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After integrating seminar today, a couple of us were talking about liturgical additions permissible in WLSS (the main JTS minyan), and I mentioned that I'd been once scolded for saying 'ezrat Sarah rather than pokeid Sarah, and when someone asked why, I said that it wasn't in the book, which was in fact the reason I was given for why it was not acceptable.
All of a sudden, our teacher, who is also the head of the JTS library (yes, this fact is relevant, as you'll see momentarily), asks us if we have 5 minutes, and to put our bags down. All of a sudden, we're following him into the rare book room. So he sat us down, and showed us a handwritten siddur from 1475, written for a bride, where the scribe had written שעשיתני אישה ולא איש (for you made me a woman and not a man) rather than the usual form found in traditional siddurim שעשהני כרצונו (who made me according to his will). (Note that the liturgy used in Conservative siddurim just glosses over the gender difference entirely by taking all negative terminology out of it, and instead has שעשני בצלמו- who has created me in his image.) I'd read about this particular version of the text in an article that I read for liturgy in college, but seeing it for real was pretty incredible.
All of a sudden, our teacher, who is also the head of the JTS library (yes, this fact is relevant, as you'll see momentarily), asks us if we have 5 minutes, and to put our bags down. All of a sudden, we're following him into the rare book room. So he sat us down, and showed us a handwritten siddur from 1475, written for a bride, where the scribe had written שעשיתני אישה ולא איש (for you made me a woman and not a man) rather than the usual form found in traditional siddurim שעשהני כרצונו (who made me according to his will). (Note that the liturgy used in Conservative siddurim just glosses over the gender difference entirely by taking all negative terminology out of it, and instead has שעשני בצלמו- who has created me in his image.) I'd read about this particular version of the text in an article that I read for liturgy in college, but seeing it for real was pretty incredible.
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And allow me to virtually bop on the head whomever scolded you because "it's not in the book." My rabbi back home does "magen Avraham v'Sarah," and I can't get into pokeid, but I like the idea of ezrat.
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Second, did you just give up saying "poked Sara" in the chatima, or give up all inclusions of the matriarchs?
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Navo'ah oholei Sarah, Rivka, Rachel v'Leah.
Utehi gemilut hasdeihen lefaneinu b'khol eit u'v'khol sha'ah.
Translation:
Let us enter the tents of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. May their acts of loving-kindness be an example to us at all times.
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Personally, I am unmoved by this piyyut, lacking as it does to my ear the resonance of Biblical Hebrew and the assonance of medieval poetic Hebrew (not that I can understand the latter in most cases, but at least it sounds cool :-) ). I'm unaware of any of the other ways to which debka is referring.
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I do, however, remember a directly-related funny experience I had when visiting a flagship Modern Orthodox shul in Dallas as part of YCT's "visit 'out-of-town'* communities" weekend. The shul davened out of Artscroll, as one can imagine, but for the prayer for the country the rabbi began reading a text that was not in that siddur. I listened carefully and after about 10 or 15 words I was able to follow along, no problem, since he was using the text from Sim Shalom. I looked around and realized that no one in the shul had any clue where the text of the prayer was from, and would probably have thrown a fit (or worse) if they found out. Still, I admired the rabbi's cajones.
Back to the subtopic of effective contemporary liturgy briefly, I think tefillah lishlom hamedina, written by Agnon, has a certain lyric quality to it, even if my Zionism is so attenuated these days that I barely relate to its messsage at all.
* Ick, how I hate that NYC-centric term, and I'm _from_ NYC.
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I love the term! NYC is the center of the universe!
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I think Sim Shalom's current Prayer for the Country traces back to a version written by Louis Ginzberg and converted into conversational English.
Contrast that to the awful "Prayer for Peace" in the Sim Shalom. How could anyone have written the line "we have come into being to praise, to labor and to love" with a straight face?
(And, yes, tefilah lishlom ham'dinah is also good as contemporary liturgy).
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Of course, who's to say that the author was trying to rhyme? It's too small a sample to tell.
The לפנינו is also rather bizarre. More in the spirit of the way that such texts typically work would be something like ותעלה זכות חסדיהן לפניך בכל עת ושעה.
Having said that, I still find this short poem (which I have never seen befre) to be much more creative and much more appropriate than any other MODERN* matriarch-insertion into the first berokho of the tefillo. If I were in a community in which it made sense to include such reference, I would most definitely use this text, or something similar, rather than the insipid stuff in the new Sim SHalom.
*Note that Yannai and Qallir and others were doing this kind of stuff 1500 years ago, but their stuff tends to be longer, and hence not so appropriate for daily prayer.
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Personally, I include them in the petitcha when I daven silently, but generally omit them when SHAA"TZing.
How do you include them in Bircat? My mom inserts "imhoteinu Sara, Rivka, Rachel v'Leah, heitiv, batov, tov, [some other variation I don't remember off the top of my head]," before "avoteinu Avraham, Yitzchak, v'Yaakov, bakol, mikol, kol."
And is anyone else ever bothered by Rachel's constant insertion before Leah? The one person I have met who puts Leah first (besides yours truly), also includes Bilha and Zilpa, which is a whole other can of worms.
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I do about what your bother does, although as I learned it, the list of 'tov' related words is 'heitiv, tovat, tov, tov" which nicely uses the same word for Leah and Rachel.
The order of matriarchs used to really bother me- because as I first learned it in the Reform world, Leah does come first in their lists. I get the whole "we like to privilege the same one who texts have privileged before" thing, but it does still bother me.
I just had the beginning of an argument about including Bilhah and Zilpah with a classmate on Friday. He does it, and wants to do so when he leads davening here on Tuesday. I think it's a problem- we have no indication that they were monotheists or monolatrists, let alone that they had any particular special relationship with G-d (and yes, I think the matriarchs did, I know some folks will disagree with me there).
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"monotheists or monolatrists"
I'm not sure it matters. I think the point is to have a metaphor for the universe that is not ultimately capricious, in which one's actions have predictable consequences and therefore ought to matter. Whether or not there are lesser gods floating around should be irrelevent to that metaphor.
And see below my response in which I cite Esther Rabbah and Pesikta de-Rav Kahana who include Bilhah & Zilpa on the list. (Again, this is all support for shitot with which I disagree me-ikkaram.)
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First prove that they existed....
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Not particularly, since that list in that order appears in the Bavli on Nazir 23b, Sanhedrin 105b, and Horayot 10b. (Granted, I haven't checked the manuscripts.) Nevertheless, I have heard several people put Leah first. (I see the attraction, but I think if one is trying to balance the competing values of adherence to the tradition [= getting the psychological comfort of being connected to a tradition and the communal cohension that comes from connecting with a canon] with the value of this particular liturgical change, it seems to make sense to cling to any precedents in that canon that one can find.)
(BTW, an interesting support for including Bilha & Zilpa can be found in Esther Rabbah 1:12 where they are included on the list of _six_ imahot; see also Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 1:7 -- I don't know off the top of my head which is earlier.)
Also, according to the teshuva that makes that distinction between petiha and hatima, the reasoning is not that there is precedent for changing the petiha, but rather that since one is permitted to insert a piyyut for צורכי רבים, kal va-homer one may insert eight words in the middle. (Also note that there is a debate over the meaning of that phrase, i.e., does it need to be a piyyut for צורכי רבים or does there need to be צורכי רבים for a piyyut [that is not necessarily about צורכי רבים].) Be-mehilat kevod mori ve-rebbi ba`al mehaber ha-teshuva, I find that a weak kal va-homer, since inserting a piyyut after a unit of text is quite different than interrupting a phrase.
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P.S. My understanding is that the two not-in-Sim-Shalom changes that are allowed to be recited by the Shatz in WLSS are "ve`al kol-yoshevey tevel" during the final line of Kaddish Shalem and Kaddish Derabbanan and "ve'ishshey yisra'el" during the "Retzeh..." paragraph of the `Amidah leading up to "Hammachazir shechinato letziyyon."
P.P.S. I do think it would be cool for JTS to have a service wherein liturgical deviations from Siddur Sim Shalom (or any one Siddur) were permissible.
P.P.P.S. I am actually curious how many (or few) other people who would be interested in a JTS service that is liturgically more experimental (preferably within a Halakhic/precedent-based framework).
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Ignoring whether it's proper or not in any of its current formulations (I vascillate on the issue, but it's a subject for an actual long post): While מגן אברהם ושרה has parallelism, it destroys the Biblical reference in the text (Gen 15:1). עזרת שרה is what's published in the Reform siddur (and was there long before the egal edition of Sim Shalom), and, as far as I can tell, is intended to parallel the liturgical text מלך עוזר ומושיע ומגן. And, פוקד שרה is a Biblical reference to Gen 21:1. I don't remember if the Sim Shalom inclusive text rephrases the preceding line as מלך עוזר ומושיע ומגן ופוקד, which would seem like what it should do to maintain parallelism.
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The latter reason for discomfort with פוקד is the one that I generally hear...
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Really?! But it's a word that can mean both things! (I just checked Even-Shoshan's Konkordatziyah Hadasha who lists three meanings, the first being זכר לטובה, with 35 entries, and the second being זכר לרעה, ענש, with 69 entries.)
(OK, I understand about connotation vs. denotation, but why should the use of "poked Sarah" evoke Ex. 34:7 as opposed to Gen. 21:1?)
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(Also, regarding "something we'd quite like Not to happen" -- my chevruta pointed out that perhaps it's necessary to problematize the discomfort people feel with מידת הדין -- not that we should be hankering for it, but rather that we ought to see דין as part of a balanced theology/religious psychology.)
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