JewsByChoice.Org

(Cross-posted on True Ancestor)

So Said Larry Hoffman, our most recent teacher in the Wexner Heritage Program, who last night began leading us into a deep exploration of the Siddur, the Jewish prayer book.

Hoffman has a PhD in Liturgy and is also a rabbi. He teaches at Hebrew Union College in New York, and is pretty geeked out about the complexities of Jewish prayer and the marvels of the Siddur.

He pointed out that, unlike most books, the Siddur isn’t bought to be read. You never start it at the beginning, and you never get to the end. What’s more, it’s made, unlike most books, to be used in a public, communal, ritualized setting.

Professor/Rabbi Hoffman said the Siddur takes something from all forms of literature, but is perhaps most like Drama: it is the script of the Jewish people’s relationship with God through time. We all have roles to play in the drama, the central one being “to change you and make you a better person and a better Jew.”

After leading us through the basic structure of many blessings in the SIddur, and applying it to the Shema, Professor/Rabbi Hoffman pointed out that, in its historical context, the Siddur arose along with the Rabbinic tradition as a way of institutionalizing creativity — the central, oxymoronic challenge of Jewish observance. Hoffman said that Jewish prayer, before the advent of the Rabbis, was most akin to the extemporizing of gospel preachers, who use practiced rhetorical devices applied to Scripture, in dialogue with a rapt audience, to create something that is (one hopes) radically new each time.

The rabbinic tradition and the printing press, however, conspired (along with other historical events, like the destruction of the Temple, Diaspora and the need to survive) to lead us down the path toward setting the means and methods of our prayer in stone. That has, said Hoffman, been both our continuity and our undoing.

When you get beneath the surface of any Jewish practice, you see that it is an improvisation dropped in a pool of amber. You are both forbidden and encouraged to set it free. You have to adhere to a set of standards and traditions. You have to make it radically new. You have to be yourself; you have to be counted in, and counted on by, the community.

And your ’self’ is a core sample of continuity — fresh and individuated at the top, rooted in eons of debate and discussion and persecution and fervent prayer. The only way to begin to make sense of it all is to understand that the Siddur is the script of centuries of improvisation, telescoped into your moment of encounter with it.

You’re in the orchestra — musician and instrument, playing and being played; no two performances the same, never the same musicians in the pit; the score, the sounds and you a triple-helix of Jewish inventiveness that never changes and yet never holds still.