That's a Lot More Than Entertainment: Laura Lieber's Staging the Sacred

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

 You artists who perform plays

In great houses under electric suns

Before the hushed crowd, pay a visit some time

To that theatre whose setting is the street.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here the woman from next door imitates the landlord:

Demonstrating his flood of talk, she makes it clear

How he tried to turn the conversation away from the burst water pipe.

…. A drunk

Gives us the preacher at his sermon, referring the poor

To the rich pastures of paradise. How useful

Such theatre is though.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

These actors do not, like parrot or ape,

Imitate just for the sake of imitation, just to show that

They can imitate; no, they

Have a point to put across. You

Great artists, masterly imitators, in this regard

Do not fall short of them! Do not become too remote,

However much you perfect your art,

From the theatre of daily life

Whose setting is the street.

-Berthold Brecht, “On Everyday Theatre”[1]

As Laura Lieber shows in her magisterial Staging the Sacred, theater was everywhere in late antiquity—any pantomimer or orator, trained or untrained, could set up a performance in the local forum; celebrations at churches spilled out into the streets; the theaters themselves had more seats than the population of the cities in which they were built. So even though Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian communities in the Eastern Mediterranean did not, to our knowledge, write and stage plays, the methods, function, and ethos of theater permeated the culture that surrounded them. Lieber argues that the church and synagogue did in fact serve as the theater of their communities, and that we can learn much about the performance of sacred poetry by paying attention to its methods and mannerisms.

Staging the Sacred comes at a propitious time in the history of the young field of comparative hymnography. Fourteen years ago in Columbus, Ohio, ten scholars of Jewish, Byzantine Christian, and Syriac sacred poetry gathered together for a workshop at the Ohio State University we called Ancient Ornamentalism. The workshop was organized by Ophir Münz- Manor, Susan Harvey, and me. The idea of this workshop was not to give polished, thoroughly researched papers, but simply to sit together and read texts that each of us brought. To my knowledge, this was the first such workshop that included such a variety of specialties and participants.

The poems we read together had a few things in common: most if not all were liturgical; most were composed by named individuals, or were at least individually composed; and they did have several aesthetic values in common. That said, we did not know what might come out of this workshop—perhaps some comparisons of exegetical themes, stylistic differences and similarities, and interreligious polemics. We didn’t know whether we would come away from it having gained more than some information.

But a remarkable thing happened in Columbus, and in subsequent gatherings of this group. We ended up asking a lot of the same questions about each other’s sources. And those questions, it turned out, were practical, physical, and logistical: Where was the prayer leader or cantor located? Were the congregants sitting or standing? What were the acoustics like? Were the hymns sung or recited, and if so, did the congregants join in?

Soon afterward, Laura Lieber joined us and became an integral part of this group. Along with her prodigious erudition and literary sensibilities, she brought an extraordinary sensitivity to the human context of ancient hymnography. In other words, she was determined to think through answers to many of the very questions that had engaged us at the beginning.

Staging the Sacred is a result of this quest. Laura Lieber has not set an easy task for herself: she seeks to lead us out of our critical editions of piyyut, poetic Syriac sermons and hymns, and early Byzantine kontakia; and into the living world of performance—the voices, gestures, choreography, and emotions of the human beings who embodied them in ancient churches, synagogues, and streets. There will still be gaps between the textual realm and the lost realm of sound, sight, and affect, but Staging the Sacred brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to bring these worlds closer together.  

Lieber does this in a few ways. With each chapter she draws on the burgeoning study of material culture and archaeology in the ancient Mediterranean to consider the physical world that the performers and participants of those communities inhabited.  At the same time, she interlaces those discussions with her thoughtful readings of sacred poetry in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek.  Most significant, she attunes us to the prevalence of theater, acting, and theatricality in that world, making the case that the culture of ancient theater and public oratory could not have failed to affect the synagogue and church. Here she seems to see the property of “theatricality” more as a valence in religious performance than the appropriation of theater in sacred space.  As she states in the prologue:

I intend to evoke neither the ancient Greek origins of the theater in the Dionysian cult nor the medieval productions of religious-themed mystery plays; rather I wish to focus on the looser but still useful idea of “theatricality” as a way of understanding the performer-audience dynamic that is so essential to liturgical ritual broadly conceived. (p. 8)

The effect is thus less to import “theater” into the liturgical sphere than to allow the property of theatricality to encompass the performance of hymnography. The reader of ancient Christian and rabbinic discourse on the theater might find this juxtaposition surprising.  After all, Tertullian, John Chrysostom, and their colleagues inveighed against the theater in the strongest of terms.  But, as she points out, even—or especially—the most severe critics of the pagan theater seem to have known plenty about it. In fact, early Christian preachers sought to convince their listeners that the drama of the martyrdom of the saints and Christ’s triumph over death was a better entertainment value than pagan plays and gladiatorial spectacles. 

Lieber makes significant progress toward setting literary hymnography in its material context.  In chapter 3, on the visual environment of the ancient synagogue and church, she does not limit herself to a one-to-one correspondence between the figures depicted in poetry and those depicted in mosaics. Rather she shows how the non-figurative ornamentation on the floors mirrored the ekphrastic and ornamental language of the piyyut and kontakion. The flora and fauna may have had symbolic value or local significance, but they also created a lush atmosphere in which the poet could engage an audience. Even the running geometric panels on the aisles echoed the rahit, the so-called “running” form in which the payetan engages in a swift, free series of phrases or shirshur, the “chain” form, or anadiplosis, in which the last word in a line is picked up in the next. 

Another way Lieber seeks to bring us from the words on the page to the physicality and dynamics of performance is by paying attention to the culture and discourse of the body in late antiquity. Theatrical and oratorical instructions trained professionals to use their faces, hands, postures, and voices to convey their characters, much like Brecht’s women and men in the street.  Mediterraneans and their neighbors used gesture both in theatrical performance and in everyday communication. Our prayer leaders, priests, or preachers could position themselves in the proper sightlines to get their audiences’ attention. The texts of the hymns themselves could frame the bodies of their listeners, their biblical heroes, and themselves in vivid ways.

A case in point is her reading of a striking passage by Yannai, in which he enumerates, literally from toe to head, the awe and terror of the worshipper on Yom Kippur.  I quote several lines from Lieber’s translation (p. 291):

See how we stand, from feet to head / from sinew to bone /from soul to flesh.

Our soles are bare, our toes are wounded / our feet wander and our heels are raw.

Our ankles wobble and our calves are frail / our knees are weak and our thighs are thin. Our loins quiver and our kidneys labor / our innards churn and our hearts lurch;

Our arms give out and our hands cannot reach / our shoulders flinch at the yoke upon our necks

Our throats sting at the smiting of our palates / our lips blanche and our teeth are

blunted— 

(Despite this) Your splendor is within us and Your justice upon our tongues!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Our souls recoil and our spirits shrivel / we are smelted in fire / and tested by water

In joy and sorrow, at home and in exile, (at) sunrise and sunset!

Note the nature of these descriptions, neither literal nor metaphorical, reminding us of the roots of ancient Semitic terms for emotion in body language.  Our ankles may indeed quiver and our throats may indeed sting, but these lines would be true even if they didn’t. And again, Lieber does not draw a one-to-one correspondence between word and gesture, but more subtly stresses the poet’s intention to make the worshippers aware of the divine gaze. 

By introducing and analyzing all of these components of live performance of ancient hymnography and more, this book has opened our field to new questions and considerations.  I would like to propose some ways the conversation might continue.

In the past few years, I have become interested in what we call occasional poetry—that is, poetry outside of the formal liturgy—especially those Aramaic and (less often) Hebrew compositions sung at weddings and funerals.[2] In this book Lieber does engage frequently with the corpus Jewish Aramaic poetry from late antiquity, first published by Joseph Yahalom and Michale Sokoloff as Shirat Bene Ma’arava in 1999 and translated by Laura Lieber in 2018.[3] But these genres within that corpus that might shed a somewhat different light on her study. Wedding and funeral poetry took place on a slightly different stage, perhaps the home of one of the families in a marriage, or the home or burial ground of the deceased. The performer is often addressing the audience more directly and God indirectly if at all. They are also more explicit about their non-liturgical purpose: to aid in mourning and joy. Thus, unlike liturgy, the occasional poetry is not hindered by law or piety in its effort to move or entertain its listeners.

Thus it is possible to envision the setting of a wedding poem, performed for the families and perhaps the nervous or embarrassed bride and groom; or a funeral poem, performed perhaps by a professional orator and accompanied by the keening of hired mourners. The Aramaic vernacular also may change some of the parameters of performance. For one thing, Aramaic will have been understood presumably by all of those present. While Jewish Aramaic was certainly a literary language, a poet can also speak in a more colloquial register. Some of the poems in Shirat Bene Ma`arava can be remarkably blunt or risqué.

As a student of magic, I am also interested in how the term performative is used in ritual and liturgical studies. We know, of course, that there are at least two meanings of the word. Performative can be an adjective indicating the characteristics of performance involved in a given activity—that is, how a work of art or ritual is enacted. This is largely the way that Lieber uses it in Staging the Sacred. But another use of the word performative, as we historians of religion know, derives from J. L. Austin’s classic How to Do Things with Words, in which the term refers to the capacity of speech acts to effect social and logical conditions, such as marrying two people or making a bet.[4] Anthropologists and historians of religion such as Stanley Tambiah and Wade Wheelock expanded this term to apply to ritual systems in which utterances are also said to create metaphysical or physical facts.[5]

As we deepen our understanding of the function of ancient prayer and ritual, there will be opportunities to think further about the implications of both senses of the word. How does hymnography fit into the ostensible and implicit goals of the ritual speech in which it is embedded?  It is remarkable how much of the hymnography we study is cast in the third person—that is, it abounds in narration or description.  But prayer usually entails petition, thanksgiving, confession, demand, and other forms of interactive discourse intended to achieve a response from the divine.  In the case of piyyut, this question takes a special form. In classical Judaism, statutory prayer is presumed to fulfil a halakhic obligation—a prominent example being the Amidah, the prayers of petition.  Those obligations are met by reciting a given blessing, berakhah, and including a set of themes. Piyyut is an overlay to that system, and on that basis, it sometimes aroused rabbinic opposition. 

Thinking about performative utterances in the context of ritual also alerts us to the other party listening in. In the course of describing the almost cacophonous rhetorical public environment in which ancient Jews, Christians, and pagans lived, Laura Lieber asks, “Is a spectacle still a spectacle if no one beholds it?” (p. 98). In the ancient world, Someone was always beholding. So prayer and hymnography were intended to be heard not only by a human audience, but a divine one. That factor had life-and-death consequences. In fact, we also ought to consider how prayer and the design of ancient synagogues and churches could be motivated by what I believe to be the single most important factor in the Eastern Mediterranean: rainfall. If we are to picture the lives of the people who came to observe rituals in sacred spaces, I believe we can also visualize them gazing at the lush, populated medallions, zodiacs and personified seasons, and reminders of their ancestors’—or their Savior’s—willingness to be sacrificed, and hoping their elaborate hymns will charm their God into bringing a good crop or protecting their little town from ruin. There are, of course, beautiful and even moving hymns at festivals for rain and dew, but in one sense all prayer is about rain and dew. 

Mapping the affective properties of hymnography in performance between leader and participant still leaves open the question of other goals those speech acts may be intended to accomplish. We now know more about the skills, desires, and aspirations of the poets and how they express and above all communicate with their audiences. Yet these values and aspirations, it must be said, are ideals. The popularity of piyyut and Christian liturgical poetry attests to the success of our artists, but we cannot know how many of the people who attended the synagogue responded to their artistry. I think we can wonder how many were there simply to come out of the hot sun or their dreary domestic lives. Every teacher knows that once you have a captive audience, your livelihood depends on drawing them in; of course we cannot know how many did not know enough Hebrew to understand more than the refrains of the piyyutim, or, as Solomon Goitein argued, simply liked the melodies.[6]

I am also hoping that this book will prompt us to think more about the socioeconomics of the sacred arts in late antiquity. Obviously, a large building with a beautiful mosaic cost a lot of money—a fact not ignored in those mosaics, as Steven Fine has shown.[7]  The same, I believe, was true of the beautiful verbal mosaics that were the piyyutim, madrashe, and kontakia that ornamented the liturgies. We know the names of the donors who paid for them but we do not know exactly what influence they had, whether they determined the subjects of the images and poetry, and how typical they were of their fellow congregants. But evidently, they did see their expenditure as a sacred vocation—in fact, perhaps, a form of sacrifice that might bring divine blessings to their people. 

For Bertolt Brecht, the theater of the everyday was the epitome of what he called Verfremdung.  This term is often translated as “alienation” and thus associated with mere ironic detachment.  But Verfremdung is better translated as “estrangement,” or equivalent to Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization.[8] Such a technique, far from distancing the viewer from the behavior on the stage, can allow a closer concentration on what a casual observer would miss—perhaps not unlike Jonath Z. Smith’s characterization of ritual as a kind of “focusing lens.”[9]

Brecht is careful to emphasize that the everyday actors of the street do not transform themselves into their characters or efface their own roles as storytellers:

…this imitator

Never loses himself in his imitation. He never entirely

Transforms himself into the man he is imitating. He always

Remains the demonstrator, the one not involved. 

Likewise, liturgical poets, even if they seek to undergo some spiritual transformation, could not lose sight of their function in the ritual setting. As Staging the Sacred shows, the ancient world was a stage; the stage was a world of much more than entertainment. 

Michael Swartz is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University

[1]Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913-1956, trans. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (2nd ed. New York: Methuen, 1976), 176.  

[2] On Aramaic funeral poetry see Joseph Yahalom, “‘Syriac for Dirges, Hebrew for Speech’: Ancient Jewish Poetry in Aramaic and Hebrew,” in The Literature of the Sages, Second Part: Midrash, Aggada, Targum, Berakhot, Varia, eds. Shmuel Safrai, Joshua Schwartz, and Peter Tomson (Assen:Van Gorcum, 2008), 375–91; Laura S. Lieber, “Stages of Grief: Enacting Lamentation in Late Ancient Hymnography,” AJS Review 40 (2016): 101–24; and Michael D. Swartz, “Death in Aramaic: The Funeral Poems of Shirat Bene Maʿaraḇa in Context,” In The Poet and the World: Festschrift for Wout van Bekkum on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, eds. by Joachim Yeshaya, Elisabeth Hollender, and Naoya Katsumata, (Berlin and Boston, de Gruyter, 2019), 253-274.

[3] Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff, Shirat Bene Maʿarava: Shirim Aramiyim shel Yehude Erets-Yisraʼel ba-Tequfah ha-Bizanṭit (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 1999); Laura S Lieber. Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity: Translations and Commentaries (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018).

[4] Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

[5] Stanley J. Tambiah, “The Magical Power of Words,” Man 3 (1968), 175-208; Wade Wheelock, “The Problem of Ritual Language:  From Information to Situation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50 (1982), 49-71.

[6] S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967-89) 2:159.

[7] Steven Fine, This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

[8] Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1965), 3-24. On Shklovsky and Brecht, see John Willet (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), 99.

[9] Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual, History of Religions 20 (1980), 112-127.