stray thoughts while davening

[cellio]

Sometimes while praying I notice things in the text and make mental notes about them, but usually they don't survive until the time when I can do something about them. (And anyway, when I'm praying I'm trying to pray, not study the liturgy or the language.) Nonetheless, a few things have survived in the buffer.

In the morning service we read a passage from the mishna that begins "eilu d'varim", "these are the things" (meaning obligations, here). In Hebrew I would expect to see eileh, not eilu. Is this an Aramaic thing, and does that mean this passage is in Aramaic that just looks like Hebrew?

In "ahavah rabbah" before the Sh'ma, there's a passage that Shlomo Carlebach set to music, beginning "v'ha'eir eineinu". We sang this recently (we usually just read the passage), and as I was following in the Hebrew I heard words I wasn't seeing on the page. Hmm, I said, a Reform change? No, I consulted Artscroll and the texts there are the same; it sounds like Carlebach added words in composing the song. I don't know the song, and naturally I can't remember the words in question, but I'm curious.

Most blessings begin "praised are you" (baruch atah) -- second person singular present. (Technically, I'm told, it's a passive participle, but it signifies an ongoing state, so functionally present tense. Or maybe this is an aspect thing; I'm a little confused about the tense-versus-aspect issue in linguistics. Anyway...) Many of these blessings then continue, or at least conclude, in third person, e.g. "...she'asani kirtzono", "who made me according to his will" -- both the verb (asa) and the possessive ("-o" on the last word) are third person masculine singular. I wonder why that is. I suspect that entire theses, or at least volumes, have been written on why we change from addressing God to talking about God; I wonder what the conclusion is. (I couldn't find an answer in Elbogen, which doesn't mean it's not there...)

(Sometimes the rest of the blessing is a participle, which does not carry tense, only number and gender. You can also sometimes read them as nouns, side-stepping the entire question; for instance, "yotzeir or" can be translated "creator of light".)

Tangentially related (maybe), it looks like I won't be taking a Hebrew class this fall. The person who's teaching the section I would be in has a teaching approach that is not a good match for my learning approach. (Was that diplomatic enough? :-) ) I really liked the teacher we had this summer, but she's only doing daytime classes (during work hours) this fall. So I either wait until spring (not necessarily bad) or find some other way to continue. A fellow congregant is getting private lessons from the teacher I like and suggested (a couple months ago) that I join her, so maybe I'll do that. I could, of course, spend the time on my individual study of biblical Hebrew; I'd like to be more fluent there.

Comments

[geekosaur]

Huh. My dictionary seems to think "eilu" is plural "which"; I'd thought "asher" was always used. ("These" would then be implied by the absence of a subject.) On the other hand, that makes "eilu va'eilu..." sound funny, leading me to think "which" is at best an approximation.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I can't remember the exact source for this, but I was taught that the switch from second to third person in brachos exists to remind of two things that are true simultaneously: first, that G-d is always there and intimately involved in our lives, meaning that prayer can serve as a chance to talk face to Face, as it were; and second, that despite the potential for closeness and personal relationship, human limitations prevent us from understanding the totality of G-d.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Oh, also ... I believe eilu is just an alternate form of eileh. If you look through Tehillim, you'll see quite a few alternate forms, esp. in verb + object compounds. I assume these were done for poetic effect, but eilu seems to have passed into more common usage.

[cellio]

Thanks! I didn't think to search Tanach.

[(Anonymous)]

As far as I know, the words to V'Haeir Eineinu by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach are from Nusach Ashkenaz, which differs [less words in this case] from Nusach Sefard. There are some variations in all Nusachot, but I believe this time the words of the song fit exactly to the words in the Ashkenaz Siddur.

[cellio]

Interesting. I thought Artscroll, and practically everything else in the US, used Nusach Ashkenaz. (I've never knowingly seen Nusach S'fard.) Now I want to hunt down the words to the song to see if I was just confused about what I was hearing the others sing.

Nusach Sfard vs Sfardi

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Note: Nusach Sfard is not the same as Sfardi, i.e. Mediterranean/Middle Eastern/further east.

Nusach Sfard is used by some/many chasidim and various other Ashkenazim including the Carlebach shul in Manhattan (IIRC, the Carlebach family had a connection to Lubavitch). Artscroll sells sidurim for both Askenazi and Nusach Sfard - it usually says on the spine of the book which it is.