Author's Response: An Invitation

SBL 2023 Review Panel | Staging the Sacred: Theatricality and Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry, by Laura Lieber

For me, scholarly writing can feel like a very specific kind of play—not the theatrical kind, but the childhood variety.  In my head, it’s like I’m hosting a kind of tea party, with the most fantastic roster of guests, and every time I re-open up an active file, it is like I’m slipping back into an extended, ongoing conversation with a host of writers—ancient poets, cranky theologians, quirky philosophers, and modern scholars.  I like to imagine the table-talk continues even in my absence, much the way I used to imagine my toys had lives when I wasn’t around.  Each writing day, I would conceptually arrange or situate my “guests” (file folders of articles and piles of books) around my mental table in such a fashion that I could coax them into discussing that day’s topic.  (Some days, of course, they would refuse, and just sit there in sniffy silence, my keyboard silent.) I would pull out the likely passages from what these writers, ancient and modern, had said and then—like the gracious hostess I dream of being in real life—use my prose, or sometimes my ability to translate, to put the various works into conversation, and thereby bring new imaginary guests (my “ideal readers”) into this delightful exchange.  I am not generating new information so much as facilitating fortuitous introductions.  I am a matchmaker between my imagined readers and my imagined authors: if I use the correct words and share the right excerpts, that the right readers and writers will find each other, and delight will ensue.

Sitting at my computer, squinting in that distinctly bi-focal-ish way, I may look deep in thought, but if you could see into my head, you would find yourself at a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, or Book Club (except I am likely drinking coffee, likely lukewarm or, worse, reheated multiple times): each book and article spread upon the table represents a person or perspective I have invited to that day’s gathering, and each day’s writing what I have managed to decipher from the chitchat I have, in my imagination, overheard.  Some days, my mind is fully engaged, and my the guests roar with witty insights, riffing off each other, leading my fingers to fly upon the keyboard in an effort to capture the perceptive interpretations and connections they reveal to me; other days, the party fails to catch, the guests don’t gel, and instead of writing, some part of my house gets deep cleaned, a syllabus gets written, a weird new recipe gets tried or at least shopped for, or something else with some claim to importance or timeliness gets done.  I’d be a poor host if I blamed my guests; maybe they needed a nicer venue, or better snacks.

As I articulate this metaphor, I confess that I often feel less like the “hostess” of this imaginary tea party than the hired help (albeit one who then goes on to write the tell-all).  That is, I have emotionally, rhetorically, and imaginatively stationed myself in this imagined scene—not intentionally or consciously, but out of habit and caution and no small measure of natural insecurity and perfectionism—on the margins. I delight in observing, not being observed.  I used to tell myself that I published in hopes that Yannai and Qallir and Narsai might get some name recognition; I was confident that their words were good.  Me?  I am a palimpsest of layers of imposter syndrome and insecurities. Having a panel on my book at the annual meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature and then letting the editors at Ancient Jew Review publish a write-up of that deeply humbling event meant admitting that I had done more than just pour imaginary cups of tea for the “worthy others” all these years.  It wasn’t just the Dead Poets Society getting attention.  This is my, “Who? Me?” moment.

All this is to say that this book panel offered me an opportunity to reflect on the fact that the area in which I work did not exist as a field when I was coming up as a scholar: it is not Jewish Studies, or Rabbinics, or Biblical Studies. My book, Staging the Sacred, and the reviewers who so generously review it here represent at least a new corner in the field of Late Antiquity, if not a new field of study, one that is not Bible (Old Testament or New); not Liturgy or Ritual Studies but impossible without those areas; not Judaism or Christian or Islam, but perhaps all of the above; not necessarily Religious Studies but perhaps Art History and Architecture, or Classics, or Literature, or a mixture of several disciplines into one.  It can feel like a very old field in its enthusiastic, omnivorous openness and very new, through its transgressive, almost aggressive desire to cross borders.

Imaginary guests are the safest kind to invite to any book club or tea party, because they always come; my texts and authors have no choice but to show up when I summon them.  And yet, when asked by the conveners of the Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism (Jeremiah Coogan, Gil Klein, and Karen Stern, to whom I extend my deepest thanks) and then again by editors of the Ancient Jew Review (Krista Dalton and Daniel Picus, whose efforts have helped turn “a little website” into a formidable academic resource), Erin Galgay Walsh, Michael Swartz, and Susan Ashbrook Harvey came to “my book party”—and not only did they come, but (if you are still reading this), so did you.  And so, welcome! Pour yourself a cup, glass, pint, or mug of your favored beverage and join me as I abandon the safety of the margins to reflect on what my readers have written.

I am honored that Michael, Susan, and Erin agreed to read and respond to Staging the Sacred as the intellectual, scholarly invitation I wanted it to be.  (As I write that, I am keenly aware that my first book was explicitly titled Yannai on Genesis: An Invitation to Piyyut; I really have been inviting you, all of you, all this time.)  But, of course, this book is actually a response to invitations I have received in previous years from each of them: they are all cited in the book, and each of them has taught me, if informally, and shared their work with me.  This book emerges from and is my contribution to a virtuous cycle of scholarly reciprocity.  The field of hymnography—and, from what I have seen, the study of Late Antiquity quite broadly—stands out for being unhesitatingly generous: individuals eagerly share resources and new publications, convene workshops and ask for help, knowing they will receive it.  I have learned a lot about “how to be in the world” from watching this community at work.  It is an ethos that is certainly “open-access,” and perhaps utopian.  It has also been unfailingly kind.

Michael Swartz’s work stands the closest to my own, in terms of how I was trained as a scholar, as someone in Jewish Studies, working with Hebrew and Aramaic texts.  As a graduate student, I studied his work on magic and mysticism, and his writings made the connection between these esoteric texts and the exoteric liturgical texts seem not only organic but essential to a full understanding of piyyut.  I was thus so startled to learn that, in his own experience, he also felt like an outsider to the field of Piyyut Studies—and in this, “we” were alike, neither of us part of the very small Jerusalem School.  Neither he nor I were part of the “expected” line of Piyyut scholars, but we worked hard to find acceptance among them; and yet, because we were raised outside that system, we wanted to create a community that blended the tremendous strengths of that academic circle—its rigorous philological and textual approaches—with the strengths and insights of the wider circles in which, as American academics, we naturally moved. 

The inaugural workshop on “ancient ornamentalism” which Michael describes in his review marks the initial gathering of precisely this community.  While at the time—fourteen years ago—the conveners could not know if their ambition had substance beyond their collegiality, time has proven the merit of their endeavor.  Michael sees this in the questions Staging the Sacred asks, but it is just as evident in the review itself: that gathering, fourteen years ago—before I had been invited to the party—has not ceased to be generative. While Staging the Sacred may begin to answer some of the questions Michael and others were asking at the Ohio State University in 2010, it provokes new questions.  As Michael phrases it, this is a conversation that will continue, and he raises a number of ways, theoretical, textual, and cultural that he will keep conversation going in his own work.  The fact that Michael could connect Staging the Sacred to his own work on Aramaic occasional poetry, and push me to be more theoretically sophisticated in terms of thinking about performance, and find new ways to make synagogue zodiacs even more compelling means that he has succeeded in keeping me in the conversation.  This is one of those parties I simply never want to leave. There is always more to say. 

I was particularly struck by the serendipity of the way Michael concluded his essay, with a reflection on Verfremdung—“alienation” or, as he argues it should be translated, “estrangement.”  While Michael introduces this concept with an eye toward the interplay of actors and their roles, returning to the delightful passage from Brecht with which he opened, I found it also spoke to the fruitful “focusing lens” of kinship that he and I shared as outsiders to the guild of Piyyut Studies.  We may have been estranged from the center of one field, but as we gathered on the edges of one discipline, we found ourselves acquiring colleagues, friends, and allies in similar circumstances, productively distanced from other fields and eager for a seat at the ever-expanding table of hymnographic studies.

Indeed, if Michael welcomed me into a corner of my own field—Jewish Studies—where I hadn’t been sure I belonged by making it clear there was plenty of space for nonconformists and irregulars, Susan Ashbook Harvey did the same for a field where I knew I was an outsider: Early Christian hymnography.  As with Michael, I knew of Susan long before I met her:  not only was her material on Syriac hymnody groundbreaking but her work on olfaction overlapped with important work being done by colleagues in rabbinics (especially Deborah Green’s Aroma of Righteousness [Penn State, 2011]).  What I could not know until I met her was that she would be yet another mentor-figure to me, and her example still encourages me to remember how richly lived lives in antiquity were: how even now, I need to remember that people not only saw performances, but smelled the incense of processions—and the odors of compatriots; how they not only heard the resonant echoes of choral performance in sung sacred spaces but also no doubt heard the hummed songs of maidservants in domestic spaces.  In short, issues of embodied senses, gender, social class, and setting can never be ignored, even if they can’t be included in every study.  Indeed, there is always more to explore.  Susan always has more seats at her table, room for another guest and delighted attention for that guest’s contribution to the conversation.

Susan’s response to Staging the Sacred made me realize how, for all my attempt to think through the liturgical poetry “in 3-D,” I had still attended primarily to the visual realm in my analysis of performance—as even the idea of “dimensionality” indicates.  Her attention to musicality and, specifically, the multipurpose functionality of song, reveals just how much more work remains to be done in this young field of study.  As she notes, we can no more recover how these ancient works sounded than how they appeared, but nonetheless we know that many, if not most, of these works were set to music (as was the case with much of theater, too).  Thus, while speculation is unavoidable, a full appreciation—or a full imagination—the power these works exerted in antiquity must take into account the acoustic experience their afforded their listeners and participants.  Susan highlights three areas of particular significance—pedagogy, therapy (or conflict and power struggles), and perfection—in her analysis, but there are surely more, and her remarks filled me with a desire to dive into my materials with not only fresh eyes, but ears.

Finally, Erin Galgay Walsh joins this panel as a delightful reminder that the field of Late Antiquity is a feast to which new guests continually arrive—a conversation into which new voices are continually welcomed.  I read Erin’s review of Staging the Sacred with particular delight, both because she brought her chosen passage from Jacob so charmingly to life—with a sense of humor that can be so often missing from scholarly discourse (but which was robustly present in performance in antiquity, I am firmly convinced)—and because I see in her work just how impressive the field’s future will be.  In her reading of Jacob of Serugh’s memre on Symeon the Stylite, Erin draws out not just the ekphrastic qualities of the passage but the range of possible functions and performative possibilities the Monty Python-esque catalogue serves, and in doing so offers just the most tantalizing suggestion of work she has yet to do. Fourteen years ago, Michael, Susan, and Ophir organized a little gathering.  A few years later, I was invited to join the party.  And now?  It is an endless, ever-renewing feast.

Erin came to Duke as a student while I was still relatively junior faculty; now she is faculty herself, at the University of Chicago, where I trained—the guest-list at the feast comes full circle, or at least Erin gets her coffee where I and my teachers did (and where, according to the café slogan, God still does).  I remember talking with my beloved teacher, Menachem Brinker, in the student lounge in the basement of Swift Hall—and he quipped, “For most of your life, you are always the youngest, smartest person in the room; but one day you look around”—and here he gestured theatrically around the grad lounge, his eyes twinkling—“and you find yourself the oldest person in the room!”  Brinker was a scholar of philosophy and modern Hebrew literature, hardly someone who would attend a conventional Late Antique hymnography tea party; and yet, his memories of studying piyyutim with Jefim (Hayim) Schirmann at the Hebrew University, which he recounted with delight during my very first quarter of study at Chicago, impressed me so deeply that I can readily discern their influence in Staging the Sacred.  I can thus trace a bright thread of continuity from Schirmann’s classroom, to Brinker’s, to mine, to Erin’s, a legacy not just of intellectual content but pedagogical delight and, yes, performance.  In Erin’s response to my book, she puts her own fine training on elegant, effortless display: she attends to embodiment in terms of both senses and gender, and her careful attention to language (as always); I like to think that the attention to humor is, at least in part, for me. To see my work woven into her way of working is deeply gratifying, even as I find her questions—and her willingness to consider comedy in sacred space—profoundly important.  I am not yet the oldest person in the room, but the day is coming; yet with voices like Erin’s continuing the conversation, keeping the party going, and with her training her own students, I suspect the discussions will continue to grow livelier and ever more far-ranging. And fun. 

With the publication of Staging the Sacred, I hoped to convene a large and robust conversation; it reflects a decade or more of my efforts to imagine the lives lived by those who wrote, heard, and loved these texts.  The volume both reflected an attempt to gather disparate thoughts and suggest where those thoughts could take us—but I could hardly anticipate all the directions, or account for every element of so rich a topic. For that, I needed others’ help: more eyes, more minds, more ways of thinking, more ways of knowing and being.  And as Michael, Susan, and Erin demonstrate, hymnody as yet contains many more paths than one person can follow, and the bounty of the table is only gluttony if too few guests are invited.

I am profoundly grateful for the gift that Michael, Susan, and Erin have offered here: not only the gift of taking a colleague’s work seriously but inviting others to consider finding their way into a field—the study of hymnody, or performance, or both—that may lie perhaps adjacent to their own.  For many years, they been guests at my imaginary tea parties, and (this realization is such a delight!) I have been a guest at theirs, and forums such as this and the panel at the SBL let us acknowledge how important such collegial interactions (in their many varieties) are to our work.  To those who organize these gatherings, who bring them to fruition, let me express my gratitude.  Our field is a feast, but it is the quintessential potluck, to which we all contribute.  (Yes, sometimes all we can manage to bring is a bag of chips and that is OK.)  Our words are how we nourish, sustain, and even delight each other.  Please join me at the table, and promise to take something home for later. I never planned to finish this all on my own.