In these multiple ways, prayer continually reiterates the basic principles of Jewish faith.
5. PRAYER AND STUDY
THERE IS ONE SPIRITUAL ACTIVITY that the Sages regarded as even higher than prayer: namely, study of Torah, GOD’S word to humanity and His covenant with our ancestors and us (Shabbat 10a). The entire Ethics of the Fathers is a set of variations on the theme of a life devoted to Torah study. In prayer, we speak to GOD. Through Torah, GOD speaks to us. Praying, we speak. Studying, we listen.
From earliest times, the synagogue was a house of study as well as a house of prayer. Gatherings for study (perhaps around the figure of the prophet; see II Kings 4:23) may well have preceded formal prayer services by many centuries. Accordingly, interwoven with prayer are acts of study.
The most obvious is the public reading from the Torah, a central part of the Shabbat and Festival services, and in an abridged form on Monday and Thursday mornings and Shabbat afternoons. There are other examples. In the morning blessings before the Verses of Praise, there are two cycles of study, each in three parts: 1. Torah i.e. a passage from the Mosaic books; 2. Mishnah, the key document of the Oral Law; and 3. Talmud in the broadest sense (pages 14–16 and 24–32).
In the main section of prayer, the paragraph preceding the Shema is a form of blessing over Torah (see Berachot 11b), and the Shema itself represents Torah study (Menachot 99b). The last section of the weekday morning prayers (pages 136–138) was originally associated with the custom of studying ten verses from the prophetic books. Kaddish, which plays such a large part in the prayers, had its origin in the house of study as the conclusion of a derashah, a public exposition of biblical texts. The entire weekday morning service is thus an extended fugue between study and prayer.
This is dramatised in two key phrases: the first is Shema Yisrael, “Listen, Israel” GOD’S word through Moses and the Torah, and the second is Shema Koleinu, “Listen to our voice”, the paragraph within the Amidah that summarises all our requests (see above). These two phrases frame the great dialogue of study and prayer. Faith lives in these two acts of listening: ours to the call of GOD, GOD’S to the cry of humankind.
6. PRAYER AND MYSTICISM
JEWISH MYSTICISM HAS PLAYED A major role in the prayer book. The most obvious examples are the passage from the Zohar, “Blessed is the name” (page 408), the Song of Glory (page 458) written by one of the medieval North European pietists, and the two songs written by the sixteenth-century Tzefat mystics associated with Rabbi Isaac Luria, “Beloved of the soul” (page 256) and “Come, my beloved” (page 266).
Less obviously, many of the early post-biblical prayers were deeply influenced by Hechalot (“Palace”) and Merkavah (“Chariot”) mysticism, two esoteric systems that charted the mysteries of creation, the angelic orders, and the innermost chambers of the Divine glory.
Undoubtedly, though, the most significant mystical contribution to the prayers is the Kedushah, said in three different forms, most notably during the Leader’s repetition of the Amidah. We have noted the two major tributaries of prayer: the spontaneous prayers said by figures in the Hebrew Bible, and the sacrificial service in the Temple. Mysticism is the third, and its most sublime expression is the Kedushah, based on the mystical visions of Isaiah (6) and Ezekiel (1–3). There are times in the prayers when we are like prophets, others when we are like priests, but there is no more daring leap of faith than during the Kedushah, when we act out the role of angels singing praises to GOD in His innermost chambers.
Familiarity breeds inattention, and we can all too easily pass over the Kedushah without noticing its astonishing drama. “The ministering angels do not begin to sing praises in heaven until Israel sings praises down here on earth” (Chullin 91b). “You”, said GOD through Isaiah, “are My witnesses” (Isaiah 43:10). Israel is “the people I formed for Myself that they might declare My praise” (43:21). We are GOD’S angels on earth, His emissaries and ambassadors. The Jewish people, always small and vulnerable, have nonetheless been singled out for the most exalted mission ever entrusted to humankind: to be witnesses, in ourselves, to something beyond ourselves: to be GOD’S “signal of transcendence” in a world in which His presence is often hidden.
This is a mystical idea, and like all mysticism it hovers at the edge of intelligibility. Mysticism is the attempt to say the unsayable, know the unknowable, to reach out in language to a reality that lies beyond the scope of language. Often in the course of history, mysticism has tended to devalue the world of the senses in favour of a more exalted realm of disembodied spirituality. Jewish mysticism did not take this course. Instead it chose to bathe our life on earth in the dazzling light of the Divine radiance (zohar, the title of Judaism’s most famous mystical text).
7. RELIVING HISTORY
HISTORY, TOO, HAS LEFT ITS MARK on the Siddur. There are passages, indicated in the Commentary, that were born in the aftermath of tragedy or miraculous redemption. This edition of the Siddur also includes suggested orders of service for Yom Ha’Atzma’ut and Yom Yerushalayim, marking the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, and the Six Day War of 1967.
No less significantly, the synagogue service invites us at many points to re-enact history. The Verses of Praise begin with the song of celebration sung by King David when he brought the Ark to Jerusalem. The verses we sing when we take the Torah scroll from the Ark and return it recall the Israelites’ journeys through the wilderness, when they carried the Ark with them. In one of the most fascinating transitions in the service, as we move from private meditation to public prayer (pages 358–362), we recall three epic moments of nation-formation: when David gathered the people to charge them with the task of building the Temple; when Ezra convened a national assembly to renew the covenant after the return from Babylonian exile; and when Moses led the Israelites through the Reed Sea. Even the three steps forward we take as we begin the Amidah recall the three biblical episodes in which people stepped forward (vayigash) as a prelude to prayer: Abraham pleading for the cities of the plain, Judah pleading with Joseph for Benjamin to be set free, and Elijah invoking GOD against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel.
We are a people defined by history. We carry our past with us. We relive it in ritual and prayer. We are not lonely individuals, disconnected with past and present. We are characters in the world’s oldest continuous story, charged with writing its next chapter and handing it on to those who come after us. The Siddur is, among other things, a book of Jewish memory.
8. PRAYER AND FAITH
THE SIDDUR IS ALSO THE BOOK OF Jewish faith. Scholars of Judaism, noting that it contains little systematic theology, have sometimes concluded that it is a religion of deeds not creeds, acts not beliefs. They were wrong because they were searching in the wrong place. They were looking for a library of works like Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. They should have looked instead at the prayer book. The home of Jewish belief is the Siddur.
At several points, the prayers have been shaped in response to theological controversy. The opening statement in the morning service after Bar’chu, “who forms light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates all”, is a protest against dualism, which had a considerable following in the first centuries CE in the form of Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Its presence can be traced in the ancient documents discovered in the 1940s, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices. Against dualism, with its vision of perpetual cosmic struggle, Judaism insists that all reality derives from a single source.
The second paragraph of the Amidah, with its fivefold reference