ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relation of ritual performance to religious belief, and vice versa. It presents the way in which the confessional mode of performance arises out of the ritual mode and in turn gives rise to the ethical. Rituals are seen as the outer forms of religious ideas that exist independently. Rituals are expressive of human agency, the power of human beings to act. Anyone who has spent time in ritually active communities knows that rituals mobilize human energy and focus it in collaborative action. The confessional mode transcends the ritual mode inasmuch as the performers recognize and speak out their moral responsibility for the rituals they perform. The Hebrew Bible, with much ambivalence, depicts Yahweh as truly known in the performance of ritual, as positively requiring such performance, the rules for which are encoded as "law"; yet Yahweh is also said to hate and despise feast days.
