Editor's note: Due to technological disruptions, the blog was not up and running for a couple of weeks.
It’s been a big week for religion, what with Yom Kippur and the Papal visit. Those who had put their faith in contemporary polling data, which pointed to legions of the unaffiliated and the disinclined, were in for a surprise. Religious expression, it seemed, has not withered away under the impress of rapid and wholesale modernization, but remains rather resilient, even buoyant.
One of the most fascinating indices of religion’s contemporary hold on the body politic is the way in which religious practices once associated exclusively with the Orthodox Jewish community are now widely embraced by those outside of its immediate precincts. I have in mind here the Yom Kippur ritual of prostration, which accompanies the recitation of the Aleinu prayer, or what some call the “Great Aleinu.” An exercise, quite literally, in submission and humility, it calls on its participants to lower themselves to the ground.
Sounds weird, I suppose, yet another one of those curious, age-old practices in which Judaism abounds. But there’s something about the physicality and historicity of the act that renders it immensely powerful. Little wonder, then, that when encouraged by the clergy to “go prostrate yourselves,” large numbers of congregants obliged. What a sight!
Equally compelling from a visual perspective was the parade of faiths on display during the Pope’s memorial service at the World Trade Center. Clad in distinctive religious garb, representatives of the different faith communities that make up New York took center stage in a show of ecumenism and good will.
The last time so many different religions shared the stage was way back in 1893, at the opening ceremony of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. As the Liberty Bell struck ten times, each strike representing one of the world’s great religions, a column of religious leaders filed into the hall.
Taking careful note of their “strange robes, turbans and tunics, crosses and crescents, flowing hair and tonsured heads,” one enraptured eyewitness went on to point out how “Jews, Mohammedans and all divisions of Christians seemed to be a rainbow of promise.” Some participants went further still, heralding the gathering as the “beginning of a new epoch of brotherhood and peace.”
Nothing came of those predictions. Let’s hope that this time around, something just might.
