ḤAZARAT HASHATZ – LEADER’S REPETITION It is the custom for the Ark to be opened and remain open from this point to the end of Ne’ila. As “the gates are closing,” we symbolically keep the doors of the Ark open, beseeching God to stay open to our prayers, and as a way of signaling to the congregation the awesome nature of the prayers we are about to pray. Those able to, stand from this point onward.

אָב Our forefather. An alphabetical acrostic prayer by Rabbi Elazar HaKalir. “The forefather” is a reference to Abraham, the patriarch associated with the first blessing of the Amida. יְדָעֲךָ מִנֹּֽעַר Who recognized You from his youth. A reference to the tradition that Abraham discovered God as a child, and rejected the idols of his father Teraḥ. בְּחַנְתּוֹ בְּעֶֽשֶׂר You tested with ten trials. God put Abraham through ten trials, beginning with the call to leave his land, birthplace and father’s house, and culminating in the binding of Isaac (Avot 5:4). וְלֹא כְבַֽעַר And not as a boor. The boor worries about his own pain, a mature person worries about the pain of others. When God put Abraham through trials, he did not protest, but when He told Abraham that He was about to destroy Sodom, Abraham did protest (Gen. 18:23–32).

הַנִּקְרָא לְאָב זֶֽרַע [Isaac] who continued his father's name. Isaac, the subject of the second blessing of the Amida, was considered Abraham’s only covenantal offspring (Gen. 17:21). Though Ishmael was Abraham’s biological son, he was not his spiritual heir.

טֶֽבַע זִיו תָּאֳרָה The likeness of [Jacob’s] radiant countenance. Jacob is the subject of the Amida’s third blessing. לְעֵת קָץ חָז וַיִּירָא He rose from sleep, beheld it and was awestruck. Escaping Esau’s anger, Jacob left home to go to Laban. On his journey, alone, at night, he slept and dreamed of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending. On waking, “He was afraid and said, How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:17).

שַׁעֲרֵי אַרְמוֹן Let the gates of the palace. As the gates (of the Temple or of heaven) begin to close, we pray for them to stay open.

פְּתַח לָֽנוּ שַֽׁעַר בְּעֵת נְעִילַת שַֽׁעַר Open us a gate at the time of the locking of the gate. No time is too late to repent. The Talmud tells the story of King Hezekiah who lay gravely ill and was visited by the prophet Isaiah who told him that he was about to die. He had sinned, he was being punished and there was no hope of a reprieve. Hezekiah replied: “Son of Amotz, finish your prophecy and go. For I have it as a tradition from the house of my ancestor, that even if a sharp sword rests upon a person’s neck he should not desist from prayer.” God accepted Hezekiah’s repentance and granted him an additional fifteen years of life (Berakhot 10a; see II Kings 20).

הַיּוֹם יִפְנֶה The day will pass. As the day dies, let us not die but live. Be with us, God, in the darkness as our eternal light.

אֵל מֶֽלֶךְ God, King. A prelude to the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy whose recitation always accompanies the penitential prayers. There are many different customs as to how many times we say this prayer at Ne’ila. Some say it three times, others seven, some ten, yet others thirteen. A long standing Anglo-Jewish custom was to say it once, so as not to rush it or the other prayers of Ne’ila, on the principle: “Better a little with full concentration than much without concentration” (see, for example, Levush, OḤ 1:4). The rule is that each community should follow its extant custom. Every time we say this specific sequence of prayers, with its climax in the Thirteen Attributes, we are recapitulating the scene at the top of Mount Sinai when Moses prayed for the forgiveness of the people after the sin of the golden calf, and God did not merely grant forgiveness, but also taught Moses, and through him all future generations, how to pray for forgiveness. This was, as explained in the introduction, the moment on which Yom Kippur is based. It is the basis of all seliḥot, prayers for forgiveness, and it is the foundational moment at which Judaism became the supreme religion of forgiveness – humanity and God meeting in direct, unmediated encounter, our tears dissolved in God’s forbearing love, our souls cleansed, our lives readied for a new beginning.

וּמִי יַעֲמֹד Who could stand. As can be seen from the initial letters of the verses, this is a fragment of a longer poem structured as a reverse acrostic, moving from the last letter of the alphabet to the first. As with many of the poems in Ne’ila, most rites abbreviate the text because of the pressure of time. The opening words evoke Psalm 130:3: “If You, Lord, should keep account of sins, O LORD, who could stand?” A moving appeal to God to look on His people – exiled, persecuted and impoverished – and have compassion.

שִׁלּוּם פָּרִים שְׂפָתֵֽינוּ Let the fruits of our lips that we offer. The initial letters of each stich spell the name of the author of the poem, Shlomo HaKatan, Rabbi Shlomo ben Yehuda HaBavli (Shlomo the Babylonian, tenth century). The opening is a reference to Hosea 14:3: “Take with you words, and return to God…so will we render for bullocks the offering of our lips” – one of the key texts showing that in the absence of the Temple, words substitute for offerings, and prayer takes the place of sacrifice.

מְרֻבִּים צָרְכֵי עַמְּךָ Your people’s needs are many. This appears in the Talmud as the model of a short prayer to be said at times of risk or danger (Berakhot 29b). We are tongue-tied, inarticulate, unable properly to frame our prayers. Please heed them despite their, and our, flaws.

תְּחֹקְקֵֽנוּ Engrave us. The poet uses an unusually strong verb here. Elsewhere we have spoken about being “written” and “sealed” in the book of life, but here the poet says “engrave us,” carve our names indelibly in stone.

זְכֹר בְּרִית Remember the covenant. The opening to a piyut authored by Rabbeinu Gershom who was known as “the light of the Diaspora.”

וְאֵין שִׁיּוּר, רַק הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת And nothing remains but this Torah. One of the most poignant of all descriptions of Jewish life in the dark centuries of exile and persecution. Jews had nothing except the Torah. It was, said the poet Heinrich Heine, the “portable homeland” of the Jews. They had lost their land but they still had the covenant. They had lost their independence, but they still had the promise. They had lost the Temple but they still had the story. They had lost the visible presence of God but they still had His word, the Torah. It was their past, their future, their hope.

אֶנְקַת מְסַלְּדֶֽיךָ *Let the groaning of those who revere You.*Four fragments from four different poets. The first, “Let the groaning of those who revere You,” was written by Rabbi Silano, religious leader of the Jewish community of Venosa, Italy, in the first half of the ninth century. The second, “Israel, whose salvation,” was composed by Rabbi Shefatya ben Amitai, leader of the community in Oria, Italy in the ninth century. “Let the shade of His hands” was written by Rabbi Yitzhak ben Shmuel of Dampierre, France, in the twelfth century. “May He let us hear” was composed by Rabbi Shlomo ben Shmuel who lived and taught at Acre (Akko) in the north of Israel in the thirteenth century.

אֶזְכְּרָה *I remember.*A poem written by Rabbi Amitai ben Shefatya of Oria, Italy, in the ninth century. In it one can hear a trace of the bitterness Jews felt when they saw the imperial grandeur of Byzantine Christianity and medieval Islam while Jewish Jerusalem lay desecrated.