Hebrew Daily Prayer Book. Jonathan Sacks
heart? This is prayer.”
There is a series of arguments, spanning the centuries, about the nature of prayer. According to Maimonides, prayer is a biblical commandment; according to Nachmanides it is merely rabbinic. Two third-century teachers, Rabbi Jose, son of Rabbi Chanina, and Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, disagreed as to the origin of the prayers, the former holding that they were instituted by the patriarchs – Abraham initiating the morning prayer, Isaac the afternoon, and Jacob the evening service – while the latter held that they corresponded to the sacrifices. Centuries earlier, Rabban Gamliel and the Sages differed as to which was primary, the silent Amidah or the Reader’s repetition. Each of these debates ultimately hinges on the question as to which of the two sources of prayer – the improvised prayers of the figures of the Bible or the sacrificial service of the Tabernacle and Temple – is the more fundamental.
In truth, there is no answer: prayer as we have known it for two millennia draws on both traditions. More remarkably, we honour both, because each Amidah is said twice, once silently by individuals, a second time aloud and publicly by the Leader. The silent Amidah recalls the prayers of individuals in the Bible, while the Leader’s repetition recalls the sacrifice: hence there is no repetition of the evening Amidah, since there was no sacrifice in the evening. In prayer, two great streams of Jewish spirituality met and became one.
3. STRUCTURES OF PRAYER
THE HEBREW WORD FOR A PRAYER book, Siddur, means “order”. At its height, prayer is an intensely emotional experience. The wonder of praise, the joy of thanksgiving, the passion of love, the trembling of awe, the broken-heartedness of confession, the yearning of hope – all these are part of the tonality of prayer. Yet Judaism is also, and supremely, a religion of the mind – for untutored emotion, like a river that bursts its banks, can be anarchic and destructive. The opening chapter of Genesis, with its account of creation, evokes a sense of order. Each day has its task; each life-form has its place; and the result (until the birth of sin) was harmony. Jewish prayer, therefore, has an order. Like a choral symphony, it has movements, each with its moods, its unfolding themes, its developmental logic. In this section, I analyse some of these structures.
The Siddur as it exists today is the result of some forty centuries of Jewish history. Yet the result is not mere bricolage, a patchwork of random additions. It is as if the composition of the prayer book has been shaped by an “invisible hand”, a Divine inspiration that transcends the intentions of any particular author. Specifically, form mirrors substance. The shape of the prayers reveals the basic shape of the Jewish spirit as it has been moulded by its encounter with GOD. These are some of the structural features of the prayers.
A. From Universal to Particular
In general, sequences of Jewish prayer move from the universal to the particular. Grace after Meals, for example, begins with a blessing thanking GOD “who in His goodness feeds the whole world”. The second blessing moves to particularities: Israel, liberation from slavery, “the covenant You sealed in our flesh”, Torah and the commandments. We thank GOD “for the land [of Israel] and the food.” The third is more narrowly focused still. It is about the holy city, Jerusalem.
The same pattern exists in the two blessings before the Shema in the morning and evening service. The first is about the universe (“who gives light to the earth” “who creates day and night”), and the second is about Torah, the specific bond of love between GOD and the Jewish people. Look and you will find many more examples in the Siddur. (The one exception is Aleinu, whose first paragraph is about Jewish particularity and whose second is a universal hope. On this, see below, on “mirror-image symmetry.”).
This movement from universal to particular is distinctively Jewish. Western culture, under the influence of Plato, has tended to move in the opposite direction, from the concrete instance to the general rule, valuing universals above particularities. Judaism is the great counter-Platonic narrative in Western civilization.
Moving from the universal to the particular, the prayer book mirrors the structure of the Torah itself. Genesis begins, in its first eleven chapters, with a description of the universal condition of humankind. Only in its twelfth chapter is there a call to an individual, Abraham, to leave his land, family and father’s house and lead a life of righteousness through which “all the families of the earth shall be blessed”.
There are universals of human behaviour: we call them the Noahide Laws. But we worship GOD in and through the particularity of our history, language and heritage. The highest love is not abstract but concrete. Those who truly love, cherish what makes the beloved different, unique, irreplaceable: that is the theme of the greatest of all books of religious love, The Song of Songs. That, we believe, is how GOD loves us.
B. Mirror-image Symmetry
Many Torah passages are constructed in the form of a mirror-image symmetry, technically known as chiasmus: a sequence with the form ABCCBA, where the second half reverses the order of the first. A precise example is the six-word commandment that forms the central element of the Noahide covenant (Genesis 9:6):
“[A] Who sheds [B] the blood [C] of man [C] by man [B] shall his blood [A] be shed.”
This is more than a stylistic device. It is the expression of one of the Torah’s most profound beliefs; namely, the reciprocal nature of justice. Those who do good are blessed with good. Those who do evil, suffer evil. What happens to us is a mirror image of what we do. Thus form mirrors substance: mirror-image symmetry is the literary equivalent of a just world.
Some prayers have a mirror-image structure. Most of the paragraphs of the Amidah, for example, finish the same way as they begin (“at the end of a blessing one should say something similar to its beginning', Pesachim 104a). So, for example, the sixteenth blessing begins, “Hear our voice” and ends “Who hears prayer”. The eighteenth begins, “We thank You” and ends “To whom it is fitting to give thanks.” The Amidah as a whole begins with a request to GOD to help us open our mouth in prayer. It ends with a request to GOD to help us close our mouth from deceitful speech.
According to Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, the first and last three blessings of the Amidah stand in a mirror-image relationship. The last uses the same key words as the first: kindness (chessed) and love (ahavah). The penultimate has the same subject as the second: the gift of life and the hidden miracles that surround us constantly. The seventeenth and third are both about holiness. Thus the end of the Amidah is a mirror-image of its beginning.
This explains why Aleinu – the prayer with which most services end – is constructed in a sequence opposite to all other prayers. Others move from the universal to the particular, but Aleinu reverses the order, beginning with a hymn to particularity (“Who has not made us like the nations of the world”) and ending with one of the great prayers for universality, when “all mankind will call on Your name”. Aleinu gives each service a chiastic structure. Previous prayers have been A-B (universal-particular); Aleinu is B-A (particular-universal).
As we will see, many of the other structuring principles are three-part series of the form A-B-A.
C. Praise, Request, Thanks
The Sages ruled that the Amidah – prayer par excellence – should follow a basic pattern of praise (shevach), request (bakashahh), and acknowledgement or thanks (hodayah). This is how Maimonides puts it: “The obligation of prayer is that every person should daily, according to his ability, offer up supplication and prayer, first uttering praises of GOD, then with humble supplication and petition asking for all that he needs, and finally offering praise and thanksgiving to the Eternal for the benefits already bestowed on him in rich measure” (Laws of Prayer 1:2).
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