Summoned

Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood

Iddo Tavory

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780226322056, 9780226321868
• eBook ISBN: 9780226322193
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

On a typical weekday, men of the Beverly-La Brea Orthodox community wake up early, beginning their day with Talmud reading and prayer at 5:45am, before joining Los Angeles' traffic. Those who work "Jewish jobs"—teachers, kosher supervisors, or rabbis—will stay enmeshed in the Orthodox world throughout the workday. But even for the majority of men who spend their days in the world of gentiles, religious life constantly reasserts itself. Neighborhood fixtures like  Jewish schools and synagogues are always after more involvement; evening classes and prayers pull them in; the streets themselves seem to remind them of who they are. And so the week goes, culminating as the sabbatical observances on Friday afternoon stretch into Saturday evening. Life in this community, as Iddo Tavory describes it, is palpably thick with the twin pulls of observance and sociality.

In Summoned, Tavory takes readers to the heart of the exhilarating—at times exhausting—life of the Beverly-La Brea Orthodox community. Just blocks from West Hollywood's nightlife, the Orthodox community thrives next to the impure sights, sounds, and smells they encounter every day. But to sustain this life, as Tavory shows, is not simply a moral decision they make. To be Orthodox is to be constantly called into being. People are reminded of who they are as they are called upon by organizations, prayer quorums, the nods of strangers, whiffs of unkosher food floating through the street, or the rarer Anti-Semitic remarks. Again and again, they find themselves summoned both into social life and into their identity as Orthodox Jews. At the close of Tavory's fascinating ethnography, we come away with a better understanding of the dynamics of social worlds, identity, interaction and self—not only in Beverly-La Brea, but in society at large.

ONE

Toward a Sociology of Summoning

I walk through the dark suburban-looking streets of my middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood to a Hasidic evening class. There is one every Tuesday evening. I get a phone call from David, the organizer, on Friday, before the Sabbath kicks in. It is always a variation on the same conversation, “Are you joining us this Tuesday? We have a really great speaker, Rabbi . . .” The name of the rabbi changes almost every week, as David scrambles to get one to come this late in the evening for no pay whatsoever. I get another call on Monday evening, just to make sure that I actually make it. If I can’t come David sounds disappointed on our next conversation. It is important to have enough people, he tells me, “it’s been going on since the 1980s.” He is in real estate for a living but seems to relish the effort he puts into organizing these weekly get-togethers—cajoling people on his phone list each week in order to find a host in the neighborhood, a rabbi to take over the class, men to attend.

Each time we meet in the house of a different Orthodox Jewish family in the neighborhood, and although I tell myself that this is a wonderful way to get to know people better, I am usually too exhausted to be on my best ethnographic behavior. I find the house, only a few blocks away from my rented garden backhouse. It is one of the small, detached, bungalow-style houses of the Beverly–La Brea neighborhood, belonging to someone I have never met before. I see a couple of bearded men walking in and can see, from the window, that the living room features a large bookcase full of religious books, the sine qua non of an Orthodox household. In the living room, beneath the shadow of the bookcase, a large table has a modest spread: soft drinks, nuts, cake, a bottle of vodka that some jokingly call “Hasidic health food.” Some men are already seated.

There are usually between eight and twenty men—and only men—at these meetings. Most are what others call “ultra-Orthodox Jewish,” sporting long beards, yarmulkes, and hats (although, this being a weekday, some are dressed in working clothes and substitute berets or baseball caps for their signature black hats). A couple of regulars are less obviously Orthodox-affiliated—a retired engineer who puts his yarmulke on for the occasion and tends to make tangential Star Trek jokes, another quiet and close-shaven retiree who seems quietly engaged but never asks a question.

The class goes on for about an hour. This time the speaker is a young guy from Brooklyn, in his early twenties, who is doing a service year in the local yeshiva in Los Angeles. He talks about the difference between levels of the presence of godliness in the world. It is mystical and a bit abstract, touching upon Kabbalistic literature and distinctions, what Orthodox Jews call “the Torah’s secrets.” But for all the mysticism, the people around the table are not listening in rapt attention. They have probably heard most of it before, the speaker is young, and his audience is tired. In fact, a couple of people fall asleep around the table, and I have to gently nudge one of them who snores a little too conspicuously.

On the verge of falling asleep myself, I can hardly blame them. Some of them, myself included, started their day at 5:45 a.m. with forty-five minutes of Talmud reading, then spent between forty-five minutes to an hour in morning prayer. As most of those around the table are not religious functionaries, they then went to work in what some called “non-Jewish” jobs—a couple of them are software engineers, one works in the aerospace industry, a carpenter, someone who owns a moving company, a real estate agent, a lawyer. After work, most of them stopped at home for a short while and then went for evening services in one of the many Orthodox synagogues in the neighborhood. Evening services are somewhat shorter, but many of the men will hang out in the synagogue for a while longer, sometimes to learn, sometimes just to chat a bit and catch up with friends. They then had little time to spend with their families before hurrying to the class. After the class ends, David asks if any of us still haven’t prayed the evening prayer. Most did in synagogue, but some didn’t, and we spend some twenty minutes praying before we disperse.

We are not alone in this. On any given day in the neighborhood there are dozens of such group meetings, classes, and study sessions. In fact, both I and a couple of others who show up that day were torn between going to this meeting and joining a new class that the rabbi of the synagogue we usually attend has just begun. On Wednesdays I go for an evening class in the local yeshiva, on Thursday evenings I have a one-on-one study session with a good friend whom I met in synagogue, Friday afternoons and Saturdays are completely organized around religious practice, as the Sabbath is spent mostly in praying, eating, and sleeping. And although men’s schedules tend to have more of these occasions, there is a plethora of women’s classes being organized on any given day.

Living in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood for three years, I found something thick, almost palpable, in the quality of neighborhood life. Like everybody else I knew in the neighborhood, I found myself constantly fielding calls to participate in classes, asked to donate time and money, sometimes called at 6:35 in the morning by someone in the small synagogue I usually attended. Trying to explain the texture of everyday life to friends outside the neighborhood, I often resorted to metaphors of thickness, of viscosity—living an Orthodox life in the Beverly–La Brea neighborhood was like swimming in honey. And as some of the men around the table that evening probably felt, it was often exhilarating, but sometimes tiring or even overbearing.

This book is about this “thickness” of communal experience and the situations that give it flesh. What does this thickness mean sociologically? How is it sustained? How do the structure and rhythms of different situations that people routinely navigate end up constructing the kinds of predictable relations and the sense of self that emerge therein?

Perhaps, one could say, the neighborhood engulfed the residents, providing a “total” world, an enclave such as the one some imagine parts of Brooklyn, New Jersey, or Israel to be—where Orthodox Judaism reigns supreme, where it seems inevitable for people to participate in Orthodoxy. But this is a mystification of most Orthodox enclaves, and, at any rate, such a notion quickly dissipated if one simply strolled through the neighborhood. The neighborhood was only about 20–30 percent Orthodox Jewish, mostly non-Orthodox white middle class. And far from the centers of Jewish Orthodoxy in New York and New Jersey, Orthodox men and women walked through a space that was recognized more for the aspiring artists and trendy teenagers who lived there or came to shop than for religious life. Large billboards, hanging just above the people walking through the streets, advertised the remake of the sexy soap opera Melrose Place, named after one of the main arteries of the neighborhood. The three subtle slogans on the posters read “Tuesday is the new Humpday,” “Tuesdays are a bitch,” and “Ménage-à-Tues,” and featured pictures of the actresses and actors casting suggestive glances at each other and at the passersby. Below, at street level, quite non-Orthodox retail stores thrived between synagogues. Two doors down from one synagogue was a marijuana dispensary, just next to a storefront marked “Tarot and Palm Reader.” On the same block as one synagogue there had been, until recently, a gay movie theater.

Orthodox residents walking through the streets seemed not to notice their surroundings. People talked to each other but almost never stopped to look at the stores they passed, as if reality were layered and they somehow inhabited a different street; some seemed to ponder the sidewalk as they walked along in quick strides, rarely lifting their heads, their whole bodily posture set apart from the street life. But this was mere appearance. Among themselves, residents often laughed at the painstaking work it took to ignore these surroundings, the “look at the birdies attitude,” as one young Orthodox man called it. When a restaurant that had had a sign depicting a pig wearing sunglasses and wielding a knife and fork closed down, the comments were quick to come. A couple of Orthodox men I had dinner with the following week said it would be interesting if they could have a kosher restaurant there instead, maybe even a synagogue. After all, one of them quipped, there is a well-known prophecy in the Kabbalistic literature that holds that, when the Messiah finally comes, pork will become kosher.

Instead of explaining the density of neighborhood life as the result of the isolation of a religious enclave, then, we must seek other avenues.1 As a way to begin approaching this question, it is useful to turn to literature. In one of the imaginary cities that Italo Calvino brings into being in his Invisible Cities,2 the inhabitants draw cords of string between their houses. Each kind of relationship between them would be marked by a different-colored string. But finally, as relationships thicken over time, the strings become unmanageable. There are simply too many relationships to allow people to move around in the streets. In Calvino’s imaginary world, the city then has to be abandoned, and all its inhabitants must move away, with only the ghosts of relationships past remaining to mark where the city once stood.

The image Calvino conjures is evocative. One can imagine a birds’-eye view of the layered ties in the neighborhood, an image thick with cords of string of different colors. One could see how Orthodox households were joined by a multiplicity of ties, while the houses of the non-Orthodox in the neighborhood (Jews and non-Jews alike) had far fewer local ties to boast of and were quite weakly linked to the Orthodox Jews living next door. This is a useful image, capturing some key aspects of Orthodox Jewish life in the neighborhood. In sociological terms, there were multiple network ties bringing people together within the circumscribed space, coalescing the Orthodox neighborhood, and transforming it from a geographically delineated area into a buzzing hub of activity.

Calvino and network analysts provide important insights that I draw on extensively. But such an analysis takes us only so far. There was something about the quality of the relationships that neither Calvino’s imaginary city nor the painstaking depictions of network analysts capture. To use the example of the Tuesday evening class: people in the neighborhood didn’t go simply because they knew people who asked them to come, although that was certainly a prerequisite. They often went because they enjoyed the learning and the sociability, but they also went because they felt needed, because that was part of what it meant to be an Orthodox Jew. As some have observed,3 what happens in a “tie” cannot be captured solely by drawing colored cords of string. Most of us have very few friends who would dare to call us at 6:35 a.m., and that only if some kind of emergency had occurred. What kind of ties allows these kinds of interactions to happen? What kind of ties brings people to a class at 8:30 p.m. when they have to wake up at 5:30 a.m., when they know they will probably fall asleep in front of their teacher?

This experiential “density” of the Jewish Orthodox neighborhood thus cannot be reduced to its vibrant associational life. This is an important part of the picture, no doubt, but only a part. If we remain with the network image we will be led to imagine social life as if we were talking about nodes being pushed and pulled in social space. But even a short ethnographic vignette such as that presented above makes it clear that it is also about being a specific kind of person, about being constantly reminded that one is an Orthodox Jew.

As they walked the streets of the neighborhood in Orthodox Jewish attire—the beard, the yarmulke, the hat, the black clothes—there were other small acts reminding Orthodox Jews who they were. Orthodox Jews they didn’t know nodded to them, inadvertently reminding them that they were also instantly recognized; non-Orthodox Jews in the supermarket assumed they were a religious authority on what is, or isn’t, kosher. The streets themselves reminded people in the neighborhood who they were, with nonkosher smells and profane images acting like a moral obstacle course they traversed on a daily basis. Living an Orthodox life is being enmeshed in a system of laws and a moral organization of purity and danger. There are many things that you can and can’t do, and so many more things you must be wary of. To use a metaphor other than ties, nodes and networks, Orthodox Jews in the neighborhood were constantly summoned, brought into both interaction and existence as inhabiting a specific identification category.

Taking Summoning Seriously

Summoned; a religious metaphor. But what does it mean for someone to be summoned? On one level it is a physical movement. In being summoned we move from one social situation to another. We are summoned to be with certain people, summoned into specific activities. But being summoned is more than that—it is about being summoned into being. When Orthodox residents realize that they need to navigate the neighborhood streets so as to avoid impure sights, sounds, or smells, when they are approached by strangers in the bus station and asked, “Is it true that Jews believe that . . . ,” they aren’t directly summoned into associational ties. Indeed, they may be summoned when no other Orthodox Jews are in sight. This, then, is a different matter. It is about the array of situations in which one becomes, or becomes once again, a certain kind of person—something that can happen alone or together, a specific pattern of social situations.

Louis Althusser, a Marxist philosopher and sociologist, had something similar in mind when he positioned “interpellation”—which, not incidentally, is French for “summoning”—as a core concept in his theoretical framework. But in his image, summoning acquires not religious overtones, but juridical ones. His image is that of the police officer shouting, telling you to turn around. As you turn around, you accept that you were summoned into a certain kind of being—“interpellated” as the subject of the state.4

Although the juridical and the religious metaphors share some similarities, there are some problems with this juridical image. First, a juridical summoning is too violent an image. Social life has its moments of coercion. But although there was an element of subtle coercion in the Friday phone calls, and although the question of “what would the (Orthodox) neighbors think?” is an aspect of much religious summoning, it would be simplistic to claim that power dynamics always form the core of such moments. What the juridical metaphor misses, and what religious “summoning” better captures, is the sense of fulfillment, responsibility, moral failure and elation that being summoned can sometimes entail. In developing a sociology of summoning, we need to be careful not to reduce participation and identification either to a dour command or simply to a warm and fuzzy feeling of communal attachment.

The juridical metaphor may also give us an overly passive view of summoning. When you are summoned to court, or by a police officer on the street, you must react. At first blush at least, it seems as though the power of the summons cannot be ignored. This, however, would present a skewed picture of the men and women I came to know in the Beverly–La Brea neighborhood as objects of religious ideology, as though the external world were producing and shaping a largely passive object. If a few decades of interactional studies have shown us anything, it is that in order for meaningful interaction to be sustained, people must recognize and participate in a shared project. As sociologists of different stripes show in detail, social situations are sustained in interaction: meanings in a conversation are negotiated and solidified not only by the person uttering her turn-of-talk but by her listeners. This aspect of meaning and identification is obvious for conversations, but it is no less true in street fights or even armed robberies—videos of stickups and street violence show that victims and perpetrators must orient toward one another for a “successful” interaction to take place.5

Summoning, then, has to be thought of as an active interaction between “being summoned” and the act of recognizing and shaping this summons. In order to be summoned, we must learn to be invoked—that is, we must recognize that something happened, and happened to us. But this is not enough. In order to be “correctly” summoned, we must act in a legible manner—a way that both we ourselves and others can read as meaningful. As I quickly learned in the flesh, specific actions were legible for others in ways that were at first illegible for myself. Certain prayers, for example, connoted specific personal occurrences in people’s lives that everybody around me knew how to decipher, and that I couldn’t see. In a very different register, I literally couldn’t understand the first anti-Semitic encounter I experienced—I couldn’t believe that the person shouting at me from a passing car was shouting “Jews” while giving me the finger—although it was crystal clear for the Orthodox friend I was with.

This book is an attempt to specify how and when Orthodox Jews are summoned in everyday life, how interaction emerges in the meeting of people’s ongoing projects and the summons of others, and the ways in which different moments imply and construct their identifications. Although we are all summoned in our lives (as students, as immigrants, as parents, as academics, etc.), it occurs to different extents and with different stakes. What made the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Beverly–La Brea a strategic site to study this aspect of human life is how “thick” these acts of summoning were, in terms of both their frequency and their implications for the way that people thus summoned understood their lives.

But to take this metaphor seriously also means that we must specify some of its assumptions: What exactly is being summoned? And when? Who summons? What kind of work goes into being summoned, or summoning? Does summoning involve simple cognitive recognition, or is it entangled in webs of emotion? And although the answers to these questions must be given in the context of actual lives, they do have certain theoretical contours that need to be spelled out, if only to set up the framework that animates this book.

So what exactly is summoned? Two answers present themselves—answers we can call “minimalist” and “maximalist.” A “maximalist” answer is that what is summoned is a particular self or subject. In social psychological parlance we could say tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Toward a Sociology of Summoning
• 2 From Ethnic Enclave to Religious Destination
• 3 Organizational Entanglements
• 4 Edicts and Interaction in Synagogue Life
• 5 The Buzz of Difference
• 6 Situational Boundaries and Balancing Acts
• 7 The Neighborhood as Moral Obstacle Course
• 8 The Density of Worlds
• Appendix: Summoned and Abductive Analysis
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index