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Kabbalat Shabbat Service
Shabbat
Dear friends,
You may have noticed the invitation to sponsor a new Siddur dedication in honor of my birthday. For the last several years, we have used the Machzor Lev Shalem for the High Holidays. In addition to significant commentaries, and additional readings, it includes transliteration of many parts of the service we sing as a community. This High Holiday prayerbook has allowed members of our community who are less familiar with the liturgy to participate more fully, without needing additional handouts or materials.
Several years ago, they created a companion volume for the Shabbat and Festival siddur. While the liturgy is 99% the same, the commentary, transliteration and even translation are not. Again, it allows for all of us to be on the same page in a number of ways. By welcoming all of our congregants into the same prayer book, we make it easier for them to feel part of our community. I know that change is challenging. We are used to the page numbers and the readings that have helped us connect to the Holy One and each other. In time, these new pages will feel familiar. One other significant change is uniting the opening Amidah page. Rather than having a page A and B, there is a single page, with one side including the matriarchs and one side without them. Again, it allows all of us to be in the same place at the same time, creating a sense of unity among our diverse participants.
We have been using the Lev Shalem most Friday nights--don’t forget to pick one up on the back table before services. Assuming shipping cooperates, we hope to begin using the Lev Shalem for our services on Shavuot. There we will discover that the festival services are towards the back of the book, requiring less flipping from Amidah to Hallel. In general, it will create less skipping around the prayerbook more of the time, and requiring jumps less frequently in our weekly Shabbat services. I hope this will make the service a little easier to follow for the novice and equally accessible for the davening maven.
Whether you have been praying the Jewish liturgy from birth, or just learning now, the readings and commentaries should inspire us all. I pray that this change will bring us closer to God, closer to Torah and closer to each other!
I pray you have a joyful Pesach and that your Omer counting connects you to the holiness of each day!
Nobody ever actually chose “Hatikva” as Israel’s national anthem. The State inherited the song, as it were, along with other treasures of the Zionist Movement.
“Hatikva” has been around for more than 100 years, and has outlasted many challengers. The elites haven’t always liked it, but the public has embraced it wholeheartedly.
“Hatikva” was written by Naphtali Herz Imber, a wandering Jewish poet who was born in Galicia in 1855 or 1856. Before he died in New York in 1909, he had managed to travel throughout Europe, Palestine, Britain, and the United States. Everywhere he went, he wrote poetry, recited his poems to anyone who would listen, and remained devoted to the nascent cause of Zionism.
In fact, Imber saw himself – not Theodor Herzl – as the spiritual father of Zionism. In one letter, he wrote: “I am the origin of the Zionist Movement. It is not generally known, but I am. Many years ago I went to Jerusalem, saw the misery of my people, felt the spirit of the place and determined to bring my scattered people together again. For 12 years, I struggled to put the Zionist Movement on its feet. Now that I have started it, I will let others carry it.”
Imber’s Hebrew poems did kindle a spark for many Jews. His most famous poem was and remains “Tikvatenu,” first penned in Iasi, Romania. It was the beginning of an anthem. Over time, Imber wrote new stanzas until the poem had nine stanzas.
The melody also has a story. Imber wrote a poem without music. Various attempts were made to set it to music. The first, apparently, was by a composer named Leon Igly. In what he certainly thought was a stroke of genius, Igly wrote a different tune for each of the nine stanzas. But teaching the public to sing it was so difficult that children who succeeded in getting through all nine verses used to get a prize of chocolate. Igly returned to Russia, and the melody was lost.
Soon thereafter, a new tune emerged in Rishon Lezion, the melody that is sung today. Some trace it to the Bohemian Symphony by the Czech composer Smetana, others say it is based on the Sephardi melody for Psalm 117 in the Hallel service. Still others say it bears a striking resemblance to a Romanian folk song.
In any case, the new tune caught on quickly, and the rest is history. Shalom, Cantor Jonathan Schultz
Part 2: What does Liyot Am Hofshi b’Artzeinu “to live as free people in our land” mean?
The Seders are fresh in my mind: we had amazing discussions, and despite the difficulty of the last few months, I’m feeling a sense of satisfaction that another link in the chain is solid, that our tradition was not only upheld but amplified by our Seder discussions which with our only adult child who was able to be with us. Despite being a musician with a great voice, he humored us by belting out another family tradition: Lishanah Haba’ah BiYerushalayim, off key because that’s the tradition.
Yes, that’s how every Seder concludes: Next year in Jerusalem. For perspective, the first mention of a Seder service is 90 BCE in the Mishnah of the Talmud by Rabbi Gamliel, the rabbi who says it’s our duty to explain the Pesach sacrifice, matzah and maror. It’s believed that the Haggadah was produced as a book around 1000 CE. In the Torah after God redeems us, our destination is the Land of Israel to fulfill the promise of God, the people and the land. Even before this, Abraham leaves his father’s home to “ a land that I will show you. ” To be in the land of Israel, to be good and to do good is the narrative the Torah weaves. It’s a promise and a partnership: if we deliver on ethical behavior, not only will God remember us, but the land will provide satisfaction.
Flash forward to contemporary days of memorial and celebration. Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’Atzma’ut seem to flow naturally from one to the other in our collective context. The Holocaust is sometimes seen as a catalyst to the creation of the State of Israel in one view of contemporary Jewish history. Even though Zionist efforts were long underway before Nazism, the efforts were fueled and intensified by ongoing antiSemitism. Our future was in someone else’s hands. Currently the first stop of many missions and youth trips is Auschwitz and then on to Israel. The message is clear: the two must be understood together. This is an image of Israel as a symbol of Survival. The phrase “Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel lives, is thought to have first been said by a British Jewish army chaplain at the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen-Belson after World War 2.
Israel also can be viewed as a celebration of a new paradigm, one that enables Jews to have as much say in their own destiny as any other free people. In the creation of the State of Israel the human role in redemption is dominant and self-assertive, a symbol of Jewish self determination: we are fulfilling our destiny in partnership with God. This is the message of Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, the price of achieving our Jewish destiny.
At one time these two approaches were seen as contradicting perceptions of the Jewish state. The post Holocaust view sees Israel as a refuge for persecuted Jews, created out of need. The latter view sees the land of Israel as a place where the Jewish people achieved a destiny we earned through struggle, fulfilling the biblical narrative. It is a difference between a Judaism based on survival and a Judaism based on purpose and continuity. Right now, these approaches have merged, and for many Jews the reality because it hasn’t been a dream for over 75 years to live as free people in our land and to have selfdetermination in Israel, a sovereign state, is being attacked. There are times when the relationship between Diaspora Jews and Israel require attentive nurturing, and there are times when the pull of historical narrative and the land is elemental. For many of us, those needs now intersect. Am Yisrael Chai!
