ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a special kind of lernen: a cultural performance, a kind of dramatic re-presentation and public reaffirmation of specific Jewish ideas and images whose source, either directly or indirectly, is the Talmud. With a simple phenomenon: prefiguration, a situation in which the lerners play out a text with which they are all familiar but which they still feel they must review. Intersubjectivity allows a great deal to remain tacitly expressed during cultural performances; references may be and often are made to common culture by means of dicta half-spoken yet fully understood. One of the abiding concerns in the religiocultural life of Orthodox Jews is the matter of religious intention and devotion. Time is conquered within the framework of the cultural performance. In the supportive social framework of the study circle and traditional cultural performance, the contemporary anxieties of anachronism disappear, replaced by an appreciation of the way things were back then.
