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 suggested that the same sequence is the basis for the threefold structure of the weekday Amidah: praise, request, thanks. Praise “emerges from an enraptured soul gazing at the mysterium magnum of creation” request “flows from an aching heart which finds itself in existential depths” and thanksgiving “is sung by the person who has attained, by the grace of GOD, redemption.” Creation leads to praise, revelation to request, and redemption to thanksgiving.
In these multiple ways, prayer continually reiterates the basic principles of Jewish faith.
5. PRAYER AND STUDY
THERE IS ONE SPIRITUAL ACTIVITY that the Sages regarded as even higher than prayer: namely, study of Torah, GOD’S word to humanity and His covenant with our ancestors and us (Shabbat 10a). The entire Ethics of the Fathers is a set of variations on the theme of a life devoted to Torah study. In prayer, we speak to GOD. Through Torah, GOD speaks to us. Praying, we speak. Studying, we listen.
From earliest times, the synagogue was a house of study as well as a house of prayer. Gatherings for study (perhaps around the figure of the prophet; see II Kings 4:23) may well have preceded formal prayer services by many centuries. Accordingly, interwoven with prayer are acts of study.
The most obvious is the public reading from the Torah, a central part of the Shabbat and Festival services, and in an abridged form on Monday and Thursday mornings and Shabbat afternoons. There are other examples. In the morning blessings before the Verses of Praise, there are two cycles of study, each in three parts: 1. Torah i.e. a passage from the Mosaic books; 2. Mishnah, the key document of the Oral Law; and 3. Talmud in the broadest sense (pages 14–16 and 24–32).
In the main section of prayer, the paragraph preceding the Shema is a form of blessing over Torah (see Berachot 11b), and the Shema itself represents Torah study (Menachot 99b). The last section of the weekday morning prayers (pages 136–138) was originally associated with the custom of studying ten verses from the prophetic books. Kaddish, which plays such a large part in the prayers, had its origin in the house of study as the conclusion of a derashah, a public exposition of biblical texts. The entire weekday morning service is thus an extended fugue between study and prayer.
This is dramatised in two key phrases: the first is Shema Yisrael, “Listen, Israel” GOD’S word through Moses and the Torah, and the second is Shema Koleinu, “Listen to our voice”, the paragraph within the Amidah that summarises all our requests (see above). These two phrases frame the great dialogue of study and prayer. Faith lives in these two acts of listening: ours to the call of GOD, GOD’S to the cry of humankind.
6. PRAYER AND MYSTICISM
JEWISH MYSTICISM HAS PLAYED A major role in the prayer book. The most obvious examples are the passage from the Zohar, “Blessed is the name” (page 408), the Song of Glory (page 458) written by one of the medieval North European pietists, and the two songs written by the sixteenth-century Tzefat mystics associated with Rabbi Isaac Luria, “Beloved of the soul” (page 256) and “Come, my beloved”
