Jewish Liturgy

How do Jews pray and why? What do the prayers mean? From where did this liturgy come and what challenges does it face today? Such questions and many more, spanning the centuries and continents, have driven the study of Jewish liturgy. But just as the liturgy has changed over time, so too have the questions asked, the people asking them, and the methods used to address them. Jewish Liturgy: A Guide to Research enables the reader to access the rich bibliography now available in English. In this volume, Ruth Langer, an expert on Jewish liturgy, provides an annotated description of the most important books and articles on topics ranging historically from the liturgy of the Second Temple period and the Dead Sea Scrolls to today, addressing the synagogue itself and those gathered in it; the daily, weekly, and festival liturgies and their components; home rituals and the life cycle; as well as questions of liturgical performance and theology. Introductions to every section orient the reader and provide necessary background. Christians seeking to understand Jewish liturgy, either that of Jesus and the early church or that of their Jewish contemporaries, will find this volume invaluable. It’s also an important reference for anyone seeking to understand how Jews worship God and how that worship has evolved over time.

Readers of this book will emerge with a new awareness of what we as Jews are doing when we pray, why we are doing it, how we are supposed to be affected by prayer, how the prayers came to be as they are today, and how they differ among the major movements of American Judaism. The traditional Jewish liturgy, if properly understood, is a deep and powerful technique for spiritual transformation. However, spiritual depth of prayer has been progressively reduced over the past 2000 years as the underlying currents of the Siddur, the Jewish prayerbook, have been lost to the majority of worshippers. This book explains the Jewish liturgy prayer by prayer, according to what, in the context of ancient and medieval Judaism, was its raison d'‚tre: a structure for transforming one's mind and way of life. The author writes: "The crisis Judaism now faces, while genuine, is due not to a lack of depth in the traditional Jewish prayer service, but to a profound and almost universal lack of understanding of that prayer service that pervades all segments of the Jewish community. Jewish prayer services in many contemporary synagogues lack spiritual fervor because the linkage between word and ritual, on the one hand, and mental transformation on the other, that would generate such fervor is not generally known to Jewish adults and is not taught to Jewish children. Unfortunately, the prayer service regularly degenerates into a race through words and gestures divorced from the sequence of mental states and visualizations through which these words and gestures were intended to lead us." This book was written to reunite the activity and language of prayer with its original transformative goal, by educating worshippers about what is at the heart of the siddur. Several chapters provide an overview of the Jewish prayer service and its spiritual flow. These chapters explain the visualizations, allusions, and meditative techniques that form the heart of the service and the altered states of consciousness through which the service ca

Originally published: New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt, c1932.

From the ancient rabbis to medieval Ashkenaz, from North Africa to Syria, from the United States to modern Israel, the articles collected in Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue reflect the diversity of approaches and the questions that modern scholars residing in North America, Europe, and Israel bring to bear on the study of Jewish liturgy. The book spans the entire history of rabbinic prayer and presents a diverse array of approaches, ranging from classical methods applied to new topics to today's interdisciplinary approaches. Contributors include: R. Kimelman, S. Fine, D. Reed Blank, V. B. Mann, S. C. Reif, R. Langer, N. Feuchtwanger-Sarig, M. L. Kligman, J. D. Sarna, J. Tabory, and S. P. Wachs.

Uri Ehrlich addresses a relatively neglected but central component of the act of prayer: its nonverbal aspects, represented by such features as the worshiper's gestures, attire and shoes, and vocal expression. In the first part of this book, the author engages in a two-tiered examination of nine nonverbal elements integral to the rabbinic Amidah prayer: a detailed historical-geographical consideration of their development, followed by an analysis of each gesture's signification, the crux of this study. Of all the possible models, it was the realm of interpersonal communication which had the strongest impact on this consideration of the rabbinic Amidah gesture system. The concluding chapters explore the broader rabbinic conception of prayer embodied in these nonverbal modes of expression. Unlike mainstream prayer studies, which concentrate on the textual and spoken facets of prayer, the holistic approach taken here views prayer as a complex of verbal, physical, spiritual and other attributes.

Menahem Schmelzer, widely recognized for his expertise in Jewish manuscripts and piyyut, has also influenced Jewish liturgical research of the past half century. This collection of sixteen academic studies, by Israeli, European, and American scholars, honors Schmelzer's contribution. The contributors represent three generations, and their topics and methods testify to the vast subject area that Jewish liturgy has become. The articles explore a wide variety of texts and ritual occasions, the relationship between text and worship experience, and implications for related areas such as mysticism; most apply the methods of other subject areas such as liguistics to liturgical study and its implications for related fields. "...this volume, as a whole, is as much a testimony to the enduring centrality of the librarian in scholarship as it is a collection of essays on "the experience of Jewish liturgy." Wide ranging in scope, these essays are an accurate snapshot of the state of research, illustrating the wealth of material awaiting publication, the need for revisiting prior assumptions, and also the limits of our scholarship." Yoel Kahn, Congregation Beth El, Berkeley

"Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship" presents the reworked results of the discussions at an interdisciplinary symposium held in Aachen, Germany, on recent trends in the study of Jewish and Christian liturgies. It introduces diverse subjects pertaining to its topic an shows their interrelationship.

A collection of blessings, poems, meditations, and rituals presented in English and Hebrew offers a traditional perspective to weekday, Sabbath, and New Moon festival observances.