Moving around the Synagogue: Responses to COVID Restrictions on Movement for Ritual Purposes in a Liberal Jewish Community

Abstract

Taking the experiences of families in a Liberal Jewish congregational school under COVID travel restrictions as a case study, this article highlights the ways in which the religious and the secular as categories, ways of being, and experiences are articulated through and as specific mobilities. It pushes back against the assumption that ‘everyday’ travels are primarily the time-spaces of secular modernity and questions the extent to which ideas about existential mobility tend to be framed by discourses of secular modernity. Examining disruptions to mobilities that entailed the redefinition of old movements as newly secular or religious, the article ethnographically demonstrates that religious and secular mobility regimes frequently overlap, coexist, and co-define each other, even within single events. Ultimately, it calls for greater attention to movement itself in the study of religious lives, rather than taking movement as the backdrop against or through which another set of actions or identities occur.