The Siddur in Poetry

THE SIDDUR IN POETRY JEFFREY M. COHEN Copyright, Jeffrey M Cohen 2012. All rights reserved The author asserts his moral rights Without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, no part of this book may be copied, performed, transmitted, reproduced, adapted or changed in any way, for any purpose, or in any medium whatsoever (whether now known or developed in the future). Nothing in the preceding statement shall limit the author’s rights under copyright in any way whatsoever. The Hebrew superscriptions are taken from the computerised text of the Siddur bnei Ashkenaz . Public permission is granted for its use (See OpenSiddur.org), subject to display of the following licence details: <a rel="license" ref="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐sa/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border‐width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by‐sa/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐ sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution‐ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License</a>. ISBN …………… Published by: J M Cohen Ph/fax: +44 (0)20 8457 5849 Typesetting by …………………….. Printed in Great Britain by Berforts, Gunnels Wood Road, Stevenage The Siddur in Poetry C O N T E N T S FOREWORD 7 SHACHARIT: WEEKDAY MORNING SERVICE Mah Tovu (On entering synagogue) 13 The Tallit Meditation 14 The Tefillin Meditation 16 Adon Olam 17 Yigdal 19 Morning Blessings 23 Elohai neshamah 25 Blessings at the commencement of the Service 26 Viyhiy ratzon milfanecha 30 Ribbon kol ha‐olamim 33 Mizmor shir chanukat ha‐bayit 37 Baruch She’amar 39 Ashrei 40 Shirat Ha‐Yam (Song of the Red Sea) 42 Barchu 46 Titbarach Tzurenu 48 Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh 49 Shema 51 Emet Veyatziv 56 9 Ezrat Avotenu 56 Amidah 58 Ya’aleh Veyavo 67 Modim 68 Al Ha‐Nisim 68 Sim Shalom 71 Tachanun 73 Shomer Yisrael 74 Alenu 76 LeDavid Hashem Ori 77 MINCHA: WEEKDAY AFTERNOON SERVICE Ashrei 40 Amidah 58 Tachanun 73 Aleinu 76 MAARIV: WEEKDAY EVENING SERVICE Barchu 80 Blessings of the Shema 80 Shema 51‐55 Ve’emunah kol zo’t 82 Amidah 58‐72 Aleinu 76 LeDavid HaShem ori 77 The Siddur in Poetry PRAYER BEFORE SLEEP AT NIGHT 85 KABBALAT SHABBAT: FRIDAY EVE SERVICE Meditation before lighting the Shabbat Candles 88 Lecha Dodi 90 Mizmor shir leyom ha‐Shabbat 94 Friday night Amidah 96 Magen Avot 98 Shalom Aleichem 99 Eishet Chayyil 100 Blessing of the Children 105 Priestly Blessing (of the children) 106 Kiddush for Eve of Shabbat 108 SHABBAT MORNING SERVICE Mizmor shir leyom ha‐Shabbat 94 Nishmat kol chai 109 Hakol Yoducha 113 El Adon 115 La’El asher shavat 117 Shabbat morning Amidah 118 PRAYERS FOLLOWING THE READING OF THE TORAH Yekum Porkan 120 Prayer for the Congregation 122 Blessing of the new month 124 11 Ashrei 40 Mizmor le‐David 127 MUSAF: ADDITIONAL SERVICE FOR SHABBAT Musaf Amidah 129 Ein Keloheinu 132 Anim Zemirot 135 Hallel 141 Adon Olam 17 __________________ The Siddur in Poetry FOREWORD The place of poetry in the Siddur Why did I choose to render the Siddur into poetry? What approach did I take to the original text? Is the work intended as a Siddur? Is it meant to replace the original? What is its target readership? These are just a few of the questions that my readers will inevitable ask. I wrote it for a variety of reasons. First, because I love poetry, especially sacred poetry – of which Judaism has a very long tradition, stretching back to the Bible. Prose is, basically, the medium of everyday speech. Poetry, with its innate economy of expression and rich and allusive vocabulary, powerfully engages the emotions and enables us to get much closer to the core of the idea. In the poetry of prayer, that is what we struggle to do: to get closer to God ‐ the core object of our adoration. Michael Wyschogrod (The Body of Faith, 1983) observes that ‘the imagination of the poet is a reflection of his spiritual life…Poetry is one of the most powerful domains in which religious expression takes place.’ Poetry is Judaism’s preferred medium of expression. Open any Hebrew Bible, and you will find that every single word is endowed with cantillations, or musical notes, indicating that it was clearly intended to be chanted, like a song or poem. Attend any Synagogue and you will hear the Torah being read in a lyrical chant. It has all the rhythms of a poem (So much so, that I recently rendered all the episodes of the book of Genesis into rhymed verse. See rabbijeffrey.co.uk). Indeed, it is regarded as almost as important that the one reading from the Torah scroll gets the musical notes correct as it is that he makes no mistakes in the pronunciation of the Hebrew words. It is the same with the Siddur. The distinguishing feature of a synagogue service is that the chazzan and worshippers do not ‘recite’ the prayers; 13 they ‘sing’ them. It is not unusual – especially in smaller congregations) to hear individual worshippers who are so ecstatically involved in their prayers that their voices are raised above all those around them, reaching a stage where they are almost in competition with the chazzan! In the larger, more formal, Anglo‐Jewish congregations, however, this is generally regarded as indecorous. But it goes further. The Siddur lends itself to that lyrical chanting precisely because it is essentially a poetic work, whose rhythms and phraseology conform to the characteristics of biblical Hebrew poetry. These are, primarily, the employment of short lines and phrases, and the reinforcement of an idea through the use of parallelism of expression. The parallel phrase generally conceals a significant nuance of meaning – which can hardly be said for the repetitiveness of so many present‐day pop lyrics! The poetic basis of the Siddur becomes obvious when we consider that over one half of it constitutes selections from the biblical book of Psalms. Of the other half, I would suggest that, most of the Hebrew hymns and prayers, even including the apparently prosaic blessings also conform to the poetic mode. The rationale behind this is the Bible’s overwhelming influence on the writings and thought‐processes of all our sages and liturgists, from the 1st century onward, to the extent that even their prose writing had a lyrical quality. Furthermore, they viewed their compositions as gifts to God; and when one presents another with a gift, one does not just hand them the object, but rather one packages it beautifully, to set it off in the most aesthetically appealing way. What was the objective of this literary project? As a retired congregational Rabbi, I have long been aware that there is a significant proportion of regular worshippers whose Hebrew reading is, to put it delicately, rusty. Most of the bridegrooms who visited my home, in The Siddur in Poetry preparation for their wedding ceremony, struggled to read the one line of Hebrew prescribed for them to declare to their bride! How, then, can the spirituality of our young adults possibly be nurtured in a situation wherein their Siddur is, more or less, a closed book, and where, instead of being a source of literary and spiritual inspiration, it is, for so many, a source of embarrassment? It is no wonder that the younger generation is woefully under‐represented on a Shabbat morning in our Modern Orthodox congregations, unless they are there to attend a simchah. So one of the main objectives of this project is to provide those who cannot follow the Hebrew text – and who certainly do not understand what is being recited – with a user‐friendly and simply‐written paraphrase of the major prayers and hymns, written in a rhythmic, poetic style that, hopefully, they will find inspirational and informative. But are not most Siddurim provided with an English translation? I believe that, although that is, indeed, the case, yet even our modern translations are, in truth, not easy to read in a way that will trigger interest and generate inspiration. The characteristic poetic parallelism, to which we have drawn attention above, comes over, in prosaic translation, as merely dull and irrelevant repetition. This is largely avoided with the licence granted by the exercise of paraphrase. Furthermore, our sparsely‐typed pages of poetry should prove infinitely more user‐friendly than the crowded and daunting pages of translation. Is the work intended as a Siddur? This is a very difficult question to answer. I would hope that most readers would be able to use it as a companion to the Siddur, or as a devotional text for use, at home, at moments of religious contemplation. However, given the high proportion of rusty Hebrew readers, I would not be surprised if it was also used as a manual of prayer. Our Talmudic sages, legislating for a similar situation of poor Hebrew literacy, and commenting on the phrase, Shema Yisrael, ‘Hear O Israel,’ stated that the 15 use of the word ‘hear’ comes to teach us that we may pray in whatever language one ‘hears’ and understands. Prayer is not meant to be mumbo‐jumbo. It was clearly intended to be a personal, urgent and spiritually satisfying exercise of approaching the Almighty and of exercising our minds and emotions to express our love of and dependency on Him. So, reciting intelligible, meaningful and edifying prayer is of primary importance. Hence the benefit, I contend, of a work such as this. I stress: It is certainly not meant to replace the original, and I would hope that, once he or she has read our brief, lyrical paraphrase of the main themes of a particular prayer or section of the service, the reader will proceed to the Siddur proper and read those passage in full translation.

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