בָּרְכוּ אֶת יהוה Bless the LORD. The formal start of communal prayer, to which the Verses of Praise have been a prelude and preparation. Barekhu, like the zimmun said before the Grace after Meals, is an invitation to others to join in an act of praise, based on the verse, “Magnify the LORD with me, let us exalt His name together” (Ps. 34:4).

הַפּוֹתֵֽחַ לָֽנוּ שַׁעֲרֵי רַחֲמִים *Who opens for us the gates of compassion.*Already at the beginning of the service, there is a hint that at the end of the day we will be praying Ne’ila, meaning “the closing” of the gates of prayer. וּמֵאִיר עֵינֵי הַמְחַכִּים Brings light to the eyes of those who await. A subtle inflection of the normal prayer which speaks of physical light. The poet wants us to know that on the Days of Awe we encounter a spiritual light. יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹֽשֶׁךְ *Who forms light and creates darkness.*This affirmation, based on a verse in Isaiah (45:7), is an emphatic denial of dualism, the idea, whose origin lay in Greek Gnosticism, that there are two supreme and contending forces at work in the universe, one of good, the other of evil – known variously as the demiurge, the devil, Satan, Belial, Lucifer or the prince of darkness. Dualism arises as an attempt to explain the prevalence of evil in the world by attributing it to a malign power, the enemy of God and the good. Such a view is radically incompatible with monotheism. It is also exceptionally dangerous: it has led some groups to see others as the personification of evil. Nonetheless, there is evidence that such views were held by some sectarian groups of Jews in the late Second Temple period; hence the need to discountenance it at the very start of communal prayer.

אוֹר עוֹלָם Endless light. A fragment of a prayer composed by the earliest known composer of piyut (liturgical poetry), Yose ben Yose, who lived in the land of Israel, probably in the fifth century. It refers to the light of the first day of creation – not physical light, since the sun was not created until the fourth day, but spiritual light.

סְלַח לְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ *Forgive Your holy nation.This poem, author unknown, is constructed as a double alphabetical acrostic. Alphabetical acrostics appear in the Hebrew Bible with several chapters of the book of Lamentations structured in this way, as well as the last section of the book of Proverbs (“A woman of worth”), and several of the Psalms (most notably Psalm 119, with eight verses for each letter of the alphabet). There may be mystical reasons for such compositions, but the practical reason is that they were easier to remember at a time, long before the invention of printing, when manuscripts were scarce and prayer books for personal use rare. סְלַח לְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ בְּיוֹם קָדוֹשׁ מָרוֹם וְקָדוֹשׁ Holy nation…holy day…HolyOne.*Isaiah heard the angels singing a threefold praise: “Holy, holy, holy.” The poet interprets this to refer to three forms of holinesses: (1) Israel the holy nation, (2) Yom Kippur the holy day, and (3) God the Holy One. Heaven and earth meet at this sacred point in time where our consciousness of fallibility seeks healing in God’s forgiving love.

וּבְטוּבוֹ מְחַדֵּשׁ…מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית In His goodness…renews the work of creation. Judah HaLevi explains that the difference between creation from something and creation from nothing is that in the former, when the act of creation stops, the object continues to exist. When a carpenter finishes a cabinet from wood, it continues to be without further effort from its maker. But when something is created from nothing, the act of creation must continue, for were it to cease the object would cease to be. Thus God, who made the universe from nothing, must re-create it at every moment. Every day the world is new, and prayer, like art, helps us see its newness. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of the seventeenth century, once said: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” The more we discover about the universe, the greater its mystery and majesty inspire awe. אֵל בָּרוּךְ *The blessed God.*An alphabetical acrostic of twenty-two words. Although this, the first blessing before the Shema, is about creation as a whole, the morning prayer emphasizes the element of which we are most conscious at the start of the day: the creation of light. Of this, there are two forms: the physical light of the sun, moon and stars, made on the fourth day of creation, and the spiritual light created on the first day (“Let there be light”). The prayer modulates from the first to the second, from the universe as we see it, to the mystical vision of God enthroned in glory, surrounded by angels.

הַכֹּל יוֹדֽוּךָ *All will thank You.*This passage, said on Shabbat, is longer than its weekday equivalent since Shabbat is a memorial of creation (Roke’aḥ). שֶׁבָּרָא בְּמִדַּת הָרַחֲמִים Whom He created by the attribute of compassion. According to tradition, God initially sought to create the world under the attribute of strict justice, but saw that it could not survive. What did He do? To justice He joined the attribute of compassion (Bereshit Raba 8:5). One of the supreme ironies of literature is that Portia’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, framed in opposition to Jewish ethics, is in fact a precise statement of it: The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath […] / It is an attribute to God himself And earthly power doth then show likest God’s Where mercy seasons justice. (IV, i)

אֵל אָדוֹן עַל כָּל הַמַּעֲשִׂים *God,LORDof all creation.*An ancient prayer, influenced by Merkava mysticism, envisioning God surrounded by the angels and the myriad stars. Merkava or “Chariot” mysticism was based on the vision seen by Ezekiel and described by him in the first chapter of the book that bears his name.

כָּל צְבָא מָרוֹם All the hosts on high. Having mentioned the sun and moon, the Hebrew hints at the other planets of the Ptolemaic system: שֶֽׁבַח נוֹתְנִים לוֹ כָּל צְבָא מָרוֹם – the ש of shevaḥ signaling Saturn (Shabbetai), and so on for Venus (נ for Noga), Mercury (כ for Kokhav), Jupiter (צ for Tzedek), and Mars (מ for Maadim).

וְיוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מְשַׁבֵּֽחַ The seventh day itself gives praise. A midrashic idea, based on the phrase that opens Psalm 92: “A psalm, a song of the Sabbath day,” here understood not as a song for the Sabbath, but by the Sabbath. It is as if, in the silence of Shabbat, we hear the song creation sings to its Creator, the “music of the spheres.”

תִּתְבָּרַךְ May You be blessed. Two prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, saw mystical visions of God enthroned among His heavenly host, the choir of angels. These visions, together with the words the prophets heard the angels sing (“Holy, holy, holy” in Isaiah’s vision; “Blessed is the LORD’s glory from His place” in Ezekiel’s), form the heart of Kedusha, the “Holiness” prayer. This is recited three times in the morning prayers: (1) before the Shema, (2) during the Leader’s Repetition of the Amida, and (3) toward the end of prayer, except on Shabbat and festivals, when the third is transferred to the afternoon. This section of the prayers – the vision of the heavenly throne and the angels – is part of the mystical tradition in Judaism. Prayer is Jacob’s ladder, stretching from earth to heaven, with “angels of the LORD” ascending and descending (Zohar). The three kedushot represent, respectively, the ascent, the summit, and the descent: the journey of the soul from earth to heaven and back again, transformed by our experience of the Divine.

וְהַחֲיּוֹת...וּכְרוּבִים...וּשְׂרָפִים...וְאֶרְאֶלִים...וְאוֹפָן Ḥayyot…Cherubim…Seraphim…Erelim… [each] Ophan. Five kinds of angels seen by Isaiah and Ezekiel in their visions. Ḥayyot are “living beings” surrounded by fire. Cherubim are guardian angels, mentioned in the story of the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:24). Representations of them were above the Ark in the Tabernacle and later the Temple. Seraphim are angels of fire. Erelim are described by Isaiah (33:7) as angels of peace. Ophanim are angels described as “wheels within wheels.” Together they form a heavenly retinue surrounding the divine throne, an angelic choir singing God’s praises. Angels appear in Tanakh as divine emissaries, but in prayer we focus on their role, in mystic visions, as singers of God’s song in heaven.

אַהֲבָה רַבָּה אֲהַבְתָּֽנוּ You have loved us with great love. Even before reciting the Shema with its command, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might,” we speak of God’s love for us. Note how that love is expressed: in the fact that God taught us “the laws of life.” Christianity at times contrasted law and love as if they were opposed. In Judaism law is love: the expression of God’s love for us and ours for Him. Franz Rosenzweig criticized Martin Buber for failing to understand the centrality of law in Judaism: “…the law of millennia, studied and lived, analyzed and rhapsodized, the law of everyday and of the day of death, petty and yet sublime, sober and yet woven in legend; a law which knows both the fire of the Sabbath candle and that of the martyr’s stake” (Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, 77). The law, through which Israel is charged with bringing the Divine Presence into the shared spaces of our common life, is itself based on a threefold love: for God, the neighbor, and the stranger. Through law – the choreography of grace in relationship – we redeem our finitude, turning the prose of daily life into religious poetry and making gentle the life of this world.

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל Listen, Israel. Most of the ancient civilizations, from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome, were predominantly visual, with monumental architecture and iconic use of art. Judaism, with its faith in the invisible God, emphasized hearing over seeing, and listening over looking. Hence the verb “Listen” in this key text, as well as our custom, when saying it, to cover our eyes, shutting out the visible world to concentrate on the commanding Voice.

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יהוה אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ Love theLORDyour God. What is the love of God that is befitting? It is to love God with a great and exceeding love, so strong that one’s soul shall be knit up with the love of God, such that it is continually enraptured by it, like a lovesick individual whose mind is at no time free from passion for a particular woman and is enraptured by her at all times… Even more intense should be the love of God in the hearts of those who love Him; they should be enraptured by this love at all times. (Maimonides, Laws of Repentance 10:3) If love in the Western world has a founding text, that text is Hebrew. (Simon May, Love: A History) וְלִמַּדְתֶּם אֹתָם אֶת־בְּנֵיכֶם…לְמַֽעַן יִרְבּוּ יְמֵיכֶם Teach them to your children…so that you…may live long. Jews are the only people to have predicated their very survival on education. The Mesopotamians built ziggurats, the Egyptians built pyramids, the Athenians the Parthenon and the Romans the Colosseum. Jews built schools and houses of study. Those other civilizations died and disappeared; Jews and Judaism survived.

אֱמֶת *True.*The word emetdoes not just mean “true” in the narrow Western sense of something that corresponds to reality. In Hebrew it means honoring your promises, being true to your word, doing what you said you would do. According to Rashi (to Exodus 6:3), the holiest name of God means “the One who is true to His word.” This concept of truth serves as the bridge between the end of the Shema, with its reference to the exodus from Egypt, and the quintessential prayer, the Amida, that we are now approaching. The fact that God redeemed His people in the past is the basis of our prayer for redemption in the future. Just as God was true to His word then, so we pray He will be now. The sixfold repetition of emet acts as a reminder of the six steps we have taken – the three blessings surrounding the Shema and the three paragraphs of the Shema itself – toward the ultimate destination of prayer, the act of standing directly before God in the Amida. This is the seventh step, and in Judaism seven is the sign of the Holy. The three steps back that we take when approaching the Amida are done in order to take three steps forward at the beginning of the prayer, a physical movement to signal that we are entering the presence of the King.