Introducing The Hidden Poetry of the Jewish Prayerbook (Part I)

[We thank Rabbi Simcha Prombaum of Congregation Sons of
 Abraham in La Crosse, Wisconsin for his invaluable help
 in producing this transcript.]

In this course, I invite you to accompany me on a journey through the Jewish Siddur. This journey has four major stations:

The first station is the opening blessings and prayers in the Siddur: these include the psychological and theological introduction to the liturgy called Mah Tovu and Adon Olam, the morning blessings on the body and the soul which give us a sense of ourselves, and concludes with Ashre, the most important psalm in the liturgy.

The second volume focuses upon the Sh’ma liturgy, with its central act of acclaiming God as sovereign. There we talk about opening blessings which precede the Sh’ma, the closing blessings which come after the Sh’ma, and how the whole Sh’ma works together as a compositional unit.

The third volume focuses upon the Amidah, the standing prayer wherein the worshiper stands before God, praises, requests, and concludes with a sense of gratitude and a prayer for peace.

Our final part deals with the conclusions of the liturgy, such as Ein Keloheinu and Aleinu, as an additional bonus includes the Shabbat service, focusing upon two elements: the Friday night service called Kabbalat Shabbat, with its centerpiece being the poem L’cha Dodi, and the other aspects of the Shabbat service which differ from the daily service.

After one has gone through this journey, the spiritual significance, as well as the poetic beauty of the liturgy will become obvious.

Now how does this course differ from other courses on the Jewish liturgy?  Many courses on the Jewish liturgy generally follow either a historical or a literary orientation.

The historical orientation is primarily concerned with the liturgy as a document of its time, from which it derives information about the past.  It seeks to understand the liturgy is a response to internal needs, or as a reaction to external events.  The analysis centers on the different stages of the composition of the texts, rather than on is finished product.  As such it is inclined to decompose the texts, and analyze them through their different stages in order to reconstruct their development through history.  This is called its diachronic history.

In contrast, the literary orientation is primarily concerned with the liturgy as a finished product.  It seeks to understand the liturgy in the light of its purpose and intention.  For it, the significating framework is found within the text itself.  The analysis centers on the integration of the various elements to create a compositional whole.  Such an approach seeks to construct the meaning of the whole, and this is called its synthetic meaning.

Much of classical scholarship focuses upon the historical method, and it focuses therefore upon philology [the study of literary texts and of written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning], semantics [the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc.], allusions to Biblical and Rabbinic literature, and how the liturgy developed through history.  The other method focuses on its synthetic meaning; that is, how it works as a piece of literature (What is its form?  What is its structure?) Its analysis follows the same methods that people use in the analysis of poetry and literature.

What we hope to do here is to combine both an understanding of the history of the liturgy, and the literature of the liturgy, and integrate the two.  Through the study of both we will come to a better appreciation of the liturgy.

                [In Part II, I will describe the methodology I
                 use in the audio course to bring meaning to
                 the Siddur text.]