Reflecting on Judaism

You might think that having reached the age of eighty and having been brought up and worked within the Orthodox Jewish community one should by now have asked most of the important questions about our religion and be comfortable with the answers. If that is what one thinks then one would be wrong.

I was sitting in shool on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Succoth at the beginning of our year 5767, wondering why we needed to sit in shool for five hours on the two days Rosh Hashanah, all day on Yom Kippur and again for five hours on Succoth saying the same prayers over and over, some of them incomprehensible.

I am aware of the conventional answers but they do not now fully satisfy me. I therefore referred to Professor Stefan C. Reif’s book ‘Judaism and Hebrew Prayer’, read it through twice, and learned that my questions are not without merit. In the process of studying his book, other questions arose which I will discuss below.

Professor Reif is the Director of Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge; Head of Oriental Division, Cambridge University Library; Professor of Medieval Studies, Cambridge, etc, etc. He received his PhD from Jews’ College, London.

Let me begin with a light-hearted piece, making a serious point, that I copied from one of Rabbi Jeremy Rosen’s recent and regular e-mail letters.

"These past two weeks, many of us have been through a veritable overload of prayer. Lots of it seems irrelevant, some of it even strike some people as unnecessarily exclusive and some of it is incomprehensible. In particular the Piyutim (medieval religious poetry replete with complex associations and references that only a polymath can hope to grasp) pad out the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in a sort of agony of suffering that must constitute some sort of penance, or else was medieval man’s way of avoiding spending any more time in his stinking hovel of a home than was absolutely necessary. They are not made any more attractive by gargling chazanim, talent contest ‘also-rans’ trying to bowdlerize the classics, or the current fad of adapting banal Carlebach spiritual kitsch to the most ridiculously inappropriate words, like happy-clappy to Torquemada. I guess each era has its own way of glorifying the Almighty. Boring poems may have been fine once upon a time, but I confess they do absolutely nothing for me nowadays.”

Prof. Reif (pages 3&5 & other pages) quotes authorities to show that obligatory worship was a Temple activity only and that there were no communal prayer services inside Palestine before the destruction of the Jerusalem shrine. It is generally agreed that here, communal prayer came into being as a substitute for the Temple sacrifices. He does stress (page 48f) that communal services existed, in Battai Knesset, among some sects outside Palestine just before this period. Jews attended to do business, study and read the Torah, pray and discuss matters of general interest.

Personal prayers have always existed but not all of the early sages agreed that communal prayer services were an appropriate substitute for the sacrifices. When the concept of communal prayer services was generally accepted, its liturgy was arrived at during the Talmudic period by consensus. It probably comprised the Shema, the Ten Commandments, the priestly blessings, the first and last three paragraphs of the Amida; short passages from the Torah; psalms and perhaps, other readings. For R. Joshua Ben Levi, it was sufficient to thank God in the morning for bringing him through the night; To thank God in the evening for allowing him to see the sunset; To beg God in the evening to bring him through the next night (page 102). I have tried to summarise Prof. Reif’s detailed discussion on prayer as accurately as I can and hope I have done him justice. You may wish to check it out for yourself.

From these simple beginnings our five-hour services grew. I suggest that what was adequate enough for the Sages following the Temple’s destruction should be adequate enough for us, for our relationship with God hasn’t changed?

Let us now move on to some other questions.

On Rosh Hashanah we read that the Torah commands us that “And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a holy convocation, you shall do no manner of servile work; it is a day of blowing the Shofer unto you.”

On Succoth we read that the Torah commands us that “On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the fruit of the land, you shall keep the feast of the Lord seven days”. “And you shall take you on the first day the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees, and boughs of thick trees and willows of the of the brook.” (Etrog and lulav).

This year both of these commandments were set aside by rabbinical decree because the specified days fell on a Sabbath and they wished to prevent inadvertent violation of the Sabbath by carrying. This decree raises some interesting questions.

1. We are constantly taught that God is omnipotent and omniscient. Do the rabbis believe that when God gave us the above two commandments He had a lapse of memory and forgot that on occasions the specified days would fall on a Sabbath? He had recommended no alternative day.
2. We know that the Shofer was sounded on the Sabbath both in temple times and afterwards. Are the rabbis suggesting that there was no possibility of inadvertent violations of the Sabbath by carrying in those days?
3. The rabbis themselves established the principle that a Torah command takes precedent over a rabbinical ruling so, whilst the Torah command is explicit the rabbinical command is only a ‘fence around the Law’. The former should therefore prevail and the Shofer should have been sounded.
4. Deut. 13/1 states “All this word I command you, that you shall observe and do, you shall not add thereto, nor diminish from it’. Are the rabbis not in breach of this command with regards to the shofer and lulav on Shabbat?
5. This year the Shofer was sounded on the second day Rosh Hashanah, a Sunday. But what if there was no second day? What would the rabbis have then suggested? According to Prof. Reif (Page 229) “ The twelfth-century scholar Zarahiah ben Isaac Ha-Levi Gerondi, writing in Provence, reported that the Provencal immigrants had unjustly introduced the Diaspora’s second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah into Palestine and pleaded for the restoration of the former custom, (only one day); but to no avail.

Which brings us to Yom Kippur. “ And on the tenth day of the seventh month, you shall have an holy convocation; and you shall afflict your souls; you shall not do any work therein.” We know that on Yom Kippur it was the priests that performed the sacrifices. We now know that there were no communal prayer services. Our fasting probably results from interpreting ‘you shall inflict your souls’. We are told that Yom Kippur was one of the two days (the other day being the 15th of Av) when boys and girls went into the fields to dance together for the purposes of ‘shiduchim’.

How is it that Yom Kippur developed to be solemnly celebrated as it is today? I am fully aware that this essay will change nothing but it is a worthwhile exercise to see how things have changed during the course of our history and to contemplate what might have been.

Woolf Abrahams.

November 2006.