Agency in Ritual Narrative

Ochs, "The Narrative Approach"

“The act of telling the story of a ritual – like a ritual itself – can exist in multiple forms that we continually shape and reshape,” (Ochs 79). Just as ritual can occur in infinite forms, reflection upon a single ritual can occur in infinite forms. While Driver focuses on the change that ritual in general evokes, Ochs focuses on how to achieve successful ritual in a world in which perception of ritual is not always positive. Driver encourages jumping into ritual but does not quite explain how to get there physically or psychologically. Ochs, on the other hand, stresses the use of material objects, text, and narrative as part of the complex, messy process of the innovation of ritual. Through description of the contrasting feelings of connectedness and individuality, Ochs gives the how and why of the aspects of rituals and their resulting social gifts that Driver champions.

With Ochs’s examples of ritual innovation from the past few decades, we can better appreciate the ritual agency that has been necessary in Judaism for its thousands of years of existence, as demonstrated by the writings of Marcus and Goldberg. If so much change has occurred in such a short time span, then modern Jews can speculate on how much change must have occurred even within the hundreds of years between the Biblical period and the Rabbinic period. By comparing present change to the past, we can identify what elements of Judaism stay essential to ritual and what elements are more flexible. Thus, we can tweak Jewish ritual so that it can give us that feeling that finally leads to the production of Driver’s social gifts of order, community, and transformation.