Turning to Jerusalem from the Exile

Until modern, liberal Jews revised it, the consciousness of living in diaspora, in exile from the ideal Jewish life in the Land of Israel, permeated Jewish liturgy. This trope only intensified as the exile grew longer. The prayers, some recited multiple times a day, shaped Jewish diaspora identity into one yearning for its ancient home. The various forms of modern Judaism have negotiated this heritage, with some revising the prayers, either to express positive understandings of the diaspora or to integrate the new realities of Jewish life in the land of Israel. At the other end of the spectrum, others have considered the diaspora and exile to persist so long as they live in the pre-messianic world, even if geographically in the land itself.

“Teach Your Daughters to Wail and One Another to Lament”: Jewish Prayers and Liturgical Texts for Female Victims of Sexual Assault

Throughout generations, various prayers have been composed to express religious and cultural experiences of the Jewish community, such as holidays life-cycle and national tragedies. However, some social issues, such as sexual assault, have been excluded from this canon. This article uncovers Jewish prayers and liturgical texts dedicated to female victims of sexual assault. Drawing on a qualitative inquiry based on content analysis and interviews with the prayers’ authors, I demonstrate how these texts (re)position sexual assault victims in Jewish liturgy by including new phrasings and references to God; by removing masculine violence related to God; by mentioning biblical female characters who experienced sexual harassment; by denouncing of patriarchal abuse; or by sanctifying the woman’s painful body, which is incorporated as an important agent in the ritual’s structure. Therefore, I suggest considering these texts a political mean to voice women’s traumas and to incorporate them into the religious sphere, thereby rectifying a long-silenced discourse.

Kabbalat Shabbat Services for First-Graders: Recognition of Gender and Motherhood in Reform Jewish Ritual

The Shabbat service is one of the most popular practices in the Jewish liturgy, and over the years it has reflected various social and cultural changes. The service is not only textual prayer but also a performative act, including bodily gestures and using sacred objects and space. In this article, based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Yuval Reform congregation located in Gedera, I analyze special Shabbat services for the first day of school. I argue that the ceremony is constructed by the women in the congregation as a gender performance advocating gender equality and motherhood experiences. Every year, they create a new prayer book, which includes prayers honoring the activities of teachers and mothers, and creatively perform physical rituals by using sacred symbols charged with new interpretations. Thus the congregants are not only undermining both Orthodox rules and the structure of Reform Shabbat services; they are also rejecting patriarchal norms and expressions in the religious space. Although the Reform congregation thereby positions itself as a gender-safe zone, the ethnographic analysis also exposes resistance and tensions – reflecting the difficulty of abolishing heteronormative gender norms and Jewish traditional perceptions in Israeli society.

Isaiah in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Jewish Traditions

The book of Isaiah has been the most important prophetic text in Jewish reception history since the Second Temple period. There is evidence from Sirach 48 that already then, the book was thought to have two different parts, Isa 1–39, containing Isaiah’s “biography” and message for his own time, and Isa 40–66, referring to the prophet’s eschatological message concerning Jerusalem. Later, Abraham ibn Ezra’s medieval commentary shows that this understanding of a bipartite book was regarded as valid. Jewish midrashim, which were developed from the first part of the book, depict important encounters between the prophet and the kings of Judah, for example, the identification of Hezekiah with Immanuel and the royal figure in Isa 9:5–6, and the martyrdom of Isaiah during the reign of Manasseh. The comforting message to Jerusalem in the latter part of the book was a topic that fascinated Jewish interpreters after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce. Many Haftarot texts of Isaiah in the sabbatical cycle of the Jewish liturgy illustrate this Jerusalem-centered focus. Some topics in the reception history of Isaiah have been developed in encounters and confrontations with Christian exegesis, such as the reception of Isa 53.

Concluding Meditations

In two concluding vignettes, the authors gesture toward how the religious traditions of their divergent upbringings inform their respective abolitionist commitments. Dubler, who was raised an observant Jew, reflects on how, among other aspects of the Jewish tradition, his formative encounters with Passover seder helped shape him into the abolitionist he is today. Drawing a connection between Jewish liturgy and the nineteenth-century abolitionist opponents of slavery, Dubler accounts for how the book acquired its title. Lloyd reflects on the experience of “witness” and how the ambivalence of this practice motivated his interest in prison abolition, and his scholarship. Both authors meditate on how direct action, prison education, scholarship, and citizenship are entangled, and how those tangles can be worked through Judaism or Protestantism.

New Directions in Understanding Jewish Liturgy

The Dead Sea Scrolls, Cairo Geniza, and critical study of rabbinic literature have contributed to our understanding of when and how fixed public worship developed within the Jewish community. The Dead Sea Scrolls show that prayer was practiced by at least some Jewish groups while the Second Temple still stood and that it drew heavily from biblical language, as can also be seen in the latest biblical books. However, Genizah documents demonstrate the persistence of liturgical diversity as late as the tenth century and, with critical study of rabbinic texts, raise questions about the acceptance of rabbinic authority.

Prayer “Birkat ha-Minim” (“Blessing of heretics”) and the Ban on Participation in the Synagogue Liturgy

The Jewish prayer “Birkat ha-Minim” (“Blessing on the heretics”), 12th benediction of Amida, attracts attention not only of Jewish Liturgy researchers, but it is also an important plot in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in ancient period. Throughout the 20th century “Birkat ha-Minim” was read in the context of anti-Judean passages of the New Testament’s books and early Christian polemic treatises. Such works often include New Testament references to the excommunication of the Christ’s followers from the synagogue (John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2). On the other side, for 2nd–3rd centuries’ Christian authors “Blessing” was one of the reasons for the emergence of anti-Jewish sentiments in the Christians’ environment. However, in recent times, a number of scholars, after more than a hundred years break, conducted a paleographic and textual analysis of the most currently known manuscripts, containing the text of the prayer, and published number of its versions, accompanied by a new critical apparatus. These publications have radically changed the understanding of this blessing. For this reason, all previous works either require rethinking or completely outdated. Although recent research allows us more accurately determine the time and place of the creation of manuscripts containing prayer, there is still no consensus on what purpose it was created and who should be understood by the term “Minim”. In addition, to what extent we can link “Birkat ha-minim” with the New Testament passages about excommunication Christ’s followers from the synagogue.