Hebrew Daily Prayer Book. Jonathan Sacks
the seventh day, Shabbat; the seventh month, Tishri with its Days of Awe; the seventh year, the “year of release”; and the fiftieth year, the Jubilee, which follows seven cycles of seven years. Seven in Judaism is not a simple prime number. It is the one-after-six. Six represents the material, physical, secular. Ancient Mesopotamia, from which Abraham came, originally used a numerical system based on the number six. Western civilization still bears traces of this in the twenty-four hour day (2 × 6 hours of light, plus 2 × 6 of darkness); the sixty (10 × 6) minutes in an hour, and seconds in a minute; and the 360 degrees in a circle (6 × 6 × 10). All of these originated in astronomy, at which the ancient Mesopotamians excelled. Judaism acknowledges the six-part structure of time and space, but adds that GOD exists beyond time and space. Hence seven – the one beyond six – became the symbol of the holy.
Six, too, is not a simple number in Judaism. This becomes evident when we read the story of creation in Genesis 1 carefully. The first six days fall into two groups. On the first three, GOD created and separated domains (1: light and darkness, 2: upper and lower waters, 3: sea and dry land). On the second three GOD populated these domains, each with its appropriate objects or life-forms (4: sun, moon and stars, 5: birds and fish, 6: land animals and man). The seventh day, Shab-bat, is holy because it stands outside nature and its causal-scientific laws.
Mirroring this pattern, the morning service is structured around the number seven: the three paragraphs of the Shema, surrounded by three blessings, leading to the seventh, the Amidah, which is the domain of the holy, where we stand directly in the presence of GOD. On holy days – Shabbat and Festivals – the Amidah has a sevenfold structure: the three opening and closing paragraphs, plus a middle paragraph dedicated to “the holiness of the day”.
It follows that sixfold structures in the Siddur signal the universe and creation. Thus, on weekday mornings we say six psalms (145–150) in the Verses of Praise. Kabbalat Shabbat also contains six psalms, corresponding to the days of the week, before Lecha Dodi, which represents Shabbat itself. The blessing after the Shema repeats the keyword Emet (“true”) six times to show how GOD’S love is translated into redemptive activity in a this-worldly time and space.
Many prayers such as El Adon (page 374) and Aleinu are constructed in a pattern of fours: four-line verses, each of four words. Often these reflect Jewish mysticism with its four “worlds”: Asiyah (Action), Yetzirah (Formation), Beriah (Creation) and Atzilut (Emanation). Merkavah mysticism, based on Ezekiel’s vision of the Divine chariot, is an important strand of early rabbinic prayer.
The number ten represents the “ten utterances with which the world was created” (the ten places in Genesis 1 where an act of creation is preceded by the words “GOD said”). That is why Baruch She-amar, the blessing before the creation section of the prayers, begins with a tenfold litany of phrases each beginning with the word “Blessed”.
Fifteen represents the fifteen steps between the courtyards of the Temple, the fifteen Psalms beginning “A Song of Ascent”, and the numerical value of the first two letters of GOD’S holiest name. Hence there are fifteen expressions of praise in the paragraph Yishtabach; fifteen adjectives following “the LORD Your GOD, true” at the end of the Shema in the morning; fifteen psalms in the Verses of Praise on Shabbat and Festival mornings; and so on. There are also more intricate numerical patterns.
These are not mere aesthetic conventions like, for example, the fourteen-line sonnet form or the four-movement structure of a symphony. As always in Judaism there is a matching of form to content, structure to substance. The Sages understood – as did the ancient Greeks, amply confirmed by modern science – that reality has a numerical structure. Mirroring this structure in prayer, we evoke the sense of a world of order in which we are called on to respect differences and honour boundaries, accepting graciously the integrity of natural and moral law.
J. From Love to Awe
The supreme religious emotions are love and awe – in that order. We are commanded to “Love the LORD your GOD” We are also commanded to experience the feelings associated with the Hebrew word yirah, which means “awe, fear, reverence”. This is how Maimonides puts it: “When a person contemplates His great and wondrous works and creatures and from them obtains a glimpse of His wisdom, which is incomparable and infinite, he will immediately love Him, praise Him, glorify Him, and long with an exceeding longing to know His great name … And when he ponders these matters, he will recoil frightened, and realise that he is a small creature, lowly and obscure, endowed with slight and slender intelligence, standing in the presence of Him who is perfect in knowledge” (Yesodei HaTorah 2:2).
The supreme expression of love in Judaism is the Shema with its injunction: “Love the LORD your GOD with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” The supreme expression of awe is the Amidah prayer, when we stand consciously in the presence of GOD. The basic movement of the morning and evening prayers is first, to climb to the peak of love, the Shema, and from there to the summit of awe, the Amidah.
4. CREATION, REVELATION, REDEMPTION
ONE STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLE OF THE prayers deserves special attention, since it touches on the fundamentals of Jewish faith. In the twelfth century, Moses Maimonides enumerated the Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith. They appear in the Siddur in two forms: the poem known as Yigdal (page 12) and a prose version after the end of the morning service (page 164).
Rabbi Shimon ben Tzemach Duran (1361–1444) pointed out that Maimonides’ principles could be analysed and categorised into three themes: 1. the existence of GOD, the Creator (Principles 1–5: GOD’S existence, unity, incorporeal-ity and eternity, and that He alone is to be worshipped); 2. Divine revelation (Principles 6–9: prophecy, Moses’ uniqueness, the GoD-given character of the Torah and its immutability), and 3. GOD’S justice (Principles 10–13: GOD knows all, repays us according to our deeds, and will bring the messiah and the resurrection of the dead). The philosopher Franz Rosenzweig summarised these in three words: creation, revelation, redemption. Creation is the relationship between GOD and the universe. Revelation is the relationship between GOD and humanity. Redemption occurs when we apply revelation to creation.
The movement from creation to revelation to redemption is one of the great structural motifs of prayer. One example is the three blessings in the morning service, surrounding the Shema and leading up to the Amidah (pages 62–74). The first is about the creation of the universe in space and time; the second is about the revelation of the Torah; and the third is about the miracles of history, ending with the words, “who redeemed Israel”.
The three paragraphs of the Shema display the same pattern. The first is about creation (GOD’S unity and sovereignty), the second about revelation (acceptance of the commandments), and the third about redemption (“I am GOD your LORD who brought you out of the land of Egypt”).
The weekday morning as a whole is constructed on this principle. First come the Verses of Praise, taken from the Book of Psalms, with their majestic vision of creation. Then follows the central section – the Shema and its blessings, leading to the Amidah – in which we sit, then stand, in the immediate presence of GOD (revelation). Finally we come to the concluding prayers with their central line, “A redeemer will come to Zion” The second paragraph of Aleinu is likewise a vision of redemption.
The pattern is repeated yet again in the Shabbat evening, morning and afternoon prayers. On Friday evening, in the central blessing of the Amidah, we speak of the Shabbat of creation (“the culmination of the creation of heaven and earth”). In the morning we refer to the Shabbat of revelation (when “Moses brought down in his hands the two tablets of stone”). In the afternoon we anticipate future redemption (when “You are one and Your name is one” and the people Israel are again “one nation on earth”).
Rav Joseph Soloveitchik