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]

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.