Ritual: An Ancient Jewish Perspective (Jewish Culture and Contexts)

A comprehensive study of the Mishnah that argues it manifests an implicit theory of what performing rituals accomplishesJews are known for having many ritual practices.Many of these come from the Bible, but Jewish ritual practice as we know it today is as much a product of the earliest rabbis who lived in the late-second and early-third centuries.These rabbis created the text known as the Mishnah, which collects, develops, and records in great detail rules about the proper way to carry out traditional rituals, what the text terms mitsvot.Naftali S. Cohn's book is a comprehensive study of ritual in the Mishnah, focused especially on the fundamental questions of the nature of ritual, what ritual does or accomplishes, and what motivates people to do rituals, all according to the Mishnah's authors. Reading the text of the Mishnah closely and drawing widely from the analytic toolbox of ritual studies, Cohn argues that ritual, in the perspective of the Mishnah's authors, has multiple effects