facing Jerusalem (Daniel 6:10). The loss of the Temple and the experience of exile led to the emergence of regular gatherings for study and prayer.
The next chapter in this story was written by Ezra (fifth century BCE) who, together with the statesman Nehemiah, reorganised Jewish life in Israel after the return from Babylon. Ezra (“the scribe”) was a new type in history: the educator as hero. The Book of Nehemiah (8:1–9) contains a detailed description of the national assembly Ezra convened in Jerusalem, where he read the Torah aloud, with the help of the Levites who explained it to the people.
Ezra and Nehemiah were disturbed by the high degree of assimilation among the Jews who had remained in Israel. They knew that without a strong religious identity, the people would eventually disappear through intermingling with other nations and cultures. To guard against this, they set in motion far-reaching initiatives, including a national reaffirmation of the nation’s covenant with GOD (Nehemiah 10). One of the most important developments was the first formulation of prayers, attributed by the Sages to Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly. Maimonides suggests that one of their motives for so doing was to re-establish Hebrew as the national language: at that time, “Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah” (Nehemiah 13:24; Laws of Prayer 1:4).
One of the results of this religious renewal was the birth, or growth, of the synagogue. During the Second Temple period, priests were divided into 24 groups, mishmarot, each of which served in the Temple for a week in a rota. They were accompanied by groups of local lay-people, ma’amadot, some of whom accompanied them to the Temple, others of whom stayed in their towns but said prayers to coincide with the sacrifices. Whether the synagogue developed from these ma’amadot, or whether its origins were earlier, by the time the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, it was a well-established institution.
The synagogue was “one of the greatest revolutions in the history of religion and society.” (M. Stern). It was the first place of worship made holy, not because of any historic association, nor because sacrifices were offered, but simply because people gathered there to study and pray. It embodied one of the great truths of monotheism: that the GOD of everywhere could be worshipped anywhere. After the loss of the Second Temple it became the home-in-exile of a scattered people. Every synagogue was a fragment of Jerusalem. And though the destruction of the Temple meant that sacrifices could no longer be offered, in their place came an offering of words, namely prayer.
The transition from sacrifice to prayer was not a sudden development. A thousand years earlier, in his speech at the dedication of the Temple, King Solomon had emphasised prayer rather than sacrifice (I Kings 8:12–53). Through Isaiah, GOD had said “My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples (Isaiah 56:7). The prophet Hosea had said: “Take words with you and return to the LORD … Instead of bulls we will pay [the offering of] our lips.” (Hosea 14:3). Sacrifice was the external accompaniment of an inner act of heart and mind: thanksgiving, atonement, and so on. Therefore, though the outer act was no longer possible, the inner act remained. That is how sacrifice turned into prayer.
What had once been two quite different forms of worship now became one. Prayer took on the highly structured character of the sacrificial service, with fixed texts and times. The silence that had accompanied the sacrifice was transmuted into speech. Two traditions – prophetic prayer on the one hand, priestly sacrificial service on the other – merged and became one. That is the remarkable story behind the words, “What is the [sacrificial] service of the 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,
