-—-————
5‘13
LITURGICAL REVISION: THE ETHICAL DIMENSION
John D. Rayner
Introduction
On
behalf of those of us
who
are only honorary Americans,
let
me compliment
the
CCAR on having chosen this outpost of its empire - for the second time - as the venue
for its international gathering.
sure
So
It is
a token of
its
increasing globalisation,
we all welcome, even though it raises a question of nomenclature.
which I am
far as liturgy is concerned, it reflects the recognition that significant Progressive
liturgical creativity has been going on for some time outside the United States,
that it may be possible to utilise that creativity towards the next phase of the
Jewish
and
CCAR's own
liturgy and perhaps ultimately towards an international liturgy capable of
being used, with local variations, throughout the Progressive Jewish world.
Let .me. also exgress my pgrsoqal seqspagfihonpur at. having been asked to introduce
this session. My credentials, for what they are worth, are that I have been engaged in
liturgical revision for forty years and taught liturgy for thirty. At any rate, I hope that
what I have to say will clarify some issues and strike some Chords.
Does worship have an
ethical
_
3
purpose?
we come
to our main topic, we need to raise this preliminary question: does
ethical purpose?
To that the Classical Reformers would undoubtedly have said 'yes‘. For they regarded
all ritual as a means to a moral end. In particular, that is how they understood the
Prophetic tirades against the sacrificial cult: as teaching that worship which does not
lead to right conduct fails in its purpose.
Before
worship have an
1 think they were wrong on both counts. On the one hand, the Prophets were saying
something much more revolutionary, namely that ritual is no part at all of what it means
to serve God, which is a matter of right conduct and nothing else. On the other hand,
although ritual is indeed a means to an end, the end is not in any straightforward sense
an ethical one. Its purpose, rather, is to bring us into the Divine Presence and so to
induce spirituality, or holiness.
Of course there are, or should be, ethical consequences. Because righteousness is of the
essence of God's nature, therefore any genuine encounter with God is sure to make a
moral impact. Similarly, the connotation of the word 'holiness‘ has an ethical
component. It straddles the two realms, of spirituality and morality. Nevertheless the
immediate purpose of worship is spiritual. It is to promote God-consciousness. The
ethical benefit is a spin-off from that.
It follows that when we revise the liturgy, our primary concern should be to maximise
its spiritual impact. That means giving priority to passages of an inspirational kind,
especially poetry and poetic prose, provided always that it is authentic and not
contrived. It also means making ample provision for music, which can be more evocative
than poetry, as poetry can be more evocative than prose. Above all, much depends on
the way the prayers are recited and the music is sung. That can make all the difference
between a mundane and a transcendental experience: between a jolly celebration of
Jewish peoplehood, and a reverential reaching out to the Creator of the Universe.
Nevertheless, the potential of worship to make an ethical impact - even though that is
not its most immediate purpose - is clearly of the greatest importance; and to maximise
it, I want to suggest thatv’two sets of desidemta need to be satisfied.
Integrity
The
first
of these
,
I
would
like to
lump
together under the general heading of integrity.
'
I
A
Eli
2:.
m
Q
I
3
~
‘
I
Maximalism
For instance, the Classical Reformers were somewhat cavalier in their treatment of the
traditional liturgy. In their desire to shorten the services and to avoid anything that
might strike the modern worshipper as antiquated, they eliminated far too much. Today
many of us feel that to deprive our people of anything that is of abiding value in the
total Jewish liturgical heritage is to rob them of part of their birthright, and consequently
that those who compile our liturgies have a responsibility - which is a moral one - to
include as much as possible of the traditional material in so far as it still has 'spiritual
life' in it..
Admittedly, that is a tall order, especially if there is a need, as 1 shall argue, to include
a great deal of additional material from outside the traditional liturgy. There is therefore
a huge embarrus de richesses, and the only practical solution, which most recent
Progressive liturgies have adopted, is to offer choice, so that not everything needs to be
accommodated in every service.
As a result, Progressive liturgies have‘tended
to
grow
longer.
One
edition of the
prayerbook of this Berlin Reformgémeiride '6ffered the'Sé'rvices fo'r the entire year ih 64
pages (Jakob Petuchoweki, Prayerbook Reform in Europe, p. 58)! By contrast, the latest
Siddur of the R868 runs to 609 pages, that of the ULPS to 655 pages, that of the CCAR
to 779 pages, and the Reconstructionist K01 ha-N'shamah to 853 pages. If this trend
continues we may have to reverse it by exercising greater restraint and selectivity; but the
principle of maximal inclusion remains valid.
Accuracy
Our communities also have a right to expect of those who compile their prayerbooks
that they have an expert knowledge of Jewish liturgy and Hebrew grammar.
Unfortunately, graduation from a rabbinic seminary is no guarantee of that.
Many recent prayerbooks — of all tendencies - are full of grammatical mistakes.
Singer‘s, for example, has many pausal forms without a comma or other orthographic
sign to justify them (e.g., 1min and 1m: in the Ahavah Rabbah, 1990 edn., p. 63). The Chief
Rabbi '5 Children 's Siddur consistently mis-spells the rubric mm“: p105 with a kibbutz and
a nonsensical dagesh in the kuf (1995 edn., pp. 12, 13, 16). The Conservative Siddur Sim
Shalom both mis-spells and mis-translates its own emendation mD'mn pm; (sic) for
DDT}?! pm (1985 edn., p. 314). The Israeli Siddur 25127
is replete with words like m5
and 5;: without a makkef to justify the short vowel (e.g., the Psalm verses on p. 6)..
A little more seriously, the B‘rachah as a liturgical form is subject to certain stylistic
rules, for instance, mow-15 11.30 nn‘nn rm, that the phrase immediately preceding the
concluding eulogy must lead into it (Pes. 104a). Many Progressive prayerbooks, when
reconstructing traditional B'rachot, ignore that rule‘ For example, the old Union Prayer
Book broke it when it changed the chatimah of the second B‘rachah of the Amidah,
known as Cevurot, to D5157 “H 1:31:13 man without providing a transition to it (1940 edn., p.
19).: a bad example which, I have to confess, the ULPS followed in its Service of the
Heart (1967 edn., p. 44)“
These are, admittedly, small points. But in the context of worship nothing but the best
is good enough. If it is a serious matter to offer a blemished sacrifice or to use an
imperfect Etrog, then we should also be fastidious about matters of grammar and style.
mum
’
Continuity
A knowledge of liturgy also includes knowledge of what our predecessors in the field
of liturgical revision have already accomplished, so that we do not ignore that part of
our heritage but build on it. “is therefore very sad when in some recent prayerbooks one
finds clumsy attempts to solve problems which were solved felicitously by many of the
great German liturgical reformers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
culminating in the Einhez’tsgebetbuch. That applies especially to the Emtza'iyyot or
3
'Intermediate Benedictions‘ of the Amidah in the RSGB Siddur,
German translation in the very land of the Einhez’tsgebetbuch..
now
being used in a
Truthfitlness
Much more seriously, though, our people have a right to expect that the prayers we
make them recite will be such that they can recite them truthfully. Surely theological
honesty is the foremost criterion by which Progressive prayerbooks are to be judged.
Admittedly, it is not always easy to know what theological affirmations our
congregants - or, for that matter, our rabbis - feel able to make. Certainly there is no
need to take every Hebrew phrase literally. Often there is room for a variety of
interpretations which may diverge more or less widely from the one originally intended;
and how far this liberty of reinterpretation may legitimately be stretched, is notoriously
hard to define. Nevertheless 51:: a», there are limits, and having said that, I must give a
few examples of where, to my mind, the limit has been exceeded.
Messiah
Can we,
for instance, affirm the traditional belief in a personal
Messiah?
I
think not.
seems to me that the concept is a figment of the imagination of the apocalyptists,
who were charlatan prophets, so that there is no good reason at all to go along with it.
Consequently I am disturbed when I find in Progressive prayerbboks the unamended
Havdalah song mum 171’53 with its petition that Elijah may soon return to the earth
for
it
mm DD, ‘with the Messiah, son of David' (see, e.g. Forms of Prayer, Vol.
I, p. 329)..
regrettable, though, is the habit, found in many Progressive prayerbooks, of
leaving a text unchanged while deliberately disguising its meaning in the translation, in
the evident hope that our congregants will fail to notice the discrepancy.
For instance, in the first B'rachah of the Amidah, known as Avot, there is the word bun,
'redeemer', clearly referring to the Messiah. As early as 1856, David Einhorn, in his Olat
Tamid, changed that to n‘mz, ‘redemption‘, whence it passed into the
and ULPS
liturgies. As Jakob Petuchowski ‘7’: pointed out in his Prayerbook Reform in Europe, only
very few European liturgies follow that precedent. 'Yet,’ as he goes on to say, 'in the
translation, the overwhelming number of the rituals prefer "redemption" to "redeemer".‘
The RSGB liturgy, too, has always retained firm, but whereas until 1977 this was
111 1:
Even more
CCAR
translated 'redeemer‘, its current Siddur has ‘rescue', which not only disguises what the
Hebrew says but also endorses what Gershom Scholem called 'the catastrophic View of
history', which is the antithesis of‘how the Classical Reformers understood the messianic
ho
e.
Amidah, known as Birkat David, is even more explicitly about
the restoration of the Davidic kingdom The RSGB liturgy changes the opening words to
11:» ‘n-I'Wn‘l we”: R'WJ, 'Fulfil in our time the words of Your servant David', leaving the
worshipper to guess which of king David's prophecies is being alluded to - a sleight-ofTrim 15th B'rachah of the
hand on which
I
feel
bound
to
cement:
it
is fine to
untraditional, but to pretend to be traditional
admirable.
be traditional, and it is fine to be
is not seems to me less than
when one
Resurrection
The second B'rachah of the Amidah, known as G'vurot, is partly about nature. In the
“mm
winter months it includes the lovely phrase
mm, that God causes the
wind to blow and the rain to fall, which most Progressive prayerbooks unaccountably
omiL But it is also about resurrection, and one of the thomiest problems in liturgical
revision is whether the traditional language of mmn n“nn can be allowed to stand and
reinterpreted as an allusion to immortality in a more general sense. I think it is a borderline case, and the ULPS has vacillated about it; but in retrospect I am slightly sorry that,
when we compiled Siddur Lev Chadash, we did not opt for a suggestion of mine, to
mm
mm
4
mm,
n‘nmn mm: to :1“a
affirming that
reinforcing the link with the nature theme.
change
God renews
life
and incidentally
Temple
The 17th benediction of the Tefillah, known as Avodah, was originally a petition for
God‘s acceptance of Israel's Temple worship and ended 11:9: mw: 11:15 1mm, 'whom
alone we worship in reverence‘. After the destruction of the Temple the chatimuh was
changed to 11’35 1mm; fiwnm - a poetic metaphor for the restoration of the Temple with
its sacrificial cult; and since just that is one of the major themes of the traditional
Synagogue liturgy, there is every reason to think that in traditional circles it was always
so understood. Accordingly, many Progressive prayerbooks on both sides of the
Atlantic, beginning with the Hamburg Temple in 1841 and the Olut Tumid in 1856,
reverted to the original chatimah, which also enabled them to reaffirm one of the salient
principles of Progressive Judaism, that the Synagogue is not a temporary, inferior
substitute for_ th_e_ Temple bqtfla permanent and‘muchV-to-be-preferred successor
infititutioxl. But both the CCAR's Gates of Prayer and the RSGB's Forms of Prayer have
recently reverted to the return of the Sh'chinah, without explaining to their congregations
whether it still refers to the restoration of the Temple, or whether it is to be understood
in some other unspecified sense — or whether it matters what it means as long as it
sounds traditional.
[ews and Non-Jews
There are also a number of passages in the traditional liturgy which raise ethical
questions about the relationship between Jews and non—Jews in the Divine Scheme. Does
it, for instance, accord with our understanding of that relationship to thank God
'mw 1m: “7m R511, for healing the sick of God's people Israel, without at the same time
acknowledging - even grudgingly, let alone graciom - that the divinely created healing
powers operate also for the benefit of non-Jews? Again, is it adequate to praise God as
015w: ‘amw warns “man, the One who blesses the Jewish people with peace, without
acknowledging, two—and—a—half millennia after Jeremiah‘s Letter to the Exiles, that peace
is indivisible? When, in the Festival Kiddush, we say ]1L’>‘D"3D?3 mam, that God has
exalted us above all tongues, are we not making a value judgment at variance with the
best Prophetic teachings (e.g., Amos 9:7 and Isa. 19:25)? When, in the Haggadah, we
pronounce the medieval curse 1mm 1152?, Tour out Your wrath upon the nations that do
not acknowledge You' — which even Conservatives like Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs omit (Ask
the Rabbi, p. 140) - should we not be aware that we are flying in the face of the teachings
of Ezekiel (33:11) and Beruriah (Ber. 10a) that God desires repentance rather than
destruction? When We use the unamended Havdalah text, do we not imply that Jews are
related to non-Jews as holy is to profane and light to darkness? If we were non-Jews,
would we not be justified in demanding that such passages be revised in the same way
as we have demanded that anti-Jewish passages be expunged from the Christian liturgy?
About the examples 1 have cited there are no doubt different views among us, but I
hope it will be agreed that they do raise ethical issues.
Attribution
point, albeit a relatively minor one, needs to be made under the general
so far as we import into our prayerbooks material that is novel
in the sense that it was not utilised in the traditional liturgy, we ought to be rather
meticulous about quoting our sources‘ Several recent Progressive prayerbooks include
magnificent anthologies, but in many cases they seem to have been culled from
secondary rather than primary sources, and often the attribution is as vague and
virtually useless as 'Chasidic‘. In View of the extreme fastidiousness of Jewish tradition
about attribution - its praise of those who quote their sources mm“ mm, in the
of
One more
heading of
'integrity‘: in
me
their
author (Avot
6:6),
and
its
B’midbar, §27, ed. Buber, 11a).
value missed,
accurately.
we ought
-
condemnation of those who
fail to do that (Tanchuma,
for that ethical reason, quite apart from the educational
to track
down our primary
sources and attribute them
Direct Teachings
Let me recapitulate a little before tuming, much more briefly, to my final topic. Although
the primary purpose of worship is not ethical but spiritual, nevertheless, in so far as it
brings us into the Divine Presence and promotes holiness, it is bound to make an ethical
impact. And two desideratu can maximise that impact. The first, which we have
discussed, is integrity.. The second, which we now turn to, is the content of the liturgy in
terms of direct teachings of an ethical mature.
Here it is necessary to re-emphasise a point already touched on: the enormous
advantage of Synagogue worship over Temple worship. Temple worship or Avodah
consisted essentially of sacrifices, of which there .were only about half a dozen different
kinds, symbolising such concepts as sin, guilt and thanksgiving Synagogue worship or
Tefillah, because it employs language, is a million times more versatile, since it is capable
of expressing an infinite number of concepts.
It is, therefore, incidentally, an almost uncanny fulfilment of Hosea's prophecy:
121-131 mm: mp, ‘Take with you words, and return to the Eternal One; say to God: Forgive
all iniquity, :m'npu, and accept that‘which is good; so we will bring, instead of bullocks,
the offering of our lips' (14:3) - a verse which already the Rabbis understood as referring
to prayer, and indeed to the Amidah in particular (NumR. 18:21).
Since to engage in Tefillah is 'to take with us words', it is capable, among many other
things, of expressing :nrz, 'that which is good' in the sense of ethical teachings, and so
confronting the worshipper with a moral challenge.
Sidra and Hafturah
traditional liturgy does that in many ways, the most obvious of which is its
lectionary of public Scripture readings. But two qualifications are necessary. One is
that the greatest passages are not necessarily read on the most solemn occasions, for
though the Decalogue is read on Shavuot, the 19th chapter of Leviticus is not read on
Yom Kippur except in Progressive synagogues. There, I think, we have an advantage.
The more serious qualification is that the traditional selection of Haftarot is not in all
respects the most felicitous from an ethical or any other point of View. Not only does it
exclude the Ketuvim, but even within the Prophetic canon it omits many passages of
great ethical power and beauty. To give only two examples, it omits most of Ieremiah‘s
Temple Sermon and all of his Letter to the Exiles.
On the contrary, it includes many passages of little value or worse. For instance,
during a recent conference of the European Region of the World Union for Progressive
Judaism in Zurich, I was horrified when at the Sabbath morning service, because it was
Shabbat Zachor, the Haftarah that was read was the traditional one from the 15th
chapter of the First Book of Samuel, the one extolling genocide which inspired - if that is
the right word - Baruch Goldstein to murder a congregation of Muslims at prayer in the
Hebron mosque. It is surely one of the most disgraceful passages in all of the world's
religious literature, and since we can't expunge it, the least we can do, if we have any
decency, is not to read it publicly.
I am therefore suggesting that we could enhance the ethical impact of our services by
choosing our Haftarot more freely and more discriminatingly.
The
The Sayings of the Sages
Another example of the ethical content of the traditional liturgy is the inclusion in the
Siddur of the six chapters of Pirkei Avot, usually translated 'Ethics of the Fathers'.
Although that is a misnomer, since the main topic of the little tractate is not ethics but
Talmud Torah, nevertheless it does contain some fine ethical teachings. But so does its
companion volume Avot d'Rabbz' Natan, which does not feature in the traditional liturgy,
and there is, I think, much to be said for breaking new ground, as we have done in Siddur
Lev Chadash, by including a selection of the best teachings from both tractates, under the
general heading of 'The Sayings of the Sages‘. That would bring to the attention of our
members some fine Jewish ethical teachings which they are not otherwise likely to
encounter.
Study Anthologies
In addition, the traditional Siddur includes a few study passages. Unfortunately,
of these are about sacrifices (the Korlmnot section of the daily morning service) or
about the species of oil permissible for the kindling of the Shabbat lights (TP‘LJ‘ID nm) or
about the hermeneutic rules (the 'Baraita of Rabbi Ishmael‘), none of which are of any
ethical import. An exception is the fine passage beginning 119w nn'a my own fan from
Mishnah Pe'ah included in the Birchot hu-Shachur section of the daily morning service,
which of course all or most Progressive prayerbooks also utilise in one context or
another.
But the idea of including such material has been taken up in a big way by a number of
recent Progressive liturgies. Outstanding among these are the so-called 'Study
Anthologies‘ of the RSGB liturgy, which, as contained in its three volumes, run to no
fewer than 273 pages! Furthermore, they are all in English, which is a pity because the
omission of the original Hebrew, Aramaic or Yiddish texts, where applicable, diminishes
their educational value, but also goes to show how much longer still they would have
been if the original texts had been included. Needless to say, many of the selected
passages are on ethical subjects such as love, humility, truth, justice and peace. Of
course, the RSGB also includes some novel material elsewhere, especially in its Birchot
ha-Shachar.
Equally magnificent is the anthology included in Siddour Taher Libénou, the prayerbook
of the Mouvement Juif Libéral de France, published in 1997. There the anthology (in
French only) runs to 153 pages and again includes much ethical material.
There are also some fine study passages in the Israeli prayerbook 35:0
of 1982,
made accessible to German readers by the prayerbook of 07 Chudash, the Liberal Jewish
Community of Zurich since 1992.
most
mum
Prayers and Readings on Special Themes
A
slightly different way was chosen by the ULPS when it produced its Siddur Lev
in 1995. The idea goes back to its Service of the Heart of 1967 as well as the
CCAR‘s Gates of Prayer of 1975, but has now been much more fully developed. This is a
section of 'Prayers and Readings on Special Themes‘ of which there are 53 sequences, one
for every week of the year, arranged liturgically — i.e., divided between reader,
congregation, responsive reading, and singing - so that they can be experienced as an
integral part of the service rather than an interruption of it for a study session.
The selection, which runs to just over 200 pages, comprises both biblical and postbiblical passages which do not otherwise feature in Jewish liturgy, including Apocrypha
and Dead Sea Scrolls, Talmud and Midrash, as well as medieval and modern poetry
and prose, and, where applicable, gives the Hebrew, Aramaic or Yiddish texts as well as
translations, and again, much of it is of an ethical nature.
may then generaiise and say that there is a clear tendency in recent Progressive
Jprayerbooks to include more and more material extrinsic to the traditional liturgy,
garnered from the whole gamut of Jewish literature from biblical to modern times
Exactly how to use that material, and in particular how to integrate it into the worship
experience, is a problem which has yet to find its optimal solution But the idea has
surely come to stay, and it has vastly enlarged the range of Jewish concepts and values
Chadash
We
7
that confront and challenge those who use our liturgy. If they also listen and respond to
what it has to say, there should be a significant ethical impact.
At any rate, our task is clear. It is so to fashion and re-fashion the Jewish liturgy that
it may enhance the lives of our people both spiritually and ethically. That task is far
from complete, but think we may humbly msay that we have made a good start. And if
I
our conference can advance
it
even a
The
little, it
will
have been worth while.
CCAR Convention
Liberal; Jewish Synagogue
St John’s Wood, London
17
May 2000