New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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Author(s): Biro, Tamas
Title: Is Judaism Boring? The role of symbols in “imagistic” Jewish
movements in the nineteenth century
Category: lecture handout, minor stuff
Length: 19
Keywords: Judaism; ritual; McCauley and Lawson\'s model; tedium; networks;
Optimality Theory; spin glasses

Abstract: Slightly reformulating and then applying the McCauley-Lawson model to
Judaism predicts that traditional Judaism is a “boring” system of
rites. This is why the new streams emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century – Chassidism and the Yeshiva movement, as well as reform and
orthodoxy – can be also viewed as attempts to reach a more balanced
systems, besides their well-accepted social-historical explanations.

It will be, however, demonstrated that not in every case is a balanced system
achieved through the introduction of special-agent rituals, as McCauley and
Lawson propose – in fact, this solution is only typical to Chassidism.
Other streams make use of different techniques, and the role of symbols will be
emphasised in creating these new movements. Additionally, the role of symbols
will be put into a network theoretical context in two different ways: the social
network and the network of concepts and symbols.

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