Jewish traditions: Active gestural practices in religious life

Of all the richness of Jewish gestural culture, this entry focuses on a number of currently active traditional bodily practices, which appear to be the beating heart of this culture. The practices under discussion are: the laying of phylacteries, mezuzah kissing, Torah scribing, gestures that accompany Torah reading, touching/kissing the Western Wall, prostrating on graves of Tzadiks, applause and hands waving in the prayer, and some others. In these practices, the cultural knowledge opens up for the retaining/ advancing cultural work, thus uniting their symbolic and pragmatic functions. The technical and anthropological descriptions of the practices are followed by cultural-rhetorical analysis, which discovers a metaphorical mechanism at their basis. A metaphorical identification is established between a real person and the ideal figure of the perfect worshiper, or between a physical body and a sacred one (the Book, the Word), or between a real space and a sacred one (Holy Land). Some of the mentioned practices, being strongly built in the complex cognitive-physical-lingual activities, enter the everyday communication and oratorical behavior as bodily techniques observed in the closing part of the entry.