ABSTRACT
In essence the idea of social drama emerges from the assumption that social situations create their own tacit order, which insiders more or less sense and which they try to protect. During the Talmud shiur, moments of high social drama occur, and when they do they make the experience of lernen extraordinarily engaging for the participants and profoundly revealing for the observer. Following a long silence in which the students have put on displays of concentrated thinking, precisely this sort of redressive effort occurs. The redressive action that one expects to follow now will aim to revitalize comradeship or at least lead to the resubmersion of rivalries, replace the Rav in a position of leadership, and finally get the chant of lernen started again. The metaphor of social drama, however, reveals the beginning, development, and denouement of the happening. That is, it frames the episode and renders it "isolable and minutely describable," and thereby subject to analytic comprehension.
