Author's Response: An Invitation

by Laura Lieber in Articles

Sir John Tenniel, Illustration of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, from Lewis Carroll’s *Alice in Wonderland* (1870). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

With the publication of Staging the Sacred, I hoped to convene a large and robust conversation; it reflects a decade or more of my efforts to imagine the lives lived by those who wrote, heard, and loved these texts. The volume both reflected an attempt to gather disparate thoughts and suggest where those thoughts could take us—but I could hardly anticipate all the directions, or account for every element of so rich a topic.

Backstage with Staging the Sacred

by Laura Lieber in Articles

Fresco with a theatre mask and Nilotic scene, from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii (courtesy of Wikimedia commons)

In some ways, Staging the Sacred proved a thoroughly disconcerting study. As I wrote it, I was continually reminded that the texts I have spent my career learning to read are, in practical terms, far removed from the actual phenomena I so wanted to study, the experience of the ancient synagogue. The texts resemble two-dimensional, frozen echoes from which I have tried to coax ghostly traces (perhaps illusions) of more dimensions. In the end, these poems—each a gem in its own way, a stone in the gorgeous mosaic of late antique hymnody—yielded up more insight than I might have thought they would.