For 2013. We present our book in serial format on our blog - God's Favorite Prayers
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Dramatis Personæ Synagogæ
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Dramatis Personæ Synagogæ
Hazzan.
It’s obvious that we may apply the label, performer, to an accomplished hazzan, a
cantor. He leads the services from the designated places for leaders, the bimah in
the center, or the amud in
the front of the synagogue.
At
the least, the hazzan
has to be a master of the basic nusach
and niggun of
the synagogue, that is, the words of the prayers, their traditional tunes and
how they must be performed in the services.
Chorus of the
Congregation. The congregation actively participates in the
services of the synagogue. So that makes them performers, too, although the
intensity of their involvement varies from one instance of prayer to another.
Torah Reader. The
Torah is read from the bimah in
the center of the sanctuary. On Sabbaths and festivals, it is read in the
middle of the service, after the morning prayers and before the additional
prayers. It’s easy to see that the reading of the Torah is central to the
synagogue performance.
“Torah
Reader” is also a part that everyone in
the community gets to play at least one time. For the rite of passage for
coming of age, the Bar Mitzvah Boy and the Bat Mitzvah Girl (except in most of
the Orthodox community) must prepare for and play this role of Torah Reader.
For the occasion, the young boy or girl usually will study and prepare to read
a portion from the Torah in the synagogue on (or near) his or her coming-of-age
birthday.
Kohanim.
These important players, the priests, are direct descendants of Aaron, the
brother of Moses, the original priests who served in the Tabernacle and the
Temple. In the synagogue, they are given today a few mostly figurehead honors.
On the holidays, during the Additional Service, they go up before the
congregation, raise their hands and recite the three verses of the biblical
priestly blessings. (Just to alert you, later in this book I use the term
“priest” to describe an archetype of a style of prayer which is related to, but
independent of, actual family ties and roles of this cast member.)
The Shofar Blower.
This instrumental soloist plays the only musical instrument of the synagogue
services. And, to be accurate, the shofar
doesn’t produce much of a tune. The ram’s horn is blown on Rosh Hashanah, more
as an alarm or call to arms, or a symbol of God’s revelation at Sinai, than as
a musical performance.
Now,
what is the nature of the performances of all of these players? This archetype
chants from his hymnal and sings his prayers using popular standard tunes—nusach, niggun
and trop, the
words, the tunes and cantillation notes—all essential parts of the text and of
the performance of Jewish prayer. But, to know the performer, one must know more
details about the gist and the genre of his or her performances.
What
the performer performs in the davening in
the synagogue in large part is from the Bible. So we must comprehend better the
main ways that the Bible serves as a source of Jewish synagogue prayers.
Bible portions are
performed as Bible. In
this mode, the performer reads scripture qua scripture. Examples: (a) We take
the Torah scroll out of the ark and readers read from it from the bimah in
the center of the synagogue. (b) We take out a book of the prophets (usually in
print, sometimes as a scroll) and readers read from it from the bimah in
the center of the synagogue. (c) On holidays, we take out a book of the
Writings, such as the book of Esther—the Megillah—on Purim and readers read from
it from the bimah.
Bible sections are
performed as prayers. In
this mode, the performer plucks long blocks of text out of scripture and uses
them as independent new liturgies of their own. Examples: (a) We read chapters
from the Torah as part of core Jewish prayers, such as the Shema made up of
chapters from the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers. (b) We read complete
chapters from the Psalms as prayers of thanksgiving in the Hallel on festivals
and elsewhere in the services daily.
Bible materials are extracted
and interwoven into prayers. In
this mode, the performer draws on scripture by making allusions to phrases,
verses, ideas and incidents to formulate original composite liturgies, medleys,
miscellanies and olios of biblical matter. Examples: (a) We combine or
interject one or more biblical verses within various prayers. (b) We take
phrases or make allusions to biblical words or phrases within different prayers.
Prayer is independent,
without reference to the Bible. In
this mode, we recite completely independent prayers that contain no
identifiable words or concepts from the Bible.
A tacit premise of
all of this performance is that God likes to hear his inspired Bible recited
and chanted back to him. The performer uses the pre-existing received scripture
in the liturgy of the synagogue extensively in the several manners I’ve
described. These modes of prayers of the performer are woven together to make
up most of what goes on in any synagogue. It is fair, then, to say that the
Bible is a big component of God’s favorite prayers.
From
the perspective of the worshipper, another way to look at the role of the Bible
as prayer is this. Some recitals, both in the worlds of music and the separate
universe of prayer, will combine performances of original numbers and of
classical numbers or golden oldies.
That is also the case in the performances of prayers in the synagogue. The
impresarios of all kinds of performances across the spectrum of music and art,
from rock festivals to the Metropolitan Opera, throughout their calendar draw
respectfully on their received body of recognized or classical works for
beloved and reverent performances. So, too, does the performer archetype in our
liturgical minyan turn
for the contents of his performance to his inherited authoritative repertoire,
to his scripts of religious contents that we call scripture.
I
find it useful to categorize how the Bible is used in the synagogue as I
outlined above and to give additional names to the major modes used by the
performer for incorporating scripture into the public services of the
synagogue. I call the first two categories (#1 and #2) the comprehensive-Bible modes
and I label the third (#3) the selective-Bible
mode.
To
digress briefly, various writers in an anthology edited by James Kugel (Prayers that Cite Scripture,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 2006), discuss
a process that they call the “scripturalization” of the liturgy. These writers
speculate that there once was a non-scripturalized Jewish liturgy, services
without Bible passages, and then over time passages, verses and phrases from
the Bible were put into it.
I don’t agree with
this perspective at all. I see the prayer book that we have in Judaism as the
result of the “liturgization” of the Bible, meaning, the prayer composers in
the great majority of instances started from the Bible. They sliced it, diced
it and baked it into a liturgical pie. I prefer to say then with some certainty
that the prayer book in essence is a large selection of the contents from the
Bible that was transformed into a diverse set of practices for various styles
of worship in the synagogue.
To
return to my main discussion, let’s examine some of the details and
complexities of both of these methods of drawing the respected sacred texts
into the recitals of the synagogue, the comprehensive-Bible
mode
and the selective-Bible
mode. Let’s consider some examples and explain a few of the rules and
principles that determine how they work.
To
know the performer in the comprehensive-Bible mode I
look directly to the Torah service—the prescribed serial reading of the Five
Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, within the services (#1).
For
many people this mode of synagogue performance is notable or memorable—as I
noted—because it’s associated with the Jewish rite of passage of boys and girls
into adulthood. If you had a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah, you know that it
probably meant you had to learn to chant a short Torah portion, called a maftir,
and a selection from the prophets, called a haftorah.
Sometimes the boy or girl chants more of the Torah portion and sometimes, none
of it at all, singing only the blessings before and after and letting a
professional reader chant the actual the biblical verses. Even if you haven’t
performed this ritual yourself, you likely have attended the bar or bat mitzvah
of a friend or relative or perhaps you’ve seen the chanting in a Hollywood
movie or on a TV show episode.
The Torah
reading-service is performed in the synagogue every week. Over a span of either
one or three years in a predetermined and fixed liturgical schedule, the entire
Torah is chanted.
Now you may ask a
fair question: Is this liturgy or lectionary? The answer is that the Torah is
chanted and not taught in the synagogue. It is liturgy, but a rich and
informative form of prayer. It is a course of Jewish beliefs performed in
liturgical chants.
I used to tell my
students that the one secret to mastering the materials of a course was to read
the textbook. And if the book was difficult and they did not at first
understand it, I suggested that they read it aloud to their roommate or friend.
The Torah service is
a most effective and persistent means of transmitting the course materials of
Judaism to the students in the synagogue. Here is how it is carried out.
In
the annual cycle variant, which is practiced today in most houses of worship,
the performer reads the entire Five Books of Moses over the course of a
year—broken down over a period of fifty-four weekly readings—generally one parasha
for every Sabbath. The first part of each portion is read as a sort of preview
in the morning services of the synagogue on Mondays and Thursdays and on in the
afternoons on Saturdays. On Saturday morning, selected Torah passages, called maftir,
are read again.
There
are some one-hundred Bible chapters from the prophets that are read in
conjunction with the Torah readings. Each one is called a Haftarah. All
of this constitutes the annual cycle, which has been commonly practiced since
the Middle Ages. In earlier times, a more drawn out and less intensive Torah
cycle, completed over a three-year period, was practiced in the synagogue.
There were, according to various counts, 141, 154, or 167 parasha
divisions in the triennial cycle that was practiced in antiquity.
The
result, in any case, is that the whole Torah—the Five Books of Moses, also
known as the Pentateuch—is read in the synagogue on a one- or three-year cycle.
That tells us something both obvious and significant, namely that at the core
of rabbinic Judaism is the veneration of the Torah as its sacred constitution.
The public ceremonial liturgical
reading of Bible passages in the synagogue is the most visible and culturally
significant way that Jewish communities worldwide act out that value.
But I do need to note
that the content that is read changes every week. In the existing models of
chanting that I just described, Jews chant most of the Torah’s passages in
public either once annually or once every three years. Compared to other
prayers of the synagogue, this Torah service is not an exceedingly repetitive
ritual practice.
Contrast this
schedule of Bible readings with the more frequently recited prayers. The
content of those never changes. The same set of Sabbath prayers are repeated
fifty times, that is once every week of the year. Some of the daily prayers are
repeated even more frequently, up to three times a day—over one-thousand times
each year—as is the case of the Amidah and the Aleinu, prayers we shall address
directly in later chapters.
The frequency of repeated
identical recitations may actually tell us little about the relative importance
of the components of the service. Both the Bible readings and the other prayers
are crucial to defining the content of Judaism, but because the latter are more
recurrent, they appear to be more prominent and more pronounced in the
synagogue services.
Accordingly,
to sum it up, the most basic ritual way that the liturgy evinces the comprehensive-Bible
use of prior texts is in these actions: the weekly Torah service, the prophetic
haftarot,
and the festival recitation of the Five Megillot
where the designated books of the canon are read in a ritualized public
context.
The Torah is read in
the synagogue straight through from its beginning in Genesis through its end in
Deuteronomy, in order and without abridgement or selection. The prophets are
not read in that fashion. Each week, a selection of a prophetic passage
accompanies the weekly Torah reading. The principle that governs why synagogue
authorities selected a prophetic passage appears to be some simple associative
elements of a prophetic theme in common with a Torah theme. The chanting of the
passages from the prophets does not present to the synagogue from those books
any systematic religious value or unifying theological world view. In
contrast to the Torah, the Jew in the synagogue does not hear the Prophets or
Writings in straight order without abridgement.
The bottom line is that, even given the extent of the
scriptural materials recited publicly, the majority of the contents of the
second and third divisions of the Tanakh (Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim,
what we call the Hebrew Bible, namely the divisions of the Prophets—Neviim— and the Writings—Ketuvim) are not prescribed for reading in the public liturgy
of the synagogue.
As
I mentioned just above, another part of the comprehensive
use of scripture is the chanting of the five scrolls
of diverse content and origins, primary readings from the Ketuvim. These Bible
books are intoned in full annually in the synagogue on this schedule: Esther on
Purim, Lamentations on the Ninth of Av, Song of Songs on Passover, Ruth on
Shavuot, and Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) on Sukkot. One entire book of the Minor
Prophets, Jonah, is read on Yom Kippur at the Minhah afternoon service.
In these six biblical
scrolls that are chanted annually, we bring into the synagogue a variety of
literary and cultural biblical archetypes. Specifically, these books present to
the public stories and poems of various Israelite women characters from the
Song of Songs, Esther and Ruth. Other readings introduce into the mix the
personality of the victims of destruction and exile speaking out in the book of
Lamentations, intoned on the Ninth of Av. We also hear of a narrative of a
heroic religious archetype of sorts in the book of Jonah, which is chanted on
Yom Kippur.
Finally,
there are several dozen or so complete Psalms (from the third division of the
Tanakh, the Ketuvim)
that also fall under the rubric of the comprehensive
use of scripture in Jewish liturgy. These hymns are recited as part of the
regular cycle of prayers. I have illustrated this in my chart outlining the
morning services, which you can find online at www.godsfavoriteprayers.com.
It
should be clear that there is a lot of Bible chanting going on in all synagogues.
In some synagogues, all of this chanting is done by a regular professional
employee, called a hazzan, a shammash or
a shaliach tzibbur
for the prayers and by a baal koreh, a
trained reader, for the extended Torah portions. In many other, less formal
synagogues lay people volunteer or are called upon to lead the services on an
ad hoc basis.
In the abstract, it
makes little difference who actually performs the singing and chanting. That
person is for us simply our performing artist. The archetype who chants or
intones the designated extended Bible passages in the synagogue acts much like
the opera star who performs the libretto of his classic works or the rock star
who stages his signature pieces.
Bear
this in mind as I move on to present my next mode or process, the selective-Bible mode. This is a more intricate
use of scripture in liturgy. Over the centuries, a host of often unknown and
anonymous authors of liturgy—artist-poet-musician-prayer-writers—interlaced
biblical phrases, verses and chapters in the more frequent synagogue services,
daily or weekly. The authors of the major prayers across the board chose to
mine scripture and embed selective contents from the Bible into their own
originally written texts of prayers.
Biblical verses were
liberally employed and interspersed within the original standardized daily
morning liturgy and the services for the Sabbath and festivals that were
written by the ancient rabbis. The results of those creative processes in turn
tell us about the social and cosmic visions of Judaism and its theology as
conceived of by these artist-poet-musician shapers of that liturgy.
You may notice that I
deliberately blur the lines here between the original shaper of the liturgy and
the performer of the services. For the most part, as I suggested previously, we
don’t have much specific information about who selected the verses and created
the composite prayers. And, for a person trying to find spiritual meaning in
the synagogue, it is the performer who brings the prayers to life. Their
origins don’t much come into play.
As you no doubt have
noticed, I have met in my synagogue both creative types whom I call the
artist-poet-musicians, and the performers of their many impressive liturgical
compositions that comprise major parts of the synagogue service.
These
creative works—the selective-Bible mode
prayers—are discourses, poems and other treatments of great religious themes.
Later, I associate some of these works with more distinctive voices that I
attribute to individual models, which I call a scribe or a priest, a mystic, a
meditator or a celebrity.
For
now, to understand the present archetype better, let me consider one especially
elegant and detailed example of a liturgical piece that shows what an
artist-poet-musician can elegantly do to form an expressive holiday liturgy
primarily using the selective-Bible
mode of his expression.
That
simply means that the artist-poet-musician takes a variety of Bible verses from
different places and puts them together to make a new prayer. Among those
prominent prayer compositions that were constructed from carefully chosen
biblical materials is the Musaf Amidah for Rosh Hashanah—a beautiful composite
that sets forth in praise of God, the prominent theological ideas for the New
Year. It is an especially dramatic performance in the synagogue because, during
its recitation on the great festival of awe, the shofar is
blown. The use of any instrument or prop is especially rare in the otherwise
spartan services of the synagogue rite. Hence the shofar
performance underlines the special nature of the day and highlights the liturgy
that surrounds it.
In the Rosh Hashanah
Additional Service, this composite, three-part liturgy accompanies the sounding
of the ram’s horn. The sections of that prayer are embedded in the festival
Amidah and are given names according to their thematic contents—first
“Malchiyot—Kingships,” then “Zichronot—Remembrances” and finally “Shofrot—Horn
Blasts.” These segments deal respectively with great subjects of the holiday:
God’s kingship, God’s covenants with the forefathers and God’s revelation of
the Torah to the children of Israel.
The
writer of these special prayers was an anonymous ancient and great
artist-poet-musician of the Talmudic era who selected and wove together ten
biblical verses as discourses for each of the three theological themes of the
holy day. After each segment is recited, a designated performer blows the shofar.
Hence, the religious meaning of the artist’s lyrics expanded on the ritual
music of the ram’s horn and gave to the stark sounds some framing words. The
biblical verses are the textual contents, the libretto or lyrics of the New
Year performance. The shofar
blasts serve as the musical accompaniment, the punctuation for these prayers
following the chant.
It’s
a bit ironic to note that there is a bon mot about the shofar
attributed to a great rabbinic figure of the past century, Rabbi Saul
Lieberman. Lieberman called the blowing of the shofar in
the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, “a prayer without words.” I guess, to be fair
to him, he meant that if you isolate the shofar
sounds and look at them on their own, they too could be considered a prayer in
one sense of the term. I find it amusing, though, to think that anyone who has
been to shul on
the New Year, in particular a rabbi of note, would say that the shofar
sounds ought to be thought of “without words” extracted from their context. At
the very least, the blowing of the shofar
has to be appreciated in those accompanying passages of a great, great many
words. In the bigger scheme of the
holiday liturgy, the sounding of the shofar is
a solo instrumental interlude inextricably embedded within a dramatic, somber
performance of 1000 actual pages of prayers, indeed with all the words of the
holiday Machzor.
Remarkably,
considering the number of books that have been written by rabbis on the Bible
and the Talmud, there is comparatively little rabbinic commentary on the prayer
book. Some years ago, I was fortunate to hear my teacher, Rabbi Joseph
Soloveitchik, expound in a lecture on the significance of the thirty-some
verses that were chosen for the discourse as the textual accompaniment of the shofar’s
spare music.
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