Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Early tomorrow morning, hundreds of students will wake up, grab breakfast and trek through the slush to sit for a final exam. It is a ritual that will be repeated tens of thousands of times in the next 10 days, as first-years and seniors, Quad and Mather residents alike find out whether those hours of cramming and concentration will...
...dismay upon hearing that I have yet to complete major portions of my work for the semester. In my opinion, the simple question "How long is your winter break?" is the worst one you can ask a Harvard student. Surely I am not alone in experiencing this painful ritual year after year...
...speak to them. They tremble. "You speak to us and we will obey," they tell Moses,"but let not God speak to us, lest we die." God complies, Moses ascends and verbally receives what the ancient rabbis called the "10 pearls," which he reports to the Israelites. In a ritual similar to contemporary Hittite and Assyrian treaties between a King and his vassals, the Israelites then swear their loyalty to the Lord. God bids Moses to ascend again, this time for 40 days, to receive "the stone tablets" written by God's very finger...
...Hidden Book in the Bible, Richard Elliot Friedman notes that there may have been two separate versions of the commandments: one ritual and one ethical. The ethical list is the one that we have become familiar with. The ritual version includes such commandments as "You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice on anything leavened" and "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk...
Before he dies, Moses is granted a valedictory. Tradition attributes all Deuteronomy to the period before his death, and it contains a recap of Israelite history, an extraordinary catalog of law and ritual, and a near Shakespearean exhortation to the generation that will cross into Canaan. Here is an old man's blind bitterness--"The Lord was wrathful with me on your account"--and here his prophetic dictate: "Justice, justice, shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord is giving...