When Rituals Go Wrong

Recent work in the field of ritual studies, notably Molly Farneth’s The Politics of Ritual, has taken up the theoretical lens of performativity in order to emphasize the ways in which rituals effect change in the social world. Yet the field has not sufficiently engaged with the performative work of rituals gone wrong. This paper is organized around an extended example—a story that Emil Fackenheim tells in his To Mend the World about a Yom Kippur fast in Auschwitz that took place on the wrong day. Relying on Farneth’s analysis of rituals as performatives, I argue that Fackenheim’s Yom Kippur story is an example of an infelicitous ritual that is still efficacious. It evidences that Jewish thought can survive after the Holocaust even though, or perhaps precisely because, the ritual breaks from normal procedure.