This lecture is part of the research project on the current reincarnation of the liturgical poem ‘Im Nin’alu’ in contemporary western pop-culture. The lecture deals with issues and challenges of coping in the postmodern situation, and presents three models of contemporary spirituality through the study case that is discussed: a spirituality of return to tradition, a spirituality of yearning to the Other, and a remix-postmodern spirituality. I’ve co-published an English article on this subject [see Relevant items below] in the journal Folklore.
The lecture took place in the 2nd international conference of the center of Yemenite Judaism and its culture, conducted on September 2018, marking 400 years of Shalem Shabbazi’s birthday, at Yad Ben Zvi in Jerusalem. A simultaneous translation (Hebrew-English) has been executed in the conference.
The recorded lecture
Abstract
In the postmodern situation, we are flooded with images, symbols, and contents from a variety of traditions and cultural contexts. Those traditions go through processes if change, elaboration and customization, aimed at the folklore materials’ adaptation to current needs, including the widespread search for “authenticity”.
The presented research deals with a comparative analysis of three models of folklore materials’ processing, each representing a different mode of coping with issues such as identity, tradition, multiculturalism and an attempt to fill some of the void experienced by individuals in the complex cultural context of the postmodern situation, characteristic of the contemporary Western society.
We shall present four different pieces from the field of Western popular culture, re-processing the liturgical poem Im Nin’alu by R. Shalom Shabbazi. Each of them expresses a different spiritual tone, and as aforementioned we shall identify through them three current spiritual models that are widespread in the Western (including Israeli) society. The pieces are musical (sometimes also including other visual and performative aspects) adaptations of Ofra Haza (from 1984, and 1988), as well as Madonna (Isaac, form 2005) and Offer Nissim (Remix, from 2005). Those pieces embody postmodernistic coping and peocessing of the liturgical poem, and in fact serve as a study case to exemplify various coping modes with tradition and folklore materials.
The three models represent three “levels” of postmodernistic adaptation: the first one aspires to an authentic experience through a reconstruction of the tradition or the return to tradition. The second model, formed in the context of World Music genre, derives from a spirituality that yearns to an authentic experience embodied by a traditions that belongs to another tradition (to be precise – the tradition of “the Other”). The third model, which we term “postmodernistic spirituality”, craves for an ecstatic experience created in an ultra-postmodernistic fashion.
Thus, we shall present the way that the materials of the liturgical poem Im Nin’alu, along with their traditional contexts, are being used, and get transformed, in current culture, as a mirror to the contemporary society and its distresses.
Relevant items:
לקשר פוסטים