Shalom my friends, welcome to the Light Lab Podcast! My name is Eliana Light, and as I'm speaking to you now recording this intro, it is still Hanukkah. So even though you are listening to this after Hanukkah, I invite you to, if you would like, bring in some of those Hanukkah vibes, the Festival of Light. My brother and I like to joke, we hope you have a Happy Festival of Us. But this is a holiday that I've always felt particularly called to. As I reflected in our last newsletter, I've been thinking a lot lately about how really everything we do as Jews has multiple facets that have been handed down to us and also that we get to decide and add what new facets are. So is this a holiday about a small band of fighters overcoming a big army? Or is it a holiday about miraculous oil lasting for eight days? Or is there something to be said for the simple, that it's cold, and it's dark, and so we gather together and bring more light into the world. It's not a secret or a surprise that so many religions and cultures have holidays of light in the winter. And in this time of metaphorical darkness I'm holding on to that piece from our sacred heritage, which is that we have the opportunity to bring more light into that world and that that light is shared with all, and with everything, and with all people. There's a little bit of Hanukkah for you, even if it's no longer Chanukah. We hope you're having a beautiful and meaningful month. And that may when you are listening to this podcast be a more peaceful and connected and more beautiful world than the world that I'm recording this in. I hope that the podcast can be not just helpful on whatever Jewish learning journey that you might be on, or your spiritual journey that you might be on, but of raising up those sparks of our tradition, to say that there is so much that is beautiful and unique about Jewish sacred heritage that can help our lives and help our world. Holding on to that has been particularly meaningful to me. And it leads us to today's interview which I'm really excited to share. So today we are interviewing Rabbi Dr. Professor Ruth Langer. I was connected to Professor Langer through her daughter, actually, Rabbanit Leah Sarna, I've been a fan of hers. I've read a lot of her work online, we met last May very briefly, and we finally got the chance. We just like hung out on Zoom for a little bit. And I asked, Hey, I'd really love to interview you for the Light Lab Podcast. And she said, no, you want to interview my mother. She's literally a liturgy scholar. And I was like, oh, you're right. I definitely want to do that. And you'll find out the more that you get to know about her. So Ruth Langer is professor of Jewish Studies in the Theology department at Boston College. It's Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Director of its Center for Christian Jewish Learning. She received her PhD in Jewish Liturgy in 1994 and her rabbinic ordination in 1986, from Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. She writes in two major areas, first, the development of Jewish liturgy and ritual and Christian-Jewish relations, and her book, Cursing the Christians? A History of the Birkat HaMinim, combines these two interests, and she's also the author of To Worship God Properly: Tensions Between Liturgical Custom and Halakhah in Judaism, as well as Jewish Liturgy: A Guide to Research. And she has written so many articles on the subject of liturgy, and you'll get to hear a little bit about her current research, which is very timely, in our interview. I hope that you enjoy. We will link of course to her work in our show notes. I am also really excited maybe for future opportunities to learn together about the history of liturgy. If you'd be interested in taking a class like that, please let us know! You can email us at welcome@lightlab.co, welcome@light lab.co, or podcast@light lab.co. Let us know what you think. And I hope you enjoy our interview with Rabbi Dr. Professor Ruth Langer.
Shalom, Professor Langer! Welcome to the Light Lab. I'm so glad to have you here.
Oh, it's great to be with you.
I'm so so grateful that we get to talk together about my favorite subject, T'fillah, of course, which is your area of academic research and interest. And I want to start actually looking back. What was your relationship to T'fillah growing up, when you were, when you were a kid?
It was actually pretty distant. I grew up in a household where my grandfather was, had been described as a very Orthodox Reform Jew, who was Classical Reform. And for him, getting to services was really important. But there wasn't much of a prayer life beyond that, except for when he was away when he would sit on the porch of his cabin in the mountains, with his Union Prayer Book open. But that's not something that we did at home, my father came from a family that was very secular. His grandfather had been ordained as a rabbi, but was disaffected from traditional practice in the world that he was ordained into, and that trickled down. So we knew we were Jews, we went to religious school, we went to High Holiday services, but Shabbat wasn't part of our lives, not very much. But it was something I as a high school student I became hungry for.
And was there a particular experience or a person in your life that led to that surge of interest?
Ah, in some ways, I think it would have been ninth grade, the year that my father was on sabbatical, we were living in the Boston area. And instead of going to religious school in a different place, my mother got some books from the, from home, and said, Okay, you have to read them this year. And I read Night, and I read Exodus. And that plus living in an, outside of, a much less strong Jewish environment that I'd grown up in, just sort of led to a lot of questioning, I remember taking a walk with my mother, and asking her about G?d, which I think completely befuddled her. I started thinking about things that year. So I was 14, going on 15. And then when we got home, I went through Confirmation the next year, at our Reformed synagogue, and then I insisted on going on for their high school program, and was so frustrated by it, that I turned in rabbis and I said, Can I learn something with you? Because they were doing nothing in this program. And so I did some independent study with, with the rabbis. But then I got to college. And I didn't go to college because I didn't, I went to Bryn Mawr, I didn't choose it because of the Jewish life there by any means. But second semester of freshman year, I fell into Jewish Studies. Bryn Mawr's classes were mostly two semester courses for freshmen at that point. And, but I had placed out of enough of them that I was taking a German literature course and I decided I did not want to continue with German literature, I really did not like it, just in terms of content, really. And the only thing that was open was, of course, about Judaism. So my teacher was Dr. Lachs. And he, Samuel Tobias Lachs, of blessed memory now, and he opened the door to me to Jewish Studies. And so by the next fall, I was majoring in History of Religion, which is what that, what Jewish Studies was in. And I was becoming active in Hillel and became a leader of Hillel almost immediately. And that changed everything. I went to do a, to a college weekend at a, recruiting weekend and Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and sat at the feet of Jacob Rader Marcus memorably, and said, This is where I want to be. So I went straight from college to rabbinic school, straight from rabbinic school to a PhD. For practical reasons, really. I was enrolled at Hebrew Union College for 13 years.
Wow.
Wow. Yeah.
That's a long time. Well, yeah.
The PhD was, was eight years, two children and a gallbladder. So.
Wow. Wow. So I could also be calling you Professor Langer, Rabbi Langer. Dr. Langer.
Absolutely.
So many amazing things. I'm, I'm wondering also thinking back to your college days, did you find that your academic study of Judaism made its way or affected your spiritual or ritual life? One might call it in any way?
Well, very much so in that way into involvement in the Jewish life at Bryn, Bryn Mawr and Haverford were a pair at that point, even more so than they are still today. Because Haverford was all men still. And the way in the, there was a there were two of two organizations going. One was, it was basically the Jewish Students Union, I think is what we called it, which had occasional programs. But then every Friday night, there was what we called Habby Shabby, Havurat Shabbat. And so the way into being part of that community was going every Friday night, which meant to having prayers together, we sang Kabbalat Shabbat together, having dinner together. And then if you really wanted to be an insider, doing dishes together, because we didn't have any staff, we did it all ourselves, and occasionally cooking. And then some of the some of my friends would walk me back to Bryn Mawr because this was all in Haverford. So yes, there was a prayer element to this, which became very important. And even, I believe it was that first year, I decided we needed, the only services that they had on the High Holidays on campus were traditional, they were mixed seating traditional, which, I didn't know Hebrew yet, so I was felt totally outsider, an outsider to them. So either that's my sophomore year or my junior year, I decided to run Reform service, must have been junior year, decided to run a Reform service. And I essentially gave myself a Bat Mitzvah, I read Torah for the first time on Rosh Hashanah, in the services.
Aww!
And ran those services and started thinking about that process. So the whole process really began as an undergraduate at college. Could speak to the virtues of being in a small, almost unstaffed Hillel, we had an rabbi, advisor or rabbinic student advisor later, who came a couple hours a week. But that was it. We had to whatever happened, we had to do ourselves. And so I became one of the people who did it. And that included, very importantly for me, T'fillah.
I think that connects to the next question, which was kind of as you're going to HUC, going through rabbinical school, starting your PhD, Jewish history is long and vast, and there are plenty of academic subjects that you could have chosen within the Jewish field. Why T'fillah?
Well, first, I was very drawn to Rabbinics. And I'd studied, Dr. Lachs did a Talmud study for students who really wanted to not I think I got credit for it one semester, but I think in general, it was completely non credit. And that was my introduction to Talmud, was through this little small group of friends who were sitting with a teacher who love to teach. And we started off, maybe, ironically, or maybe eventually turned to, I think we started with Sanhedrin. But then, most of the semesters, we learned Berachot, which is of course all about liturgy. But then when I went to HUC, liturgy was very central to our experience as rabbinic students. I had, I was very involved, even the first year in Israel. But then the second year, I was one of the students who was asked to fill in very last minute at a congregation that hadn't gotten a full time rabbi. So I was, I was very green, sent down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which was a part of America that I'd never been in before, to not just lead high holiday services, but to go twice a month for the whole year. I love that. I've loved that part of the experience. I love the, I love the intensity of actually leading prayer, leading T'fillah. Because you, you have to focus on it, you have to think about it in a different way that I've lost from my life now that I'm not in that business anymore. But the real answer to your question in terms of how did I end up doing the doctorate in T'fillah has, is an outgrowth from that, which was when my husband and I actually got married the day after my ordination. And he was a professor at HUC, these things don't happen these days, are not supposed to happen anymore. And so I was staying on in Cincinnati at that point and was the question is what was I going to do with myself? And I had always wanted to have a, to get a doctorate. Dr. Lachs had tried very hard to convince me to do that right out of college, right out of undergraduate. So that was an obvious answer to me. And then the question was, with whom? And on what? And the person I most wanted to learn with and to study with was Dr. Jacob Penakovski, who was one of the great American scholars of liturgy at that point. That was certainly part of what he taught. He taught that and theology and also did a lot of work and Jewish-Christian relations. And all of those have become part of my life as time went on. But I went into liturgy, not because of a really specific interest in prayer, as an academic field, so much as because this was the professor I wanted to study with.
And that opened it up.
And that opened it up, absolutely yeah.
What was your doctorate research primarily focused on?
My doctor, my PhD, the actual dissertation resulted in a book called I can pull it out and show it to you, but this is an audio podcast, you can see that, it's, the book is called To Worship God Properly. And it really looked at the Halacha around T'fillah. So I did a attempt to synthesize out of the, the corpus of the Talmuds and in the Midrash. What is, especially the Talmuds, what is the statement of Halacha about T'fillah, that sort of landed on the laps of the Geonim? So what is, what's, what from the Talmud sets the course for future liturgical Halacha? And then the the, the rest of the rest of it was three case studies of places were mostly, mostly medieval rabbis, but in some, most cases, that is a long medieval period, as we would call it today, going up till today, in some cases, in the ways that that Halacha, it was influenced and shaped later. So the three cases that I dealt with were blessings that are not in the Talmud. So what do you do when there's when something, how does, how does liturgical change happen, is really part of what's going on there, or doesn't happen, how does it get squashed? And there I really looked at two, in detail, at two blessings, one for the morning after a wedding, for a bridegroom to say when he discovers that his wife was a virgin. Which is, that's such a, I mean, we sort of wince at the content of it today.
Yeah.
But it's actually a beautifully composed blessing. It's very parallel in it's kind of use of language to the blessing that we say after circumcision. So it's a similar, it's, it's being treated as a similar instance in life, in the medieval world. And the other one was a blessing for the priest to say, the Kohen to say, at the Pidyon Haben, at the redemption of the firstborn. So the priests have this role on the 30th day after baby's born of fulfilling what's really a biblical commandment of redeeming this child so that it doesn't have to be dedicated just to service to G?d. And the irony of it is that the priests sort of shows in the liturgy as it emerged, the priest sort of shows up, takes some money and walks out again. And the medievals thought the priests need something to say. And they developed a long, elaborate, not terribly well composed, in my opinion, blessing for this case. And these two get conflated by the late medieval period and squashed. The priests, one for the priests just completely disappeared, the one for the morning after the wedding, lasts in some ultra orthodox and non Ashkenazi circles, but without, often without the full formula of a blessing so that it's sort of acknowledged, but it's not there. And it's not something I'd ever heard of before, at that point in my life. So that's Chapter one. Chapter Two, is on whether it's legitimate to recite liturgical poetry within the standard prayers, which is a huge question in terms of what prayer is meant to be and how, how reactive it can be, to the circumstances of the day, whether that be a Torah reading, or of the holiday. And this is whole corpus of poetry that essentially became sanctified, especially in Ashkenaz. But is it legitimate to interrupt the statutory prayers, the official prayers with this poetry. And so this is a debate that worked itself out in medieval Spain in one way. And then really in 19th century Ashkenaz, when people started getting worrying about people staying Jews and staying within the Jewish community, when the prayers were so difficult, they didn't understand what was going on. And so there's a lot of elimination of this poetry, except for on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Ashkenazi tradition in the 19th century. And then the third was whether a person praying without a minyan can recite the Kedusha, can recite angelic liturgy. Because it's so holy can a person do that without a communal context? So those are the three studies.
That's amazing! It's, it's incredible also to think about liturgical change, as liturgical change and innovation, as not something new but as part of the tradition of the liturgy. And even that they were prayers that were added that then were remove. Like I would have had no idea that that that had happened.
Well, I mean, there's there's a couple of different things in what you just said that really need to be unpacked.
Yeah, So let's unpack.
Well, first of all, first of all, how did how did the prayers emerge? And when did they emerge? Right basic, basic question, but actually one about which there is still a lot of dispute. So literally on one foot, the traditional understanding was pretty much that these prayers, some of them were, I mean, the, the Talmud says, some of them were written by the Avot, by the patriarchs, and some come after that Babylonian exile by the Men of the Great Assembly. There's no basis for that in anything that we can document. And certainly what we have now from the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that while people were certainly praying, and we have that also from the Bible, and from extra bit of extra biblical books, the texts that we think of now, the structures that we think of now for prayer didn't exist. What was happening with the academic study of liturgy, starting over 100 years ago, now, maybe close to 125 years ago now. And actually, in some ways, going back to Leopold Zunz in 1832, was that there were scholars who were trying to say, Okay, we have this variety of prayer texts out there. We have the Ashkenazi, right, we have this Sefardi, right, we have the Italian, right? There's actually many more rights than that. And can we look at what we know, and figure out what the original composed text was? Who wrote down what initially. And that's the way we tend to think about prayers. In fact, if I were to write a prayer today, it would be, it would get my name attached to it, probably, hopefully, at least initially. And it would be something that I wrote, and it would have an integrity as something that I wrote. Well, we know that that if there was an initial composition like that, it didn't maintain its integrity, and it got passed down. There's been, I'm not going to go through the whole history of scholarship, because I think that's probably more than you want, unless you want me to do it. But there's been scholars who said well, Joseph Heinemann was the biggie the 19, 1964, his dissertation, published in Hebrew in 1964, in English in '72, or three, basically said, well, there were different contexts in the late Second Temple period in which people were composing prayers, each with different kinds of formal characteristics. Like, prayers of the synagogue are always voiced in the plural, that people in the plural. And they address G?d as You. Prayers of the Beit Midrash speak about G?d in the third person. So the study hall prayers, He would talk about. Then there was some from the Temple and some from in prayers of the individual would be voiced in the first person singular. And there are different kinds of formulaic things that he would, he identified them. Unfortunately, that doesn't all hold up. And there's also no evidence for this subdivision of things sort of looking back from later liturgies. So in 1989, Ezra Fleischer, also pf blessed memory, all of these folks are no longer with us, published a really seminal article, which he says, Nope, this destruction of the Temple, caused the construction of the liturgy. And so everything happens after 70. Everything begins at Yavneh, among the rabbis gathered, probably under Rabban Gamaliel. So the second generation of Yavneh, not the immediate destruction, but descent, decade, two decades, maybe three decades later, and they compose the prayers as the Talmud records, and sent, got, and then sent, promulgated it. I always used to joke that the fax machine theory of Jewish liturgy, because I didn't hear that I don't really agree with that. Fax machines are not the way to do it. It would be a blog post theory, I don't know something like that. The truth of the matter is my theory, my understanding of it, is that Fleischer's right in that the destruction of the Temple is a determinative moment. But he's not right in seeing complete discontinuity for everything that was going before. But, and where he's also not right is in his taking rabbis' descriptions of their own authority as actual history. If I'm going to write my own history, I'm going to be at the center and I'm going to make myself much more important, right.
Right.
But if you look at the cracks and the crevices in the rabbinic accounts of things, what you see is that they are arguing for their authority, and they don't have it yet. So 1995, there was a revolution in the study of the synagogu. And a recognition that the secon, and this is the based on the work of another no longer with us Professor, Shmuel Safrai, recognize that none of the descriptions of the synagogue, pre-rabbinic, talk about prayer in the synagogue. Every description in the New Testament, Jesus or Paul, go into a synagogue, they read scripture, and they talk about scripture. And that's consistent with everything, every other piece of evidence that we have, including the Mishnah, including the Tosefta. So through the third century, the popular synagogue, and they did exist, was not a place of rabbinic prayer. It was a place of Torah study and teaching and learning. Now, there were rabbinic synagogues where the rabbis gathered where they did pray, and what I think happened, and I've written, I've published on this, and there are people, Lee Levine is very much in this understanding also, is that the rabbinic synagogue, by the late third century, in the time of Rabbi Yochanan, was incresingly the popular synagogue. Increasingly, people were wanting to come and participate in the rabbinic synagogue, and it begins to spread and to percolate out. It does, and that's in the land of Israel, and in rabbinic centers and Babylonia. But we have already in that by the ninth century, alright, so we're going centuries later. We have Jews in Spain who are writing to the heads of the Jewish world in Babylonia saying, we heard some rumor that we're supposed to be praying 100 blessings every day. What are they?
Wow.
I mean, really, really basic questions. And what they get in return are communications that we have, at least versions of, still today. From Rav Natronai Gaon and Rav Amram Gaon, both of them were around 875, rivals of each other in some ways. Rav Natronai Gaon sends a list of the 100 blessings, and Rav Amram Gaon sends a prayer book, he sends instructions, and prayer texts. And this becomes the model for, basically, most subsequent prayer books, certainly is very much the model for the European prayer books. It wins, but it's copied with different prayer texts. We don't have it perfectly. But we do know, we have the emergence of a prayer book as a text, really in the late 9th century. And that's the point where we start having disagreements also over should you say this prayer this way? Should you say that prayer that way? In a broader way. That's not to say that the rabbi's weren't praying. The rabbi, that basic structure of rabbinic prayer is established in the Mishnah, which is codified we now say around 220. So the structure is there. But to what extent are the words there? That's the debate. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that was one of my questions. And maybe we can use the Amidah as an example, since we did a whole series of episodes on it. You know, the rabbi's of the Talmud saying that the Amidah was written by the Men of the Great Assembly. So there's not actual evidence for that. So where did it come from? And how did, how did the rest of it came to be? And maybe there's something to learn kind of from this one example, about how things got added and became a part of, of liturgy over time.
So when we look at the Mishnah, it's clear that chapters four and five of the Mishnah are talking about something that the rabbi's, of Mishna Brachot, I'm sorry, are talking about something that the rabbi's call T'fillah. And I'd like to say this is T'fillah with a capital Taf. Capital letters don't exist in Hebrew. But it's not praying in general it is, The T'fillah. And by this they are talking about the Amidah. So in Mishnah 4:3, Rabban Gamliel says, and this is devilishly hard to translate in a non gendered way, that every day each person is obligated to pray 18 blessings. That's the weekday Amidah. Does he tell us what they are? No. So we don't really know the content - we know from the Mishnah the timing of the Amidah, we know that it's being recited three times a day. We know that there's something called Musaf, which is recited on holidays, also Shabbat and holidays. We know that it has 18 blessings. We know what times, what the time parameters are for its recitation because the rabbi's tie this very carefully back into the times of Temple sacrifices. And we know that there's, you're supposed to have a mood set before you go in, because you're supposed to have something called koved rosh, that you're supposed to have a sense, a sense of seriousness coming into it. And then there's some discussions about improper language in a couple places. But that's, that's essentially all that we know about the Amidah from the Mishnah. When we get to the Tosefta, which is a parallel text to the Mishnah, in some ways, it's it's texts that were excluded from the Mishnah. But traditions from the same period. It's a couple of decades later, and it's come, it's actually being formed into a composition, the Tosefta in Brachot says, well, here are 24 different themes that ought to be included in those 18. And in order to get there, you got to do some combinations of them. Some of those themes disappeared. Some of those themes are very much combined in our Amidah. So you have a sense of there's okay, there's some sense of 18. Why 18? I can't figure out. It's not our are talking about chai, that there's no evidence for. So I went looking for that at one point. I couldn't find anything. So unclear why these 18, and actually, later texts show that there's some playing around with that rabbinic tradition, including the fact that we now say 19.
Right.
But the Tosefta is showing that in this, and it's not a an attributed text, we can't date it, specifically. But, but it's still brought into the Tosefta. So in the third century, well into the third century, there's still a sense of flexibility about what exactly the topics are of the Brachot. There's also a sense that well, maybe 18 different topics is really hard for for, I'm coming up with Latin and Greek, that doesn't work, the hoi polloi, the uncha, that the uneducated people, the people aren't part of our world, we want to have be part of our world, for them to get it, be able to produce it. So we'll have the institution of the prayer leader, the shaliach tzibur, who is somebody who has the capability of praying, and will get up there and everybody else, oh, simple. You just have to listen and say Amen. Not quite sure how that spirituality worked. In any case, that's, that's the rabbinic answer to the trap challenges of this. And the thing that we that's really key to understanding this is remembering that they did not write these prayers down. Right, so prayers, they understood this as being an entirely oral endeavor. Not quite clear why, there's some tradition of that it may not have to do with prayer at all, it may have to do with magic. That there's there's a rabbinic text, not remember exactly where it is, that writing prayers is like burning the Torah.
Oh, my goodness, that's intense.
Yeah! But so what is that saying? It's not saying, Oh, these people were doing that they're bad. It's saying don't do it. Right. It's a preemptive statement.
Wow, it's just so interesting, because the conversations about liturgy being accessible or not, are still happening, now, when we have the words written down.
Of course.
Like, even more so, potentially, when they aren't written down, a nd you're required to remember them all. I've had in my mind, and I don't know where I learned this, or if it's correct, that there were parts of the Amidah that were standardized, here's what you say, and that then there were the parts that were expounded upon, right?
So the what seems to have come into existence, probably after. after this Tosefta text, is that it was coming into existence before then, is a list of topics. Right? And so the, the Brachot themselves at the end of each paragraph of the Amidah, the blessing texts, those were the first standardized, at least in their topics, if not their specific language. And if my theory is correct, and again, this is somewhat controversial, people, people were educated in Bible enough in its original language, right? So they knew the Hebrew texts, they knew what that meant, they knew it the way that my father knows Shakespeare. Right, so that they would just have sort of immediate word associations when they were searching for something. And so the, the technical term is the register of Hebrew, that developed for use in liturgy, and is very much paralleled by the register of Greek that was used for Greek-speaking Jews and Christians doing liturgy, was very informed by biblical language. And so it would, it would essentially, riff on the biblical language. And you think about it like a jazz riff, it's not, not so different. But people had this register of language in their brains, in their, in their hearts, maybe.
Right.
To speak their language more. And so they had the capability of generating prayer that was appropriate prayer language. And that's a harder thing for us to understand today. I think it's easier for us to understand what inappropriate prayer language is. I once asked a group of students, I was at this point, I was teaching a course at the Jewish Theological Seminary. And I asked a bunch of students, can you come up with inappropriate prayer language, and someone from the back of the room, this is the first day of class I don't even remember, the person's name is also a long time ago now said, Yo G?d. It communicates what you might want to be communicating with prayer. But we know that's not how you address G?d. So we have sense of what's inappropriate language for certain circumstances. And we change our register depending on who we're talking to. I talk a different way to a baby than I do to a colleague, I say as a grandmother, whp is enjoying grandmothering. So people, people who were, and this was pretty widely, they were educated into prayer lang, into biblical language, which included a lot of Psalms. And when you start analyzing the language that emerges for prayers, it's heavily influenced by Psalms or Psalm-like passages. And it's in their language. So that's, that's definitely a piece of what gave people tools to compose their own prayers. But you had to have some education to do that. And this gradually then coalesced into texts that were accepted and required more. So the beginning of the first paragraph of the Amidah, the very beginning, seems to become standardized pretty early. But this is where we come back into liturgical poetry. In the land of Israel, where people were probably somewhat more educated in Bible, there was a development that came into its own, certainly by the fifth century, but it had certainly roots before that, of what we call piut, or liturgical poetry. And we know that by the sixth century, there were poets in the land of Israel, who, week by week, were composing substitutions for most of the body of the text of at least the first three blessings of the Amidah. These are poems that when we print them out, in fairly small print, go on series of poems that go on for pages. But they would be about the Torah reading. And so they would be maybe instead of a sermon, but fairly, by the time we get to the sixth and seventh century, the language is fairly complex. It's an art form that emerges that we just have sort of the shreds and the leavings of today, except for that we found them in the Cairo Geniza.
Good old Cairo Geniza.
Good old Cairo Geniza.
What would we do without it?
Right, so, so the, this storehouse of old Hebrew texts happened to be in a synagogue where the, they were praying, according to the right of the Land of Israel, and not the Babylonian right, that became dominant. And so they they had there, the collections of the Piutim, of major poets from the land of Israel, starting in the fifth century, and maybe even, maybe a few earlier, but they're not known to us by name. And in the sixth century, Yannai, and Shimon ben Rabbi Megez, and seventh century Kalir, whose poetry we still say, this is a world of creative prayer, and with a musical element to it also that we can't reconstruct.
Oh, so we just know that there was a musical element, but we're not sure what it -
It seems to be that there are choral refrains.
Hmm. That's beautiful. I mean, it's, it's interesting to think about, you know, wanting to connect a prayer service to what's going on in the Torah portion that week, what's going on in the world that week, and that these days, we might do that through giving different intentions, or doing Dvar T'fillah that connects to the, to the Torah service, but to actually say, oh, no, we're putting this poetry, it is the liturgy this week, this poem that connects us to the Torah reading. It's really, really surprising to me.
This is, to me, this was the major mode of entertainment. Because they didn't have have cell phones, they didn't have television, radio, whatever. This was what people came to hear this and maybe a sermon later on in the day.
It's also interesting thinking about the notion that T'fillah Shouldn't be performative. And that performative to some folks means, oh, there's somebody on the Bima singing to you or at you, but like, the people in the congregation wouldn't have known the new piut for the week. What does the - What does prayer look like then when it's a listening and being in the presence of instead of a singing?
Yeah, and that's the challenge of it, so that by the time we get a couple centuries later, there's a, a satirist named Al-Harizi, who travels to Mosul that was in the news, during the Iraq War. And he tells about the experience in a synagogue in Mosul, which has a Hazzan, a cantor who's full of himself. And he gets up and he starts singing and he's singing piut, and nobody knows what he's doing. And Al-Harizi is describing first of all the mistakes of the Hazzan, because he's mispronouncing the words, and then the fact that the communities for that because everybody's taking a nap, but they're talking to the neighbors and it's, it's, it's, it's a description of an unsuccessful liturgy. And yet the Hazzanim and Maimonides is, is fulminating against this also, are busy trying to get the best poetry that they can get, they can collect from other people so that they can say, oh, I can do this poetry, I can, you know, I can lead the best service possible. So there's a rabbinic tension with Cantors that goes way back. Way back.
Again, like thinking of a satirist, I've heard you know, shul reviews that, to think that the art form goes back that long. I want to go back to the Amidah for a second, because I know that this has been a part of your research is, so it's supposed to be 18 Blessings. What's up with 19? When did it enter? Which one is it? Yeah. Tell it, tell us more.
It means so there's been a lot of disagreement about this. How did that happen? Can we have the story of the Talmud that this is a story of the Babylonian Talmud only, so which means that we can guess that it's probably coming off, be coming out of the Babylonian world, the Babylonian Talmud tells a story about the late first century, when Rabban Gamliel says to the people, the rabbi is assembled in his, at Yavneh, and says, Okay, who can, who can, who can, he first asked for somebody to organize the 18 benedictions. And someone named Shimon Hapakuli, we don't know anything about otherwise, gets up and does it, fine. And then, at some point later, Rabban Gamliel says, oh, gosh, we need a blessing against the minim. The minim, minim are sectarians at some points, sometimes later on, it becomes heretics. I think in the early period, it's probably people who don't agree with the rabbis who aren't following the rabbinic order, organization of thing, they label them all minim. The word minim just means kinds of sorts, we use it for all sorts of other things, right?
Right.
So we have the four minim, the lulav and etrog is referred to as the four minim. And we have the seven different kinds of grain that are from Eretz Israel that we that can make, can become chametz, that's also minim. So anyway, since he asked for the formulation of birkat haminim, and somebody named Shmuel Hakatan gets up and formulates it. The problem with this is that we know from the Geniza again, that in the land of Israel, they never had 19 benedictions, they only had 18. But they did include this Birkat Haminim, this curse of the heretics, of the sectarians, in that 18. So what do we do with this? We know that 19 is a Babylonian invention. And that discounts this story in the Bavli, in the Babylonian Talmud, as being ahistorical but an attempt to explain things, and I've written on this great length. And the, the most likely explanation seems to be that if you go back to that text in the Tosefta, the combination of the minim with another blessing was one of the possibilities. But there are other combinations, and in Babylonia, they decided that they wanted to do not combine the blessing about Jerusalem and the Messiah, basically, the Davidic King. So, and then there's a theory about why, which nobody could prove or disprove, which is that this is because the Exilarch, the head of the, the political head of the Jewish community in Babylonia understood himself to be of the Davidic line. And so this was sort of a soft to the Exilarch. Who knows. But the truth of the matter is, is that there was some flexibility in terms of the actual number of blessings. There's a debate in the Talmud about whether it should be 17, 18 or 19. And there seems to have been a little less concern about it being precisely 18. So the Babylonians felt free to add another, you know, to split to divide things up, to divvy up the fields that mean that no new topics there, but they, they divvy things up differently.
Sticking with the minim for a moment, last night, I was actually teaching a class where we looked at the Aleinu prayer that was written in the Middle Ages, including lines that are, or maybe not, maybe you can tell, you could tell us about it. But lines that kind of made the class uncomfortable, we looked at the original text, as we have it with, you know, really pointedly saying that people with other gods are not, are not doing it correctly, even looked at the tradition of spitting during those lines in synagogue, which I hadn't known about. And I think that's why we have this idea that the blessing on minim came around that time. I'm wondering if you could talk about the Middle Ages within your research as a time of tension with the Christian world, and what liturgical changes or liturgical just challenges or other innovations that you've found in your research from that period.
I don't really think there's a relationship between Aleinu and Birkat Haminim, except for that they're both things that got got medieval Christians upset.
Right.
But, you know, there's there's many other examples of that, too. So the Birkat Haminim in its original text probably did name Christians.
Wow.
The Geniza texts show, that the text that we say to get, we say today, are, had every single noun changed by sensors. So Christians said, the Christians got upset at this blessing, starting already in the 13th century, when they became aware of it, start having some evidence of censorship in the 15th, 14th and 15th centuries. But then once printing starts, and Christians get really worried, worried about the words that are in their world, right, because words mean something and those meanings to them were, were not just sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, that wasn't their understanding of things. Words can hurt. Words have something, something real about them. So Christian-instituted censorship of books of all sorts, once printing made books, much more numerous and much more accessible to people. And so there was literally official Christian censors that then collected all Jewish books also, and started knocking out certain words, which included all the nouns of this Birkat Haminim, which was originally against Jews who convert to Christianity, Minim and Notzrim was the second line. So whatever Minim are, but Notzrim was the word that Jews used for Christians, that word never made it into Europe, into Christian Europe, but it was certainly there, certainly there in the Geniza, and, including in Babylonian texts. The third line, in one form was all of our enemies that got changed either your enemies been in G?d's enemies or changed altogether. And then the fourth line was against the Malchut Zadon, the, I like to translate it quoting Reagan as the evil empire, which would have been the local governing powers in many people's minds. So this was a text that got Christians really upset. And they forced the change of every single one of those nouns. It's only the the Jews of England still say Malchut Zadon, but we say Zedim, or Zadon. And indeed, it just that the entire force and meaning of this blessing was forced to change, and it stuck, among almost all Jews. So that's, that's one thing, but then you also asked about Aleinu. So Aleinu is a ancient piyut, I mean not ancient ancient, but late ancient. In form it is prior to this piyut that I was talking about from the fifth century. It, because it doesn't have any kind of rhyme but it does have a meter. And that dates it maybe fourth century, maybe a little bit, we don't really know. It's attributed rabbinically to Rav, who would put it into the third century and Babylonia Babylonians unlikely, but in any case, it's definitely in that world of piyut. And consistent with that world of piyut, from the land of Israel, we hear that if we read it, it's four beats to a line, aleinu leshabeach ladon hakol, latet gedulah leyotzer bereshit, etc, with some variation from that, but that's basically what's going on. And that piyut in its origins was written for Rosh Hashanah, for the first set of shofar blasts and Musaf called Malchuyot about G?d's being a king. And that's really what Aleinu was about is about G?d's sovereignt, to de-gender the language a little bit. That's what it's about, that's it's our original locus. Eventually, it gets moved also to Yom Kippur, to Musaf, also Musaf. And it's only in the time of the Crusades, and after the Crusades devastate the Jewish communities of the Rhineland, that we have it spread to the daily prayers. And that's when it becomes noticed by Christians also. So the story of its origins, and again, this could be completely mythological, is that the Jews of Blu were locked in their synagogue as the synagogue was burned, and they started singing this prayer to the point that the, the melody of it caught the attention of the king. But within a century or so we see Aleinu or at least the first part of Aleinu, so not necessarily al kein nekaveh lecha, being recited pretty much throughout the Jewish world, at the end of every service. And that seems to be spurred by some reaction to the Crusades. So it's at this point the Christians start noticing it. And they notice this line, shehem mishtachavim lehevel v'rie that they bow down to emptiness and nothingness, mitpalelim l'el lo yoshia, that they pray to a god who cannot or does not save. Christians don't worry about that second part surprisingly, because it's, that can be read as a counter Christian claim. But they do learn fairly early have a understanding that we have Jewish sources for also that this word of nothing this I translated as nothingness, varie, is has numerical value, it's gematria, is equivalent to the name Jesus, Yeshu.
Woah.
And so that then, they then understand this sentence as being anti-Christian. Was it anti-Christian and its origins? Depends on when you think the pring was written, and whether one understood, how important one understands Christianity to have been to Jewish consciousness in that period. So if it's fourth century, it's into the Byzantine world. If it's third century, maybe, maybe not. And then there's Jewish apologetic texts who say this was written by Joshua. Place as far back pre-Christian as possibly can. But it certainly was understood by Jews as being anti-Christian, including the, there is one commentary, one or two commentaries known to us, which break open every word and make it even more virulently anti-Christian. So this then becomes a source of Christian censorship. And this line is removed from printed sidurim, almost entirely, anything printed in Europe, replaced by a symbol, often, we have evidence that people were still seeing the line, they were taught to say it, when you get to the symbol, once you're old enough to be trusted to learn the secret knowledge, you say this, and in some places they would spit, and in some places apparently also jump up and down. I can't quite envision exactly what that was. But we have in the early 18th century complaints to the Prussian king about this, which results in his requiring that Jews allow Protestant theologians to come and sit in the synagogue whenever there's going to be a service, who will make sure that this line is not said.
Wow.
Yeah. Which meant that they also were requiring the prayer be said out loud, instead of mumbled as it often is said in Orthodox context even still today, which I think is where the melody is developed for it, that we sing.
Wow, because there, because we had to sing that out loud.
It had, it had to be out loud so that the, so this monitor could hear it. Now did the monitors actually come all the time? We know that this legislation was re-promulgated over and over and over again during the 18th century. So the issues remained. But basically, this is what resulted in the dropping of this line. And then in its retrieval in the 20th century in Israel, particularly. And eventually then in America by Artscroll and other Orthodox printers, but you won't find it in European and American prayer books before in that interval at all. And really, from the point of printing, from print censorship of print.
Wow, and it's not included in most, if not all liberal prayer books that have been printed as of late. And -
And, and I won't say it. Yeah, I really tempted, I haven't gone through my various Orthodox prayer books and crossed out that line, but I've been very tempted to do so.
In this, yeah. It's, it's challenging in this in this modern world of living together. And my students last night, most of whom were surprised by that line, but also, the lines that come before it that we all say, also made some of those some people uncomfortable, understandably, about that we were given a different fate than the other nations. And we were made different than the other nations. And I'm wondering, whether you personally or the research you've done, what might we do with that? What, what might we do as kind of modern pray-ers with pieces of the liturgy, that make us uncomfortable?
That really depends where you're located in the Jewish world. So if you're in the Orthodox world, and you accept the prayer book as authoritative, there's nothing you can do about the words of the prayer except for sometimes history has eliminated this one line, so you can continue to not say it out loud. But you can interpret the prayer. And that becomes then pretty much a necessity. But the, once you're, the more one moves towards the liberal end of the Jewish spectrum, the more option there is for simply rewriting the prayers. So for people who are have that freedom, and are interested, there are varieties of revisions of Aleinu, in the contemporary Reform prayer books, in the contemporary Reconstructionist prayer books, are reconstructing one, it's called now. And even the Conservative prayer book does some things with it. I mean it doesn't change the language so much is it has interpretations around it. And it will not include that one line. But the discomfort with Jewish, and exceptionalism isn't quite the right word, being better than everybody else, maybe exceptionalism is the right word, is something which is one of the things we have to deal with in today's era. At the same time, if I don't feel and teach my children, where I have that responsibility, that what I'm doing is right, and is what G?d wants me to be doing, then I'm really sowing the seeds for the destruction that Jewish people. I'm saying that in a fairly extreme way, but I need to struggle to find a way to feel that it's right or to do what I find is right. But to do, to say, yes, thank G?d, I'm a Jew.
Yeah.
Yeah? And I want to be teaching that, I want to be imbuing that in in my children and now my grandchildren. My grandson was asked, Are you a Jew? And he said, No, I'm at chair. Isn't that the concept yet?
Not quite yet. Would it be fair to say that different versions of Aleinu that are being written, or different versions of other prayers, are part of a tradition of liturgical innovation and change? Or does it seem, since it's more I guess, community by community, and individual, that it seems like a different thread.
In some ways it can be understood as retrieval, that this, this world in the land of Israel in late antiquity, was a world of immense liturgical creativity that really valued this liturgical creativity. And that there's a retrieval of that, or maybe a way to be inspired by that. One of the other articles that I've written recently, it's not published yet, looks at the verse Hashem sefatai tiftach u'fi yagid tehilatecha, what does it mean to say the beginning of your prayer? Oh, G?d, open up my lips so that my mouth will speak your praise. And then to say at the end of that same prayer, Yihiyu l'ratzon imrei fi f'hegyon libi lefanecha, May the words that I spoke be acceptable to you G?d. So that framing of the Amidah does not speak to my mumbling through a set of texts that are written down for me on the page. That framing speaks to a situation where I need to come in struggling to come up with the right words, with an intention to come up with the right words, knowing that I might not make it, but G?d will help me get that intention into something that's acceptable. G?d opened my lips. That's not, may I have kavannah to read the words something other than superficially, that's literally, may I form the right words. And that to me, that, that realization, reshapes even my davening with the set words.
Say more.
Because I have to infuse them with meaning. I have to infuse them, what I'm bringing to them then becomes more important than the words on the page.
That's a beautiful framing.
Yeah. And even, I did, I spoke about this in a conference in Israel, where the people who disagree with me on this basic history of liturgy were there. And they said, Well, you know what, you're right about the third century. That is what it meant, then, because that's when this is all in the name of Rabbi Yochanan in the third century. You've got to be right about that.
There's one. I've always thought it really beautiful, and a acknowledgement of the challenges of T'fillah, that we start the Amidah by saying, Help me pray the Amidah, just, right, in acknowledgment that what we're about to do his hard, and it's got to be not just, there are a lot of words, and it's hard to read, but that there's, there's something that's being asked of us, in our, in our hearts to do.
So what does it mean to stand before G?d? Literally to stand in G?d's presence? That's scary to challenge.
It certainly is. And that's why we keep learning about it and exploring it together. I'm also wondering, as we, as we start to wrap up our conversation, what you find the value is, in studying liturgy, as an academic field, or learning more about its history, to maybe you as a pray-er, and to all of us, you know, we're going to link your publications and articles in the show notes. And we hope that people will continue their learning. What might it do, or what is the value for you as a pray-er and maybe more in general, us as pray-ers, to learn a little bit about the liturgy academically, we're going to link to your publications, and your writings in our show notes. And I hope people will go back and study. But what can the influence be of, of academic study of liturgy into our prayer lives?
That's a challenge because sometimes I get so caught up on looking at old manuscripts and things like that, that you sort of forget about the, the, and I have fun mucking around in old manuscripts. And you can do that today, because it's all digitized. It I mean, certainly, in terms of this, this incident that we were, this incident that we were talking about, it gives us, it gives me a sense of the challenge of becoming less mechanistic in my own prayer, of seeking a way to have to move from words to spiritual experience. That's not what I study so directly, though, so it doesn't, usually the things that I'm working on are sort of more abstract. But I hope always that what I can do is, is to help the people who want the intellectual level to their prayer life also have that, that ability. And that plays out. I mean, I gave a sermon in our synagogue on Sukkot a couple of years ago, on the Hoshanot, and the process of these, this circling with the lulav and etrog that we do, and just talking about the context, the historical context of what it is that we're doing, and that's really stuck with people. Because this thing that we did, where it used to be in an Orthodox synagogue that the women sat and chattered while the men walked around in circles, and tried to get through with it. We were able to give some kavannah, some sense of what it was we were doing, why we were doing, and even what the words meant, that we were, that we were calling out. Even right now I'm working on an article on prayers for divine vengeance. Which is, I agreed to do this six months ago. And then, and then I set aside October to write it.
Oof.
And it's been tough. It's been really tough. But at the same time, I understand the emotional need for these prayers in a way that I would not have before October 7. And the tendency to pull back from this is really, really strong in the tradition. And I think I can contribute that. There's a wonderful commentary on one of these prayers, the prayer that follows the Megillah reading, by Joseph Karo, in his Beit Yosef, in his commentary on that prayer, where he basically ends by saying that we need to remember that this is, we're calling on G?d to create a just situation. We are not as humans being called to wreak vengeance ourselves.
Right.
And that's been really helpful to me. And I'm finding that in some other modern commentaries on things like the traditional Avinu Malkeinu has lines about asking G?d to avenge the blood of the, the blood that has been spilled. How can we say that today, thinking about the blood that has been spilled, today.
Right.
And that, that this is something which needs to be G?d's justice that we are maybe participating in, but we are not working off of our own grief and our own anger, in creating the situation of justice, that it calls us back away from that. That, to me has been powerful, too. So they little piece, little points.
That is powerful. And I'll say, for me, one of the things that the academic study of liturgy does is, it helps me feel like I'm situated as part of a grand tradition, and connects me to, I would say, my spiritual ancestors more generally, but also to think about the pieces of liturgy having been written by people. That's something I say a lot of my teaching, prayers were written by people. They didn't just show up in a book, wholesale, right in their, in their form, they came out of people's minds and out of people's hearts and out of people's mouths. And we as people get to connect to that human experience, and maybe help us feel less alone.
Yeah.
Because it's not just me that feels sometimes sorrow and wants to ask for help or feels grateful, it's my ancestors too.
And it emerges out of communities of people. Because if everybody was formulating their own prayers, eventually you have something coming out, which says, Oh, this is an accepted way to do this. This was the this is the most the best way to say this, we think.
Right. And isn't it great that we get to have a shared language for doing so instead of all of us in our own little silos trying to go head it and on our own.
Prayer is fundamentally in community, so therefore, it needs to be done communally.
Beautiful. Before we go, is there anything else that you would like our listeners to know about? Whether it's research that we're going to link to, something that you're working on now, how to get in touch with you?
Well, I'm available. My email is on the internet. I'm a teacher at Boston College. And so I have a website there, which has ways to contact me. That's that's all very public.
We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll include your your Boston College.
Yes. I'm happy to answer questions. And, you know, I don't keep a big public presence on Facebook or Instagram or something like that. But I'm happy to answer your questions. Happy to have people in touch with me.
Thank you so so much for an enlightening conversation this morning.
This was fun.
And thank you so much for listening. Our podcast is edited by Christy Dodge, show notes by Yaffa Englander, and produced by Rachel Kaplan. Thank you so much to this amazing team for getting the pod up and running. Every time you hear it in your ears, listener, there's a whole little team behind us making it all happen. Our theme music is A New Light by me. You can read our extensive shownotes and learn more about each episode at light lab.com/podcast. Join our Facebook group. Follow us on the socials to keep up to date. And we hope to be in this beautiful virtual space again with you very soon.
