Traditional struggles: Studying, deciding, and performing the law at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.

摘要

As an open-ended process of preservation and transformation that masquerades as the transmission of an accurately maintained set of cultural prescriptions from the past, tradition entails an ongoing struggle over authenticity. In this dissertation, I examine three sites of the struggle over traditional authenticity at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), an all-male rabbinical seminary (yeshiva) affiliated with Yeshiva University, the flagship higher educational institution of American Modern Orthodox Judaism located in New York City. Chapter One discusses conflicts and issues pertaining to the method of study of Talmud at RIETS, addressing the following subjects: the formation of the subjectivity of the yeshiva student, competing methods of study, the relationship between methods of study and the disciplining of students, and the challenge to traditional methods of study presented by critical-historical approaches developed in the academy. The subject of Chapter Two is a highly-charged controversy among leading RIETS faculty members regarding the acceptability of the brain-death criterion of death, which is assessed from the vantage point of how the integrity and authority of the tradition is maintained in the context of an ever-present and inescapable process of cultural hybridization. Chapter Three examines the complex manner in which the performance of the commandment of tzitzit constitutes, conveys, and contests social and cultural meanings and relationships at the same time as those performing the commandment seek to discern and realize God's expectations regarding the proper fulfillment of the commandment, the conduct of Jews within non-Jewish society, and the destiny of the Jewish people. Some of the factors complicating the determination of traditional authenticity at RIETS discussed in this dissertation include modernity, identity, politics, hybridity, ideology, materiality, and desire. In the Conclusion, I briefly discuss my status as a native anthropologist, and probe the slippery border between being a native anthropologist and anthropologically native.