RICHARD ROSENTHAL

them. She observes that there is a relationship of the symbols of the human body to the social body. The human body provides us with a set of symbols based on bodily process; social symbols get their meaning from communities with a shared history. The development of Reform Judaism in the nineteenth century was a revolt against the symbol system of Judaism in its earliest, often incoherent, stage. Like most such revolts it often reduced itself to a protest against symbolization as such.’

There are three phases in the movement from ritualism. "First, there is the contempt of external ritual forms; second, there is the private internalizing of religious experience; third, there is the movement to humanist philanthropy.”"The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society."* These changes are most clearly reflected in the language by which religions speak; it becomes more abstract; the cosmos it describes is more benign; the categories it uses are more undifferentiated. It is the internalization of a new vision of the social body.

Social changes had a devastating effect on the traditional halakhic system which depends so heavily on differentiation. Jews have always needed to say hamavdil. Halakhah defined and limited the body of Israel by limiting the physical body. Medieval Ashkenazic Jews , especially, developed a system of personal piety which built walls around Jews in western Christianity . For example, no one has defined the social body more distinctly by the physical body and vice versa than the Hasidei Ashkenaz. If we read the bodylanguage in the Rokeach we see an obsession with borders, with touching, with body fluids, with a great need for purity at the edge. The most intimate of human connections were governed by hilkhot niddah; Jews and Christians were defined in hilkhot avodah zarah with its subdivisions of yayin nesekh and stam yenom, all are physical matters which deal with touching and tasting. Kashrut

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