Between Letter and Spirit: The Ontology of Jewish Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic study that focuses on the discursive, gestural rituals and performance practices in the orthodox Jewish community in Toronto, Canada over the last decade. It explores how the written law factors into an oral tradition, a script not passed on by bodily surrogation alone but in the form of guidebooks, performance manuals and legal texts. We have learned from Judith Butler and others how we perform cultural and ideological scripts; performance theory has taught us how scripts are passed down generationally through oral traditions and the repertoire. Diana Taylors bookThe Archive and the Repertoireargues the vital role of performance gesture, spoken word, movement, song, dance, etc. in storing and transmitting cultural knowledge. What distinguishes this methodology from Taylors and others is that it asks how does performance differ in a cultural context where those performance scripts are not implicit, but written? In this project I focus on the scripts central to the religious and cultural life in orthodox Judaism. Indeed, these prescriptions seem to compel their own transgression. The scriptand the performance are passed down, and what results is a sort of contest between them. This dissertation argues that the archive and the repertoire were never meant to line up that their efficacy relies precisely on their mutual disconnect.With disidentification as a major theme and throughline, I look at various sites of more progressive enactments of orthodoxy in orthodox communities, which, in some cases, include overt subversions. These phenomena are not a turning away from orthodoxy but rather a recreating of customs often characterized as orthodox, which construct new avenues for embodied performance, mindful enactments, and community formation. In this dissertation, I pose the questions: How are identities formed and agencies acquired through failing to meet a standard or perfectly match a picture? How does this Sisyphean process of striving for the impossible, in the words of Haym Soloveitchik, produce music that is better than it can be played? (73)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".