LEADER’S REPETITION OF THE AMIDA There are two views as to the meaning and significance of the Leader’s Repetition of the Amida (Rosh HaShana 34b–35a). According to some Mishnaic sages, the leader repeats the Amida for the sake of those unable to pray for themselves – a phenomenon more widespread then than now because there were few prayer books and not everyone was able to say the Amida by heart. This was especially so on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, when the prayers were long and many of them less familiar than those said at other times of the year. The other view, held by Rabban Gamliel, was that the Repetition, said out loud by the leader, is the primary form of prayer. Evidently for Rabban Gamliel, prayer was essentially a substitute for the communal sacrifices, offered daily, together with an extra sacrifice (represented by Musaf) for Sabbaths and festivals. For this reason there is no Leader’s Repetition in the evening service, since no sacrifice was offered at night. In this view, prayer is a communal act: the leader stands in place of the priest, words take the place of the sacrifice, and the offering is made by one on behalf of all. With either interpretation it is important to follow the Repetition, to make the appropriate congregational responses, and not to talk otherwise until the prayer has been completed. We speak to God privately as individuals and publicly as a community, for ours is a faith of strong individuals and of deeply rooted, communal bonds. At this point it is the community speaking through the leader’s prayer.

PIYUT: THE POETRY OF THE PRAYER BOOK The first formulation of Jewish prayer goes back to the time of Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly in the fifth century BCE. Ezra and Nehemiah, returning to Israel from exile in Babylon, found the Jewish community in the Holy Land in a poor spiritual state. They had lost many of their religious traditions; a great number could not even speak Hebrew (Nehemiah 13:24). Ezra and his court instituted a basic liturgy so that people could learn to pray in a linguistically pure and well-structured way (Maimonides, Laws of Prayer 1:4). A second major consolidation occurred in the time of Rabban Gamliel II after the destruction of the Second Temple. In the absence of the Temple and its sacrifices, prayer assumed greater significance, and it was important for the spiritual unity of the people that they pray the same prayers at the same time in the same way. Even so, there were various points in the service where individuals were able to say private prayers in their own words. We have many such examples preserved in the Mishna, the Talmud and other ancient rabbinic texts. So a balance was struck between formality and spontaneity, some sages favoring a set text, others valuing individuality within the framework of an agreed template. Formal collections of prayers did not appear until the period of the Geonim: Rabbi Amram Gaon’s was the first, in the ninth century, followed by that of Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon in the tenth. Meanwhile another element of prayer, piyut (the word comes from the same root as “poetry”), was developing. This differs from the standard texts of prayer because it is non-obligatory, not part of the minimum requirement of prayer. It was created to augment, adorn, and beautify; to reflect more deeply on key points of the service; to bring out in greater depth the distinctive character of specific days; to bring variety to the rhythm and pace of prayer; to inform, educate and help us introspect, and sometimes simply to create a mood. Piyut can be traced back to Israel in the third or fourth century ce, and this form of prayer eventually spread to all major centers of Jewish life. Babylon, Spain, Italy, and northern Europe all contributed richly to the poetry of the synagogue, and different rites reflect that variety. Piyut grew more or less contemporaneously with the development of Midrash Aggada, rabbinic reflection on and commentary to biblical narrative. Piyut incorporates much of this material, suggesting that part of its purpose was educational as well as aesthetic. It reminded people of the laws and traditions relating to the day. It may even have been a way of circumventing the bans that occurred from time to time on the public teaching of Judaism. We do not know the names of the earliest writers of piyut. The first we know of by name is Yose ben Yose who lived in Israel, probably in the fourth or fifth century. The first great master of the genre, a century later, was Yannai. A century later still (according to most authorities) came the virtuoso, Rabbi Elazar HaKalir, who brought the art to extreme sophistication, coining new words, developing new literary techniques, and creating, in short phrases and sometimes single words, dense networks of association and allusion. It takes encyclopaedic knowledge and acute literary sensibility to fathom the full panoply of meanings in a Kalir poem. One thing is clear: to judge by the complexity and popularity of piyut, the communities to which it was addressed were exceptionally literate, testimony to the high levels of education sustained by Jewry even in ages of persecution and poverty. Not everyone approved of piyutentirely. There were notes of dissent from Rav Hai Gaon, Maimonides, Ibn Ezra and others, on a number of grounds. They were unwarranted interruptions; they made the services too long; they are hard to understand; their use of language was uneven and eccentric. Their theology, thought Maimonides, was sometimes suspect: their talk of angels, intermediaries and mysteries. Yet piyut survived and thrived, and continues to play a major part, especially in the liturgy of Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. Each region – Ashkenaz, Sepharad, Eastern and Western Europe, Italy, France, Poland, Lithuania – had its own traditions. Sometimes these were localized to individual towns, like Rome or Mainz or Prague. The literature is vast: what is contained in standard prayer books is only the barest fraction of what exists. There were hundreds of authors, and tens of thousands of poems. A major source was the huge array of documents discovered in the Cairo Geniza, a store of discarded manuscripts of various kinds going back many centuries. Even today not all of this literature has been published. Compositionally, piyutim are usually constructed on the basis of an acrostic, sometimes following the order of the alphabet, sometimes the alphabet in reverse (תשר**״**ק), and sometimes in more complex forms such as אתב״ש, in which odd-numbered lines or phrases move alphabetically forward while even-numbered lines move backward. Often poets devised an acrostic that spelled their name, the only way they had of ensuring that authorship was recognized. There are many genres of piyut, depending on their position in the prayers. So, for example, a poem inserted in the first blessing before the Shema is called a Yotzer, since the blessing ends Yotzer hame’orot,“who forms lights.” A poetic addition to the Amida (almost invariably confined to the first three blessings) is called a Kerova. The final poem before the Kedusha is called a Siluk. Like the last movement of a symphony it is usually a passage of great intensity, resolving the tensions of the previous movements. The Siluk for the Musaf of both Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur is the dramatic poem Untaneh Tokef(). Piyut is a magnificent range of solo voices in the choral symphony Israel has sung to its Maker, King, Judge and Redeemer. It is prayer as poetry and poetry as prayer, and its sacred beauty still challenges the mind as it lifts the heart.

מִסּוֹד Drawing from the counsel. This brief poem is of a type called Reshut, literally, asking “permission” of God and the congregation to represent the community in prayer. This specific reshut, common throughout the prayers on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, derives from the fact that some leading scholars criticized poetic additions to the prayers on theological grounds. Thus the prayer leader was moved to say that his words were carefully constructed to follow the traditions of the sages.

אֵימֶֽיךָ I bear Your awe. This is a different kind of reshut, in which the leader expresses his sense of inadequacy to represent the community in prayer. Abraham, when he prayed for the cities of the plain, said he was “mere dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27). How then can anyone have the temerity to plead with God? Yet, emboldened by the knowledge that God hears and heeds the words of all who call on Him in truth, empowered by the psalm that says, “A broken heart You will not despise” (Ps. 51:19), the leader prays that God help him formulate his words articulately and act as a worthy representative of those who have asked him to pray on their behalf. It is humbling for us to overhear this private conversation between the leader and God before he begins to speak on behalf of the congregation. The author of this prayer is Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus, a member of the remarkable Kalonymus family who moved from Italy to Germany in the tenth century, and over the next four hundred years provided Rhineland Jewry with some of its greatest poets, moralists, preachers and scholars as well as its most distinguished communal leaders, particularly during the age of persecution that began with the First Crusade in 1096. At least a dozen members of the family wrote liturgical poems. Meshullam, who lived in the late tenth and early eleventh century, was a distinguished Talmudist, often referred to as “the Great.”

אִמַּֽצְתָּ You affirmed. Note how the beginning of this prayer begins with the last word of the previous prayer. This was a common device used by the synagogue poets to create seamless joins between the sections of long poems. The poet asks God to look at the people in the synagogue, shoeless, dressed in white, already faint from fasting, and asks Him to tilt the scale of justice in their favor. The poet speaks of sin as stain, blemish, defilement, and pleads with God to cleanse us and remove its mark. Since the poem is specific to the first blessing of the Amida, it refers to Abraham with whose name the first blessing ends.

זָכְרֵֽנוּ לְחַיִּים Remember us for life. The first of four insertions specifically for the period from Rosh HaShana to Yom Kippur. It is a poetic miniature of great beauty: four phrases, each ending with the word “life.” In general the rabbis were reluctant to admit request-prayers in either the first three or last three blessings of the Amida, or at any point on Sabbaths and festivals. Only on the grounds that they represent a communal rather than individual request were they permitted at all.

תַּאֲוַת The soul’s desire. To bring variation into the poetry, this has been written as a reverse acrostic, beginning with the last letter of the alphabet and closing with the first. Since the second paragraph of the Amida is associated with Isaac, the poet makes reference to the binding. זִבּוּחוֹ וְדִשּׁוּנוֹ [Isaac’s]sacrifice and ashes: Since Isaac was willing to be sacrificed, it is as if he was.

עַד יוֹם מוֹתוֹ Until the day of his death. Throughout our lifetime God waits for us to turn to Him. No moment is too late. “The word ‘now’ means teshuva,” said the sages (Mekhilta, Massekhta deShira 5). God is here, in this place, at this moment, and all we have to do for Him to turn to us, is to turn to Him. “Even if one was wicked for the whole of a lifetime, and repented in the closing moments of his life, nothing of his wickedness is recalled to him” (Maimonides, Laws of Repentance 1:3). The line, “To the very day he dies, You wait for him,” also appears in the Untaneh Tokef prayer.

אֱנוֹשׁ מַה יִּזְכֶּה How might man be acquitted. This is a poem of the tokheḥa form, that is, a rebuke to the congregation. This was the function performed by the prophets in biblical times, and Maimonides rules (Laws of Repentance 4:2) that every congregation should have someone who can perform this function. He should be “a great scholar, advanced in years, God-fearing from his youth, and beloved by the people.” We should come to the synagogue not to be praised but to be challenged. The poet, in the spirit of Ecclesiastes, Job, Proverbs and the Ethics of the Fathers, reminds us that life is short. We should neither waste it on trivia, nor think that we can do wrong and get away with it by deceiving others. We should give thanks that we are alive; do good deeds (the only things we retain after we die); and value a reputation for goodness more than any honors or titles. We can only be sure that “the day of death is better than the day one was born” if we know, in our heart of hearts, that we honored God, brought honor to our people, and helped others whenever we could.

אִחַֽדְתָּ יוֹם זֶה בַּשָּׁנָה This one day of the year You set aside as unique. A lament that we no longer have the Temple and its rites to atone for us, yet we still, in other ways, make sacrifices for our faith. May they therefore be regarded to our merit as if they were offered in the Temple. Using phrases from the Song of Songs (“lily,” “like a seal placed upon Your heart”) and Jeremiah (“wedding canopy of Your beloved”), the poet speaks of the love between God and His people. Note also several references to Jacob/Israel, the patriarch traditionally associated with the third paragraph of the Amida. The poet points out that Jacob was described as “dwelling in tents” understood by the sages as “houses of study,” and hints that we remain true to that heritage. The last four phrases of the poem all end with the verb zakhor, “remember.”

אַתָּה הוּא אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ You are our God. An alphabetical hymn composed out of descriptions of God, all but two of which – “His life is everlasting” and “His counsel is candor” – are biblical. דָּגוּל מֵרְבָבָה Encircled with myriads. The angels that surround God’s throne, as seen by the prophets. מַעֲטֵֽהוּ קִנְאָה His cloak is jealousy. The word “jealous” in the Bible is always a reference to God’s love for Israel and humanity, and His pain when that love is betrayed. נֶאְפָּד נְקָמָה His coat is vengeance. When Judaism speaks of the “vengeance” of God, it means two things: (1) vengeance belongs to God, not man (see Lev. 19:18), and (2) ultimately there is justice in history. The great crimes do not go unpunished.

וְכֹחֲךָ יִגְדַּל נָא That Your strength might be exalted. A reference to Moses’ words when he pleaded for forgiveness for the people after their demoralization by the spies, when he said “Now may the LORD’s strength be exalted” (Num. 14:17). Strength here means the power to forgive. Forgiveness is not moral weakness but moral strength.

מוֹרֶה חַטָּאִים You who instruct sinners. A prayer whose double acrostic bears the name of its composer, Meshullam bei-Rabbi Kalonymus. Each verse carries a refrain consisting of the first half of each line of Psalm 145, the prayer known as Ashrei. Its theme is the devotion of Israel to God as evidenced by their constant prayers to Him. There is reference to the four prayers of today (Shaḥarit, Musaf, Minḥa and Ne’ila) and the seven times a day we bless God (the three blessings surrounding the morning Shema, and the four in the evening service). The second half is a prayer for the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem so that our prayers can be more glorious.

הַיּוֹם יִכָּתֵב *Today…will be inscribed.*Taken from a longer poem, this is an aside to the congregation, passionately urging them to pay attention and recall the gravity of the day – the day on which our fate is inscribed in God’s book.

אִמְרוּ לֵאלֹהִים Say of God. A long poem by Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus, on the theme of God the Creator and the majesty of His creation, based on the verse: “Say of God: How awesome are Your works” (Ps. 66:3) – “Say” in the sense of “praise, declare.” וְכָל בַּשָּׁלִשׁ He measured out: An allusion to Isaiah (40:12): “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?” זֹֽהַר כִּסְאוֹ The brightness of His throne: A mystical vision based on the visions of Ezekiel and, especially, Daniel: “His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze. A river of fire was flowing, coming out from before Him” (Dan. 7:9–10). Fundamental to this poem, as throughout the Bible, is the sense that God has fashioned the universe with the architectonic precision Tanakh calls “wisdom.” The more we learn of cosmology, the more we are beginning to appreciate how finely tuned the universe is for the emergence, first of stars, then of planets, then of life, then of us.

מַעֲשֵׂה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ The work of our God. The original of this poem was much longer, every verse describing “the work of our God” followed by another, contrasting verse: “The deeds of man.” The poem appears in abbreviated form in most rites, with all but one of the “deeds of man” verses omitted. As is evident from what remains, the poet took a dim view of humankind (compare Hamlet’s “Yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”). There is such a voice in both biblical and post-biblical literature, but for the most part Judaism lives with the paradox of “What is man that You are mindful of him? Yet You have made him little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5–6). Only on Yom Kippur, with its themes of the mortality and sinfulness of man, do we give prominence to the more negative view, as we do at the end of today’s Amida: “Before I was formed I was unworthy, and now that I have been formed it is as if I had not been formed.”

אֲשֶׁר אֹֽמֶץ תְּהִלָּתֶֽךָ *Even though Your mighty praise is…*As the Kedusha approaches, the poet – still Rabbi Meshullam – surprises us with the theological paradox he has set up in the previous sections of the poem. God is surrounded by angels who constantly sing His praises, yet it is from us, mere humans, that God desires praise. Somehow, despite our finitude, God’s greatest desire is to hear us, mere physical beings, turn to Him in praise. “Sanctity is in their mouths,” that is, the mouths of the angels, but “You desire praise” from mortals, “with their numbered days, whom all good has abandoned, filled with anxiety, and deeply grieved in their souls – for this is Your glory.”

עַל יִשְׂרָאֵל Over Israel. The poet continues his paradoxical line of thought. We are frail, fallible creatures, yet You have endowed Your people Israel with Your faith, blessing, presence and glory.

הָאַדֶּֽרֶת וְהָאֱמוּנָה Majesty and faithfulness. The source of this poem is the mystical tract Heikhalot Rabati, a classic of what is known as Heikhalot literature, itself a branch of Merkava (“Chariot”) mysticism based on Ezekiel’s vision of God enthroned on the divine chariot. Heikhalot Rabati is an ancient text from Talmudic times, describing the ascent of Rabbi Yishmael to heaven. Jewish mystics, after long preparation involving fasting and meditation, would experience ecstatic visions of an ascent into heaven, encountering there the mysteries of the divine palace, the Heikhal. Mystic texts such as these have often had a subterranean influence on Jewish prayer, understood itself as a heavenward ascent. According to Heikhalot Rabati, this is the song sung by the angels while we recite the Verses of Praise. Some rites (Sephardi and Nusaḥ Ari) say this psalm every Shabbat. Others do so only on Yom Kippur since on this day we are “like the angels,” neither eating nor drinking but focused entirely on prayer. Therefore on this day alone may we sing the angels’ song.

לְיוֹשֵׁב תְּהִלּוֹת To the One enthroned upon praises. As we approach the Kedusha, the poet takes as his theme the fact that in the Kedusha itself we, mere humans, join the angels in praising God. The angels say “Holy,” and we, in response, say, “Blessed.” Thus God is, in the language of Psalm 22:4, “Holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.”

וּבְכֵן, לְךָ הַכֹּל יַכְתִּֽירוּ And so, all shall crown You. A powerful fugue, affirming both the awesome mood and nature of the day – God sitting in judgment on the Day of Judgment – yet also God’s compassion and forgiveness. Without both, the human world could not survive. Without justice and judgment there would be anarchy, a war of all against all. But without compassion and forgiveness we would all be condemned, since “There is none on earth so righteous as to do only good and never sin” (Eccl. 7:20). The prayer is a segue into the Kedusha.

KEDUSHA Usually on Shabbat and festivals there is a difference between the Kedushot of Shaḥarit, Musaf and Minḥa services. Only on Yom Kippur are all four Kedushot (including that of Ne’ila) alike, the same as that of the Musaf service (Sefer Roke’aḥ 216). This means that they all contain the line Shema Yisrael – originally introduced into the Musaf Kedusha at a time of persecution when Jews were forbidden to say the Shema prayer in public. All the Amida prayers on Yom Kippur have a heightened form of holiness, for on this day – fasting, dressed in white, focused on heaven – we have become, for a day, like the angels.

קָדוֹשׁ, קָדוֹשׁ, קָדוֹשׁ Holy, holy, holy. This was Isaiah’s vision: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the LORD, high and exalted, seated on a throne, and the train of His robe filled the Temple. Above Him were Seraphim, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And they were calling to one another: Holy, holy, holy is theLordof hosts; the whole world is filled with His glory. At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the Temple was filled with smoke” (Is. 6:1–4).

בָּרוּךְ כְּבוֹד־יהוה Blessed is the LORD’S glory. This was Ezekiel’s vision: “Then a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me the sound of a great noise, saying, Blessed is theLord’sglory from His place. Also there was the sound of the wings of the living creatures brushing against each other and the sound of the wheels beside them, a great rushing noise” (Ezek. 3:12–13). Two very different visions, witnessed by different personalities at different times – Isaiah’s while Israel was at home in its land, Ezekiel’s from exile in Babylon – yet they are the two supreme biblical scenes of God enthroned in heaven, surrounded by angels. Reenacting these scenes during the Repetition of the Amida is the supreme summit of communal prayer and its boldest mystical expression.

חֲמֹל עַל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ Have mercy on those You have made. A special insertion, unique to the High Holy Days. The sentiment evokes the end of the book of Jonah that we will read later in the day.

כִּי מַקְדִּישֶֽׁיךָ בִּקְדֻשָּׁתְךָ קִדַּֽשְׁתָּ For with Your holiness You sanctify all who affirm You holy. The Hebrew word for holy means “set apart.” Just as God is set apart from the physical universe He created, so He has set Israel apart by choosing it to be the nation that bears witness to God through its history and its laws.

בְּאֵין מֵלִיץ יֹֽשֶׁר With no one to advocate for us. A reference to the book of Job: “Even now I have a Witness in heaven; One who will testify for me on high.” (Job 16:19). Job has been accused by Satan, understood in Judaism not as a force of evil but simply as the prosecuting counsel in the heavenly court when humans are on trial. Job has faith that if there is no one else to testify to his innocence, God, who knows all, will.

עוֹד יִזְכֹּר לָֽנוּ He, our Lord, will yet remember for us. The poet concludes that if all else fails, the merits of the patriarchs, the mighty (Abraham), the child who was bound (Isaac), and the perfect one (Jacob) will be counted in our favor.

אַל תִּירָא יַעֲקֹב *Do not be afraid Jacob.*Words said by God to Jacob as he was about to go into exile to be reunited with his son Joseph (Gen. 46:3). Exile, in Jewish thought, is intimately connected with sin: “Because of our sins we were exiled from our land.” Hence the word teshuva has a double meaning: spiritual return to God, and the physical return of the Jewish people to its land. Just as God promised Jacob that He would bring him back, so He promises us through His prophets that return in both senses will happen. We will return in spirit to God and we will return as a people to our land.

וְעַל הַתְּשׁוּבָה מֵרֹאשׁ הִבְטַחְתָּֽנוּ And You have promised us repentance from the very beginning. According to the sages, teshuva was created before the universe (Nedarim 39b). Before God created a being capable of freewill and therefore sin, He had already made provision for the forgiveness: “God creates the cure before the disease” (Megilla, 13b).

יוֹם אֲשֶׁר *A day on which.*A complex poem on the theme of Yom Kippur as a day and the day. Yom Kippur is “the day” par excellence in the Jewish calendar. The tractate dealing with its laws is called, simply, Yoma, “the day.” The sages also said about the first day of creation – called in the Torah (Gen. 1:5) yom eḥad, “one day,” rather than yom rishon, “the first day” – that this refers to Yom Kippur, meaning, that this would prove to be the day on which the evil brought about by humankind could be cleansed and healed (Bereshit Raba 3:8). The poem itself is an אתב״ש acrostic in which each stanza has three parts: the first beginning “A day,” describing our need for forgiveness; the second beginning with “Today,” expressing a prayer; the third, a scriptural verse on the subject of forgiveness, grounding the prayer on God’s promise as recorded by the prophets.

מִי אֵל כָּמֽוֹךָ *Who, God, is like You?*An alphabetical summary of the blessings of the weekday Amida, shortened here by the omission of those parts of the prayer that are inappropriate for Yom Kippur. The poem has been attributed to Rabbi Elazar HaKalir.