My Morning's Excitement

[debka_notion]

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.

Comments

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

I've developed something of an appreciation for the English Sim Shalom Prayer for the Country, which I think is some of the best-written modern Conservative liturgy out there. (excepting that sometimes, I say "teach them insights of Your Torah" and think "but not too many."

[hotshot2000.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it or heard it in years, but I grew up on Silverman's Prayer for the Country and Sim Shalom's never grew on me; I remember thinking that Silverman's sounded more poetic, but that's probably just an intellectualization of my emotional connection to something I heard in my youth.

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.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

* Ick, how I hate that NYC-centric term, and I'm _from_ NYC.

I love the term! NYC is the center of the universe!

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

The English in the Silverman tended to be deliberately archaized, which is something that usually rubs me the wrong way. What I like about the Sim Shalom version is that it's in normal conversational English, makes sense as liturgy, and, for the most part, actually says something I want to say.

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).

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

The only benefit to the horrid prayer for peace in Sim Shalom is that I heard it every shabbos for one summer from the mouth of a truly lovely holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia, and now I can only hear it in my head with his accent which involved reading at a rather variable pace... So now it just makes me giggle a little.

[cynara-linnaea.livejournal.com]

The Conservative minyan at my college actually had to cut the reading o the Prayer for Peace because after a student 2 years ahead of me did a humorous rendition of that line, no one could ever recite it without cracking up. Nearly 3 years after her graduation, they are thinking of putting it back in.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

That's a really amusing story. Also a little sad- that just because a modern prayer in English might come from the Sim Shalom, it has to be verboten in the Orthodox world- or vice versa.