or committee. They take generations to be decided. When it comes to open canons, judgments evolve gradually. They are matters of consensus, since that is all an open canon is: a consensual scheme by which people assume that some things matter more than others.
Over time, the canon grows with new material, and more and more, these days, anyone can try her or his hand at adding to it. Once again, only time will tell whether something is or is not canonical. Not all songs admitted into the liturgy will be sung twice, let alone the many, many times over a course of years that it takes to make a work canonical. On the other hand, if a song never gets sung, it surely will fail. In that regard, one conclusion stands out by virtue of its being repeated by one author after another in this book. Nowadays, getting your tune sung as worship is much easier than it used to be. We can predict, therefore, that the canon will expand accordingly, as it makes room for the best of different kinds of music.
Priestly, Prophetic, and Pastoral Worship
Our authors return again and again to the theme of musical diversity, which has become the norm in both church and synagogue—and not just for musical reasons. We sometimes forget that sacred sound is intrinsically bound up with the sacred texts that are our prayers and the sacred drama that is our worship. Liturgical trends thus have musical consequences. It is not without significance, therefore, that liturgists have begun emphasizing a performative theory of what gets done in worship. By performative, I do not mean the normal artistic denotation, as in “the performing arts.” Rather, liturgists borrow the term from philosophy and mean by it “performing tasks.” Emphasis now is on the task or function required of any particular element in a ritual. Music thus plays many functions in our services. It gathers us together as community, develops emotional moods, provides quiet time for meditation, lets us sing in great elation, interprets sacred texts, and so on.5 Depending on the performative task at hand, music is variously listened to, sung by choirs, chanted, intoned as communal response, belted out by the congregation, performed by a solo voice, and so on. People write in many styles to accommodate many musical tasks. The canon grows to reflect them all.
The second reason for diversity is the growing importance of the assembly or congregation in liturgical theory and practice. Time was when authorities did not much care what the people thought; when, in fact, leaders of worship rarely knew who the people were and did not much care. In Catholic history, the medieval practice of private masses comes to mind. Huge Protestant churches and Reform Temples went through years of American history in which the prince of the pulpit labored all week to give a stirring hour of Sabbath oratory to a crowd of anonymous auditors, whose sole task was to listen and go home. By contrast, M. T. Winter reminds us that current Catholic ecclesiology identifies the gathering of worshipers as the church. And nowadays, pastors are really that, pastors, whose seminary-taught preaching skills are important, but who probably appreciate the art of counseling and caring far more than their ministerial forebears did. Not just people in the abstract but persons in the concrete have become central to American religious experience, and that new-found attention to who is present among us as we seek the presence of God leads eventually to the recognition that not all persons are alike. Hence a second reason for diversity—not just the liturgical function of the music, but the human diversity among the worshipers as well.
We should not take this newly discovered pastoral emphasis for granted. A recent study of liturgies in progressive Jewish congregations worldwide is worth citing in detail; allowing for some deviation based on theological differences, its conclusions are equally descriptive of Christianity as well.
There are signs that some of us have entered [a new] stage of liturgical creativity, the stage we call Personalism. Classical liturgies left little room for individuals. Everyone did everything together. Worshipers sat together, stood together, read together, and listened together. Moreover, relatively scant attention was given to prayer outside the synagogue walls. And finally, life cycle events were all the same: group confirmation had replaced individual bar mitzvah; weddings and funerals followed stipulated service texts which were not altered for individual needs. Home prayer books were published, but not widely used….
The 1980’s have suggested an increasing accent on individual needs. Already in the 1960’s of course, one could see this trend—hence the decision to increase optional readings and individual meditations in many of our books…. But by personalism, we mean more than having options in our liturgies, and more also than enjoying several alternative prayer books…. When we speak of personalism, we mean above all a new accent on persons, individuals—a recognition that not all our worshipers are the same, a sense that the liturgy must not exclude anyone. Our congregations are filled with women and men, children and adults, young and old, sick and well. They are married and unmarried; people with family needs and individuals seeking private consolation or spiritual purpose. There are homosexuals and lesbians, single parent families, people without children (of necessity or by design), converts to Judaism, the Jewishly educated and the Jewishly naive. Personalism is the genuine desire to enhance personal spirituality for each person in our midst, to say and do nothing liturgically that inhibits their full participation in the Jewish people, and their full identification with the liturgical vision unfurled in the canvas of our prayers. This new liturgical stage emphasizes the personal voice in public prayer, and the responsibility of public prayer to respect the persons who constitute the public.6
The shift from corporatism to personalism is the most major breakthrough for worship in our time. And it is new. We can characterize worship as fulfilling two other roles too, but they are older; we are more familiar with them. First, there is the priestly model, in which worship is cultic and priests or other worship specialists invoke the presence of God on a largely passive congregation. The old Jerusalem Temple, for instance, called forth God’s presence with the priestly benediction from Numbers and the Levitical chanting of psalms. Second, we find a prophetic model, where the goal of worship is to move people to action. Preaching is central here; so too is music that delivers a message and unifies the assembly around a common task in the world—recollect the singing of “We Shall Overcome” during the heady days of prophetic worship that accompanied the Civil Rights marches. Now personalism gives us our third model, which we have already designated pastoral. Pastoral worship empowers people to find the presence of God in the ordinary activity of life; it identifies God as sitting with the people rather than on high. It emphasizes a tradition common to Jews and Christians: the Mishnah’s insistence, “Where two sit together and the words between them are Torah, the divine presence is in their midst.”7 Or, as Matthew puts it, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in their midst.”8
Sacred music is asked to perform with all of these three models in mind. Worship cannot be any one alone. Contemporary American musical creativity has emphasized the assembly’s singing and the popular sound because those are often what fulfill the third of our three functions, the pastoral. Our inherited pool of sound contains many examples of the priestly, and quite a few hymns that are prophetic as well, but relatively few examples of the pastoral. We are passing through a twofold stage in readjusting our musical canon: first, new causes in the world are drawing our attention to the liberation music of today; and second, pastoral music especially is being written to make up for the relative dearth in compositions that fit this newly discovered liturgical concern. Some of the musical works in both these categories will eventually enter the canon; others will not. Only history will tell.
Prospect
Was the equilibrium of Christian worshipers upset by the invention of composed polyphony? Were Jewish worshipers shocked by the first Hasidic niggun? Surely we are not the first generation to find that our sound pool has become turbulent as new compositions enter it. Swimming holes always have room for fresh water dropped by the rain in a sudden summer storm. When the sun comes out again, you run even faster then usual to dive into the water, which is mostly what it was before, but which has been augmented with just a little bit of freshness. Canons grow too, else they lapse into museum relics that only a few throwbacks to the good old days remember how to read. Archibald McLeish writes J. B. and leads me back again with newfound curiosity to the biblical book of Job—Would I have reread Job so quickly without J. B.? Who knows? The old favorites of our musical canon are not threatened by new music; they can only be enriched thereby. The sound pool of sacred music is being enriched by the freshness of new compositions. We should stop running for cover and, instead, enjoy the rain.
NOTES
1. My thanks to Cantor Don Gurney for this suggestive metaphor, which I expand in ways that (I hope) are acceptable to him.
2. James A. Sanders, Canon and Community (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 38.
3. Ibid., p. 37.
4. Cf., e.g., Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Remembering the Past in Creating the Future: Historical-Critical Scholarship and Feminist Biblical Interpretation,” in Adela Yarbro Collins, ed., Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, (Chico, Ca., 1985), pp. 43–63; Marjorie Procter-Smith, In Her Own Rite: Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition (Nashville, 1990); Marjorie Procter-Smith, “‘Reorganizing Victimization’: The Intersection between Liturgy and Domestic Violence,” Perkins Journal (October 1987): 17–27; Janet R. Walton, “The Missing Element of Women’s Experience,” in Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, eds., The Changing Face of Jewish and Christian Worship in North America (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991), pp. 199–218.
5. For a discussion of performative theory attached to music, see Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Art of Public Prayer (Washington, D.C., 1989), pp. 243–66.
6. Lawrence A. Hoffman and Nancy Wiener, “The Liturgical State of the World Union for Progressive Judaism,” European Judaism 24/1 (1991): 17.
7. M. Avot 3:2; cf. Avot deRabbi Nathan B, ch. 34.
8. Matthew 18:20.