long time no "see", and the shofar on Shabbat

[cellio]

Neat. I've bumped into Micha again.

Micha was a regular on the Usenet group soc.culture.jewish[.moderated]. For all I know he still is; my feed for this group is highly flaky and I don't read it any more. We got into some interesting discussions back then (we're talking four year ago now), and this resulted in my flying out to spend a Shabbat with his (Orthodox) family. It was a fascinating experience in many ways. (I wrote a huge journal entry about it. I wrote lots of huge entries back then...)

But then my feed got flaky, and Usenet continued to descend to new depths, and we lost touch. Recently some of the "old regulars" started a mailing list for discussions among members of different movements, and when I heard about it I signed up. I noticed that Micha was there but didn't make direct contact.

After I posted something last week he sent me mail saying, basically, "long time no see". So we've been catching up. Nifty. I wasn't really even sure he would even remember me. I get the impression that he does a lot of what I call "Orthodox outreach", and I figured I was just another person passing through to him. (For all that we exchanged long, deep email for a while.)

So now we're arguing (on the list) about the ban on blowing the shofar if Rosh Hashana falls on Shabbat. Ah, it feels good to be home. :-)

(The issue is that we are commanded to hear the shofar on Rosh Hashana, except the rabbis ruled that if RH is on Shabbat we don't do this. Why? Because of the prohibition on carrying things in the public domain on Shabbat -- if we blow shofar on Shabbat, then someone might be tempted to carry one and that would be bad, and even having one that lives at the synagogue is not adequate. My counter-argument: if it's about carrying, then why do we permit the use of any object during Shabbat services? We read from a Torah scroll, make kiddush with a kiddush cup, use siddurim (prayer books), etc, and someone could be tempted to carry these items from outside the building. Yet it is sufficient to set items aside that belong to the synagogue and live there, so why not also the shofar?)

Comments

Re: RH davening

[goljerp]

there are some piyyutim-like things on RH that just go on far too long.

Ah, yes. The Piyyutim...

I should've gone to the class that my Rabbi was giving on the poetic liturgy of the days of awe, but I was unavoidably busy all the days so far. So you're not going to get a defense of them from me...

In my opinion, they were a medieval fad, but not a major problem... until the modern Machsors (prayer books for the high holidays). Because then the prayer book publishers put them all in, even if each individual community only did one or two of the set. So then people started doing them all, because they were all there...

Some modern prayer books (e.g. the Harlow Machsor) deal with this by removing some (fine with me), and by removing the english translations of others (not fine with me). But that's another discussion. Maybe I'll talk with him this year about it... but probably not, since he goes to a different minyan in my shul. (That one uses the Bokser, actually...) And the fact that I'm a lot shyer in person.

fixed liturgy

[cellio]

Because then the prayer book publishers put them all in, even if each individual community only did one or two of the set. So then people started doing them all, because they were all there...

My understanding is that this is basically the history of the siddur in general, not just the machzor. (Siddur: prayer book. Machzor: siddur for the high holy days specifically.) Services have gotten longer over the centuries as publishers added optional parts and congregations adopted them as mandatory.

This poses a particular problem (IMO) in the Amidah, which was supposed to be prayer from the heart, extemporaneous, around a specified set of themes. Originally, only the chatimot (the closing "baruch atah..." sentences that sum up the theme of the paragraph) were specified [1]; now we have set text for all of it. Except that the Amidah is supposed to contain non-fixed prayer, so people now have to add that at the end. Somewhere along the line someone set out a suggested form for this prayer, which is now in all the siddurim, which means it's fixed... which means we have to add new non-fixed prayer after that now...

I approve of the Reform movement's goal of thinning down all of these acretions to get back to he core service. Unfortunately, sometimes they cut out parts that really are supposed to be part of the core, which is frustrating.

I have heard that the earliest known siddur dates to the ninth or tenth century, but so far as I know no one has published a facsimile. (If anyone has written up its contents, I don't know where to look for it.) I'd love to know what was in that siddur!

[1] In the mishna to tractate Berachot, which also cautions us not to make our prayer fixed.