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liturgical minutiae
It's like this. There's a prayer, R'tzei, that is part of the Amidah, the central prayer of each service. Most of the time, the text is about the rebuilding of the Temple and the return of korbanot ("sacrifices"). [1] This is, of course, theologically challenging for Reform, and most Reform siddurim over the years have changed this text.
When the movement changes a text, it doesn't just do it willy-nilly; they try to do it as authentically and logically as possible. So while you might disagree with adding "v'imahot" ("and our mothers") to the opening prayer of the Amidah (I do :-) [2] ), the goal of egalitarianism made them want to do something, and that was the change that fit best with tradition, the flow of the text, and so on. There is no ungendered word for "ancestors" in Hebrew, or they presumably would have used that. (That said, there's an interesting approach in some parts of the new siddur, where they use "doroteinu", "our generations", to replace "our fathers and our mothers". It's a change in meaning, but a small one. And it seems to work in the places where they've used it.)
Ok, back to R'tzei. There is in fact a different version of that prayer that doesn't refer to the Temple and is more generally about service to God. [3] I've heard several people, including my rabbi, say that it's in the holiday service. Today we went looking for it.
After failing to find it in the Yom Tov (holiday) Amidah in several siddurim, we consulted a book about siddurim. (This was actually a study of Reform siddurim in particular. I should ask to borrow it at some point.) That book said that it's in the musaf service [4], not in the main service. So we looked there and still didn't find it, until we realized that the source pointed to a repetition within musaf and we were looking at the first version. [5] So, finally, we got to the right part of the siddur.
Guess what? It's not always there! At the risk of getting the who's-who wrong, let me just say that we consulted Birnbaum, Hirsch, a "mainline Orthodox" Israeli siddur (I don't know whose), and one other (name like d'Pool?), and two of them included the altered final bracha and the other two didn't. When I got home I checked most of the remaining siddurim on my shelves. Artscroll has the alternate text, as does Siddur Sim Shalom (Conservative). The Lubavich siddur (nusach ha-ari) does not have it. I lack the skill to check Va-ani Tefilati, a Masorti siddur, which is, basically, Israeli Conservative. (I lack the skill because the book has no English translations. It was an ordering error, but shipping it back would have cost more than keeping it, so I kept it.)
When I reported this back to my rabbi, he said that he had found a reference [6] to the Jerusalem Talmud [7] that calls for this change. It might actually support using this (unobjectionable) version at other times, but we will have to consult the talmud to see what it says, and I might have misunderstood that point. (We don't have the Jerusalem talmud in our library, only the Babylonian, so this requires an excursion.)
It would be cool to chase this down, because if it does say that, then it's an actual halachic source supporting a change to the siddur that some would like to make, and that would be kind of nifty. The Reform movement doesn't require that a change be halachic, of course, but there are still points to be scored by finding a solution that is that closely tied to tradition. Or at least I think so.
[1] This is the one where the chatima begins with
"hamachazir".
[2] It's grammatically incorrect, or at least grammatically redundant. Or so I've been told by people who know these things. But I'm one of those old-fashioned folks who also believes that "he" can be neutral in English...
[3] This is the one where the chatima begins with "she'otecha".
[4] Musaf is an extra service that immediately follows the regular morning service on Shabbat and holidays.
[5] The Amidah is repeated in each service: first each person reads it silently, and then the chazan (leader) reads it aloud. With one exception that is irrelevant to this discussion, this repetition is the exact same text -- except, as it turns out, for R'tzei on a holiday. So the first time it's the usual text, and only the second time does it change. (And yes, this does mean that on Shabbat morning you will hear or say the Amidah four times -- twice in the morning service (shacharit), and twice in musaf. Practice makes perfect.)
[6] He cited "Eisenberger", if my memory hasn't failed me, but I don't have the title and Google isn't working its magic for me tonight. So I'll have to ask for a title or a first name or something.
[7] There are two talmuds, one composed in Babylon (in exile) and the other composed in Jerusalem. The Babylonian one is more complete and is held to be authoritative, but occasionally something turns up only in Jerusalem (not often).
Re: liturgical geeking, cont'd
Me, I am not sure about the sacrificial cult, but I use the future tense. That's how meshuggah I am.
I don't think it's meshuggah to hope for the temple but not the sacrificial cult. That is, we can still hope for a central place of worship in our land. I don't myself, most days, but I can understand those who do.
Re: liturgical geeking, cont'd
Re: liturgical geeking, cont'd
I'm not qualified to comment on your psychological condition. :-)
More seriously, though, I am aware of the kind of faith that says "I personally think this is bad, but (1) I trust God to make it not bad and (2) I trust the tradition that tells me to pray for this". If I could believe with confidence that the oral law came directly from God, maybe I wouldn't balk at this either. But that's harder for someone who believes that some parts of the oral law were written by men in a particular context.
Re: liturgical geeking, cont'd
I think it's pretty hard to subscribe to the whole system without acknowledging that the people who framed it were really into the sacrificial system. A lot of the Talmud is them "geeking" about it the way we are doing this now. And a lot of that was because while the Amidah et al. are human creations, the sacrificial system is Torah she be'al peh. Direct Torah in a way they had to privilege.
In turn, I think it's important for a halachic Judaism to admit those parts of the tradition that are not always convenient for us to acknowledge, including the parts that seem ugly for us today. There's no way to maintain a connection with historic Judaism without admitting that for thousands of years the restoration of the full cult was the highest aspiration of Jewish ritual thought. Even if it's impossible in this world, it's the imaginary ideal.
Rambam may be right and the future Temple will have no need for sacrifices. Ask me when we get there. However, in the degraded world that is the here and now, as far as we know, this represents the closest we know of God's will -- certainly closer than any of this minyan or Amidah stuff that we obsess about.
So removing it or putting it in the past tense makes me feel like it's historical revisionism, like we're airbrushing the past to pretend that this was not the historical norm. I find the system of the sacrifices challenging, and like much of Judaism, I don't know how much I believe in it, really. But Judaism is an ancient desert tribal value system on one level. I think that if we enshrine the idea of jettisoning things that we find distasteful, there's no telling where things will stop. Of course that's the larger issue of halachic versus Reform Judaism right there.
I respect Reform for being more consistent because it does away with the normative halachic assumptions in favor of historicizing the past. It's just not an approach I can emotionally follow, personally. When it comes to this prayer I feel that if one is buying into a belief that there is a normative halachic system to follow, one has to accept that the premises of the prayer are what they are. I'm not saying that I look forward to eating the paschal lamb on pesach -- just that we have to recognize that our ancestors did look forward to it and not sanitize that fact away.