Prayer, Politics, and Performance in Jerusalem

Centuries of discourse has constructed Jerusalem as a highly religiously meaningful and symbolic space. As such, prayer and ritual are among many expressive modes at the disposal of agents working for change in the city. Within the public sphere of Jerusalem, political activists employ prayer within processes of production of space, serving as a tool to claim contested spaces, to shape the terms of political struggles, and to configure and challenge prevailing narratives—especially those that conflate religion and the nation. In this study, I interpret prayer as an expressive and performative political language that constitutes a type of discourse with communicative symbolism, used as a tool by active agents to make an impact on their environments. In diverse cases that I discuss in this paper, Jewish settlement, commercial activity, military service, gender equality, and religious pluralism are among many social and political causes for which Jerusalemites gather for communal prayers. I conduct an ethnomusicological analysis of prayer in public space, as well as an analysis of prayer as a technology of both ethical and political subjectivities. I supplement this ethnographic research with textual and musical study of prayer books, songs, and rituals, in order to situate prayer performed in public space today in the broader context of socio-political uses of prayer throughout recent Jewish history in the region.