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March/April 2008
Our Prayer, Our Problem
Gershom Gorenberg
The hymn, if you can call it that, came to me in an email from a friend who lives near me in Jerusalem. A friend of his had encountered it in a prayer book for Sukkot and Simhat Torah. The first verse is, “A day of light for Israel—a cursed day for Ishmael.” “Israel” means the Jews, “Ishmael” either Arabs or Muslims. In Hebrew, “light” and “curse” both begin with aleph.
From there, the acrostic marches through the Hebrew alphabet. The last verse, for the letter tav, is “A day of redemption for Israel—a day of defeat for Ishmael.” The title page of the prayer book says it was produced according to the rulings of Mordechai Eliahu, the chief rabbi of Israel from 1983 to 1993, regarded as the reigning religious authority by many Orthodox settlers and their supporters. Online, I found the hymn on a couple of pro-settler sites as a song for Simhat Torah dancing—though with the word “Ishmael” replaced by “enemies.”
As a journalist who has covered religious extremism, I’m no longer surprised to see hatred dressed up as a mitzvah. As an Orthodox Jew, I’m as outraged as always. But this incident also reminds me of a thought that has tugged at me since last summer’s Jewish-Catholic fuss, when Pope Benedict approved wider use of the old Latin Mass. The Latin text for Good Friday refers to the “blindness of the Jews” and asks God to “take the veil from their hearts” so that they will accept Christianity. The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement decrying the “body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations.” Other Jewish groups expressed more cautious concern.
Such sensitivity made sense, even if only a few people use that liturgy. In the post-Holocaust interfaith era, we expect Christians to rework their theology and liturgy to remove contempt for Jews—not to reaffirm triumphalism. But it struck me that we can only make that demand if we also take a close look at our own prayers, and take scissors to some sections. For Jewish liturgy carries its own historical burden of hatred.
The Hebrew poems, or piyyutim, incorporated into prayers for the High Holiday period are one repository for anti-gentile fury. Bar-Ilan University historian Elliot Horowitz points to “Yisrael Nosha”—“Israel Is Saved by the Lord”—which is still recited in the traditional Ashkenazi liturgy for Slihot, the prayers of repentance recited before the holidays. One line urges God to “annihilate Se’ir and his father-in-law.” “Se’ir” is a name for Esau, the symbol of Christianity in medieval Jewish literature. Esau’s father-in-law was Ishmael—meaning Islam in the poem. Few modern Jews get the allusion. But then, how many Catholics understand Latin?
Actually, that reference to Islam is exceptional. Hebrew University historian Israel Yuval says that traditional liturgical attacks “are always against Christianity,” and are found in Ashkenazi prayers, not Sephardi ones. The rage reflects theological battles with Christianity, which claimed the Bible as its own and argued that Jews suffered in exile because God had ended the covenant with them. The Jewish response was a stress on “vengeful redemption”—looking forward to a conclusion of history in which the power relations were reversed, the Christians destroyed.
Yuval points to a piyyut in the Ashkenazi prayers for Yom Kippur morning that compares “the gentiles [who] prepared a statue” with “Your righteous ones who declare Your unity morning and night.” Another poem in the same service lists Biblical names of nations and asks God to “swallow them up…crush them, strike them…”
Both poems appear in the Rinat Yisrael holiday prayer book, ubiquitous in Israel—but they’re in the back, in small print, for the rare congregation that uses them. As Yuval notes, most piyyutim are no longer in fashion, even in Orthodox congregations. He suggests that the hateful ones were dropped because people felt that they “weren’t appropriate.” Every religion, he says, “has its garbage. I don’t get worked up about awful texts. What interests me is what’s done about them.” He sees a strong, positive tendency to weed them out.
Some weeding is left to be done. In Orthodox Ashkenazi services, a prayer beginning “Av Harahamim”—“Father of Mercy”—is recited nearly every Sabbath after the Torah reading. The first half asks for God’s mercy on the souls of Jews killed during the Crusades. The second half asks God to exact vengeance for their spilled blood, quoting Biblical verses such as, “He will execute vengeance upon the nations, heaping up bodies, crushing heads far and wide.”
Historically, perhaps it’s understandable that Jews responded to slaughter with hope for a “vengeful redemption” against Christendom. Nine hundred years later, praying for bloodshed should not be part of any Jewish service. Not only are the words vicious, they can have practical consequences at a time when some young people in the Orthodox settler camp, miseducated by rabbis not worthy of the title, are making vengeance into a religious value. Reciting this prayer, they’re more likely to think of their Palestinian neighbors than of crusaders.
Which brings us back to the hymn asserting that a day of light for Israel is a cursed day for Ishmael. Yuval suspects that the piyyut is a faux antique, written in the old acrostic style but recently manufactured. Old liturgy didn’t attack Islam. Creating a new text of religious hatred is far more serious than maintaining a traditional, half-understood one. Let’s say it’s a “body blow” to relations between faiths. If Jewish groups want to criticize other religions’ prayers, that’s fine, but let them also deplore our own prayers for vengeance and hymns cursing Islam. Let them begin the public debate, so that we may clean our own house.
Gershom Gorenberg is a Jerusalem-based journalist and the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.