On the evening of July 11, Niska stepped onto the stage for the first time at the Francofolies of La Rochelle. It was also my first visit to this festival, but above all my first concert by this rapper: the atmosphere was tropical, and thousands of fans waited, chanting the lyrics to his songs. If you don’t know Niska, it’s because it’s a name that people over twenty probably don’t know. Should I inform you? I will refrain from weighing in on that to avoid appearing as a dull old man, knowing that my children somewhat judged me when they learned I had approached Niska backstage. But the essential isn’t there; I didn’t attend a concert, but a manifestation of religious fervor. How can one explain it?
It isn’t only the young that this concerns. For older folks too, similar things happened this summer. Thus The Cure filled three consecutive nights at the Arenas of Nîmes, twenty-eight years after they had played there, thirteen thousand people each night in a Roman amphitheater of the first century, tickets sold out, before heading to Rock en Seine on August 30 in Saint-Cloud. Megaconcerts follow one another, stadiums are booked a year in advance, and one pays more to stand in a field than to own the artist’s complete works.
What we are buying, then, is not music. It is the act of being there, with others, at the same moment. The most solid explanation dates back to 1912 and can be found in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Durkheim studies the rites of the Australian Aborigines, but it is about us. He posits, in the final pages, that “if collective life, when it reaches a certain degree of intensity, gives rise to religious thought, it is because it produces a state of ebullience that changes the conditions of psychic activity.” What follows is a description that must be read with La Rochelle in July, during the Francofolies: “Vital energies are overexcited, passions more intense, sensations stronger; there are even those that occur only at that moment. Man does not recognize himself; he feels transformed and, as a result, he transforms the environment around him.”
Durkheim goes further, and he takes us a century ahead: “Every festival, even though its origins are purely secular, has certain characteristics of a religious ceremony, for, in every case, it has the effect of bringing individuals together, of moving the masses, and thereby evoking a state of ebullience, sometimes even delirium, which is not without kinship with the religious state.” He then lists the clinical signs: “shouts, chants, music, violent movements, dances, the search for excitants that raise the vital level.” One could not describe a festival more aptly, and it is worth noting that the sociologist had even foreseen stimulants.
The conclusion writes itself. The crowd is not the price to pay for the concert, it is the concert. We do not suffer from the twenty thousand others; we come for them. Poor sound is the entry fee for an experience that has nothing to do with sound.
The matter seems settled. It is not, and a simple way to be convinced is to ask a tradition that has pondered it for two thousand years, with a skepticism that Durkheim never embodied.
The Talmudic scholar Sophie Goldblum reminds us that Judaism has quantified the matter. There exists a threshold, and that threshold is ten. Below it, certain words cannot be spoken: the kaddish for the dead, for example. There are thus phrases that a single man does not have the right to utter. Not that he is incapable; he simply does not have the right. The number is not a comfort here; it is a condition of validity.
What remains to be explained is where this ten comes from. The rabbis trace it to the same word, eda, the assembly, the community, present in two episodes. The first is Korah’s revolt against Moses and Aaron. The second is the return of the explorers sent to Canaan, who bring back false information and demoralize the people. Twelve depart, ten lie: that is the quorum.
Sophie Goldblum notes the strangeness of the procedure. To establish the minimum required by the highest prayer, the tradition turned to the two worst assemblies of the Torah. As if the number carried with it its own warning. Ten is the number from which a group exists. It is also, and these are the same verses that declare it, the number from which it becomes dangerous.
Conversely, a verse from Proverbs (14:28) provides the formula justifying the crowd: berov am hadrat melekh, in the multitude of people is the glory of the king. The nuance is decisive, and Sophie Goldblum insists: it is not our experience that commands it. We do not gather the crowd because we pray better in a trance. We gather it because the number is desired from above. It is precisely the opposite of Durkheim, on the very same phenomenon. For the sociologist, the crowd manufactures the god. For the rabbis, the god demands the crowd. From this principle follow very concrete prescriptions. For certain obligations, for example reading the Book of Esther, one is encouraged to assemble as many people as possible rather than to divide into small groups.
Islam has made the same calculation, but in the opposite direction: the threshold there is minimal, two men suffice to form an assembly, but the reward is counted—the communal prayer is worth, as prophetic tradition states, twenty-seven degrees more than solitary prayer. And once a year, in Mecca, the demonstration reaches its apex: two million people circling around the same point, dressed in the same white garment so that no one stands out. Christianity, for its part, has simply abolished the threshold: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am in their midst,” says the Gospel of Matthew.
There is a downside, and it is troubling. Communal prayer, says tradition, is never dismissed. The number covers. There is the formula for fasting days: a congregation that does not include those who transgress Israel is not a congregation. Admirable generosity, and the dissolution of individual responsibility. It does not matter what each person is worth if we are many. One measures what this idea can offer in reassurance, and what it can offer in unease. It is also, precisely, what one experiences in a pit.
Yet the tradition does not stop there. It places beside the synagogue a place that obeys other rules, the house of study. Sophie Goldblum notes the asymmetry: the Mishnah promises that if ten men sit and study Torah, the Presence dwells among them, but it immediately adds that it also dwells when they are only five, three, two, and even when only one studies. For study, the bar is lower than for prayer. Should we conclude that study matters less? One might argue the opposite, and that is more accurate: it is too important to wait for the quorum.
There is something clearer still. Some knowledges are transmitted only to one or two disciples at a time—the secrets of creation, those of the celestial chariot, everything that touches on beginnings and endings (Mishnah Haguiga 2, 1). There, the number is a hindrance. The tradition acknowledges that intimacy in the relationship is necessary for such knowledge to be received, and that the collective is not the optimal regime for all transmission. This should be enough to urge caution before our summer liturgies. We do not understand better at fifty thousand. We feel more deeply, which is not the same thing, and confusing the two is precisely what the festival sells.
There remains the dark side. Babel: a single people, a single language, and it is this very unity that is judged threatening, to the point that the remedy is to introduce division. The unanimous crowd, in this narrative, is not a promise, it is a symptom. And all hinges on a single verse from Exodus (23:2), which Sophie Goldblum cites: “You shall not follow the multitude to do evil,” a prohibition against following the mob.
Durkheim, who was not naive, had stated the same thing in another vocabulary, at the end of The Elementary Forms: “The pure and the impure are therefore not two separate kinds, but two varieties of the same kind. There are two kinds of sacred, one festive, the other harmful.” A single object moves from one to the other without changing its nature.
And he had described, regarding rites of mourning, what becomes of the ebullience when it turns: “Each is carried along by all; it turns into a panic of sadness.” Then comes the line one must have read at least once in a lifetime: “There is a need, at all costs, to find a victim upon whom the collective pain and anger can unload. This victim is naturally sought outside; for a stranger is a subject minoris resistentiae.” The stranger fits because nothing in him, Durkheim writes, repels nor neutralizes the bad and destructive sentiments awakened by the event.
It is the same energy. The crowd that sings and the crowd that searches for a scapegoat are not two separate crowds. That is why rabbinic mistrust of the number, which might have seemed like a casuist’s vanity, is in fact a first-rate sociological intuition, articulated with two millennia of foresight.
Every seven years, it is commanded to gather the entire people at the Temple in Jerusalem, at the end of the sabbatical year to hear the Torah: the men, the women, and even the little ones, who everyone knows will understand nothing. Why summon those who will not understand? Because the content of the ceremony is simply to be there.
Durkheim left, on his last page, a question he believed relevant to his time and that remains ours: “The old gods age or die, and others are not born.” He drew from it more a prognosis than a lament: “One day there will come a time when our societies again experience hours of ebullient creativity during which new ideals will emerge.”
We are not there. But every summer, in a Roman amphitheater in Nîmes, on a rocky esplanade facing the Vieux-Port, in the park of Saint-Cloud, several million people repeat the gesture without the text.
They gather, they shout, they sing together phrases they know by heart, and they experience, for the duration of a song, what Durkheim called the passage from the profane to the sacred.