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

[wilperegrine.livejournal.com]

That's awesome!

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.

[jonahrank.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's really cool!

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).

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

To some degree, I wonder what the author/editor of the 15th century siddur was thinking שעשיתני אישה ולא איש (and by extension, שעשאני איש ולא אשה, the more archaic phrasing) means.

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.

[qianian.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, What?