Recording as the Re-Membering Work of the People: A Catholic-Jewish Dialogue on the Body and Liturgical Memory

Abstract

The word leitourgia, meaning the work of the people, is often used to describe Christian worship and has also been adopted by many scholars of Jewish public worship. This word implies that liturgical worship in the Jewish and Christian traditions is a work that incorporates a people or assembly. The time- and place-shifting afforded by new recording technologies, however, alters the nature of liturgical work and its relationship to tradition, memory, and the assembly. In this article, phenomenology and reflexivity are deployed to examine the role of the body and its liturgical formation on producing and revisiting recorded liturgy. Liturgical work is already practiced by worshippers who (often in defiance of official leadership) record and view recorded liturgies. The embodied work of this displaced assembly reveals unexpected similarities in Jewish and Catholic ordained leaders’ “flattening” before the physical and metaphorical cameras of Western public life. Finally, diverse experiences of recorded liturgy are used to compare theological concepts of liturgical memory in Jewish and Catholic thought.