Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer

by Schonfield, Jeremy

• ISBN13: 9781904113720
• ISBN10: 1904113729
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-25
• Publisher: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press

Summary

Jews encounter the prayer-book the Siddur more often in their daily lives than any other text, yet it is mysteriously absent from their otherwise comprehensive curriculum of study. The present work, the first to examine this paradox, explains this as a reluctance to engage with the intellectual and emotional questions that the liturgy generates. Submitted to close examination, Jewish prayer is shown to be less a deferential dialogue with an attentive deity than a liturgy of protest in the face of the chaotic unpredictability of the human condition, a protest qualified only by joyous recognition of Gods role in ensuring life itself. This ground-breaking work studies the opening sections of the morning liturgy

Author Biography

Jeremy Schonfield is Mason Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Rabbi John Rayner Lecturer in Liturgy at Leo Baeck College in London.

Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration and Conventions Used in the Text	p. xv
Note on Extracts from the Liturgy	p. xvii
List of Extracts	p. xix
The Incuriousness of the Jewish Worshipper	p. 3
The Reticence of the Ideal Reader	p. 22
The Liturgical Narrative: Modern and Traditional Views	p. 47
Birkhot Hashahar
The Darkness of Waking	p. 67
The Bonds of Freedom	p. 81
The Silence of Language	p. 109
Building in Babel	p. 150
The Scattering	p. 171
The Imagined Temple	p. 203
Pesukei Dezimra
Hope in Words	p. 247
The Liturgical Argument Encapsulated	p. 311
Other Versions, Other Readings	p. 325
Appendix
Photographs of Ritual Objects Used in Prayer
Vessel used for ritual hand-washing	p. 349
The arba kanfot-the four-cornered undergarment	p. 350
The talit-a four-cornered prayer-shawl-and decorative bag	p. 351
A selection of tefilin	p. 352
Inside view of tefilin for the head	p. 353
A parchment scroll of the Shema, of the kind contained in tefilin	p. 354
A detail of the outside of tefilin for the head	p. 355
A talit and tefilin in use	p. 356
A talit and tefilin in use, showing the arrangement of straps	p. 357
Bibliography	p. 359
Index of Biblical and Rabbinic References	p. 375
Index of Subjects and Names	p. 383
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