17132
380
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C O N***FILENAME***0006.bbt TROVERSY
On the Origins of the ¦Amidah: Response to R uth Langer I am grateful to Dr. Langer for her discussion (vol. 19, no. 2) of my ideas concerning the nature and development of obligatory Jewish prayer. Since 1990 I have devoted a series of detailed articles to a critique of the received wisdom on this subject and to the presentation of an alternative thesis. I am grati®ed that Dr. Langer, despite her obvious doubts and reservations, has presented English readers with substantial components of this argument. She has done this, moreover, with depth and fairness, qualities not always in evidence when scholars take issue with one another's work. She deserves not only my gratitude but that of the readers of this journal as well. In the few remarks that follow, I refrain from o²ering a detailed response to all the issues raised by Dr. Langer. I have laid these out at length in a private communication to her, and there is no need to rehearse them for the general reader, who I'm sure will take me at my word when I say that I have a response to each of the points raised by Dr. Langer, as I'm sure she has to mine. Instead I would like to present the overall principles of my approach, even if only in schematic outline. In Dr. Langer's exposition, these principle were presented Ð perhaps unavoidably Ð in a truncated manner that took them out of order and placed emphases in inappropriate places. The result was an inevitable diminishment of the coherence and integrity of my argument. Because my articles appeared only in Hebrew, it is therefore important to me to give the reader who is unlikely to read my work in the original a chance to have a clear perception of it. I wish to begin by emphasizing the fact that the di²erence between my approach and the conventional view does not lie, as Dr. Langer claims it does, in the way the few direct talmudic passages describing the emergence of the ¦amidah
Controversy
❙
381
are interpreted. These sources, as Dr. Langer correctly observes, are elusive and can sustain contradictory interpretations. The distinction of my approach lies rather in its taking into account blocs of sources and chronological parameters that were ignored by others. It attempts to explain the phenomenon in question within its real historical context. Both positions agree that it was the sages of Yavneh who promulgated the requirement that all Jews pray three times a day, either privately or communally, and that they recite on this occasion a prayer of eighteen blessings, i.e., the ¦amidah. Yet standard scholarship assumes that they did not ®x the text of this compulsory prayer, considering, as Dr. Langer puts it, that the people had already ``developed linguistic registers for appropriate prayer to God . . . and were capable of composing, and expected to compose, their own prayer in it'' (190). Implied in this argument is the assumption that long before the Yavnean period, necessarily during the period of the Second Temple, people were already accustomed to reciting prayers that resembled in character the ¦amidah that the Yavneh sages sought to institutionalize. I have demonstrated in my published articles that this assumption is mistaken. Examination of the large corpus of literary and other evidence that re¯ects the realities of life in Erets Israel at the end of the Second Temple period (the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, Philo, the New Testament, and more) proves that there existed at this time no sort of verbal worship that resembled the liturgy that was established at Yavneh. To be sure, Erets Israel was ®lled with synagogues during the Second Temple period; however, these were not houses of prayer but rather places where people gathered to hear the Torah read and expounded, never to pray. Jews in those times would pray individually, each in his own way and language, and at times or places they desired. Prayer was considered neither an obligatory nor a communal endeavor. As with prayer from time immemorial, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, it was man's intimate and personal communication with God. Close inspection of the characteristic structures and themes of the shemoneh ¦esreh as attested by all available sources from the earliest layers of the tannaitic corpus to the canonical form familiar to us today demonstrates that the ¦amidah was not meant to be a prayer in the common meaning of the term, but rather a
382
❙
Prooftexts
ritual of collective worship, a divine service in the strictly formal sense: its recitation is compulsory; it is performed at set times in a solemn cultic setting; its contents are ®xed and concern exclusively the welfare of the collective; and it must be recited in the presence of the community. The shemoneh ¦esreh, then, does not resemble the kind of prayers uttered by individuals before (and, of course, after) the Destruction; it resembles instead the sacri®cial worship conducted by the priests in the Sanctuary. This new kind of verbal worship was conceived at Yavneh as a way to o²er the nation, in the absence of the sacri®ces, an alternative form of worshiping God. At the time it was promulgated at Yavneh, the shemoneh ¦esreh was an utter innovation on all levels, whether institutional, functional, or theological. The ``linguistic registers'' that people used while the Temple stood Ð if indeed, such existed Ð were utterly inappropriate to this new purpose. The assumption put forward by standard scholarship, namely, that the Sages created ex nihilo this new form of ritual prayer, mandated its recitation three times a day, required it to be said in Hebrew, ®xed the exact number of its components and established their subject and order, but did not also ®x its precise wording, is highly illogical. No ancient religion left room for improvisation in cultic matters. Nor did the Sages leave room for improvisation in halakhic matters. There is therefore no way to imagine that they left the nation's new way of worshiping God to be shaped by the free will and inspiration of common people. Anyone who examines the abundance of evidence in the talmudic corpus, beginning with the earliest tannaitic strata, will quickly discover that these sources speak of the ¦amidah as of a precisely worded text, repeated again and again by the worshipers. In Leviticus Rabba (23:4), for example, we ®nd the tanna El¦azar Hisma, a disciple of Yehoshua¦ ben ¼ananya (one of the older sages at Yavneh), leaving the synagogue in shame because he was not su³ciently familiar with the text of the ¦amidah to serve as shelia¶ tsibbur. In B. Berakhot (28b±29a), we learn of the congregaton waiting ``two or three hours'' (!) for Shemu¥el Hakatan to recall the proper wording of birkat haminim (which he himself had composed!). Then there is the amora Rabbi Yonah, who used to raise his voice while reciting the prayer so that members of his household would learn the wording of the ¦amidah (P. Berakhot 4:1). Elsewhere, the sages take up the case of whether a man who
Controversy
❙
383
``®nds himself '' at shomea¦ te®lah while reciting the ¦amidah should repeat the prayer or not (ibid., 2:4); they also discuss the question of whether reciting the ¦amidah requires kavanah, (ibid., 2:5). R. Matanyah commends his head for automatically bowing at the modim prayer. Amora¥im confess that they have never said the ¦amidah with kavanah and, to the contrary, that any time they tried to do so they thought about extraneous matters (ibid., 2:4). R. Zeira admits that each time he sought to introduce an innovation into the ¦amidah he got confused (ibid., 4:3; see also B. Berakhot 29b). And how are we to explain the fact that all the references to the wording of the ¦amidah that occur in talmudic literature (and these are many more than we are accustomed to think) are familiar to us from recognizable, canonical versions of the liturgy? The conclusion that the language of the ¦amidah was formulated in a binding version at Yavneh (B. Berakhot 28b; Megillah 17b) is thus an inescapable outcome of the analysis of the nature and status of prayer during the Second Temple period, as compared with the speci®c nature and purpose of the ¦amidah. It is also attested by the explicit and implied statements made in a multitude of ancient sources. It also o²ers a key to clarifying many of the cruxes that have long existed in the study of the development of Jewish prayers. It explains not only why the ¦amidah was established but also why it was meant to be performed in public; why it is obligatory upon both the individual and the congregation; why the individual uses the language of `we' in reciting it; what accounts for its literary, stylistic, conceptual, and ideological unity; how its appearance in the synagogue gave birth to the kedushah and how it in¯uenced the system of Torah reading and the status of the derashah; how later additions to the liturgy came about; how it enabled and in¯uenced the emergence and development of liturgical poetry; and even how, over time, its own wording changed and diversi®ed, until it became what it is nowadays. Such is the explanatory power of the conception I have developed, and I would be happy to have it compared with that of the conventional approach. How is it, then, that Dr. Langer concludes her review essay pondering which of the two approaches makes more sense? There can be no doubt that she considers the conventional approach superior. The reasons are obvious as well: it is the one we learned in our youth; it leaves scholarship plenty of unresolved
384
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Prooftexts
problems to busy itself with; and it leaves undisturbed the mysti®cation and murkiness that some ®ner minds enjoy so much. Ezra Fleischer Jerusalem
Considerations of Method: A Response to Ezra Fleischer With his response, Prof. Fleischer himself sketches out the central argument of his series of articles. With this, he furthers one of the primary factors motivating my original review essay: to provide a summary of this signi®cant discussion of early Jewish liturgy for those many students of the ®eld who are unable themselves to read Fleischer's elegant, poetic Hebrew prose. We should all be grateful. As he acknowledges, it was obviously impossible in reviewing a book's worth of articles to present any one argument at the level of detail allowed by Prof. Fleischer's more speci®c focus here. It is also apparent to me, having studied Prof. Fleischer's briefer public and lengthy private responses, that his articles (which now include ``The Kedushah of the ¦Amidah [and other Kedushot]: Historical, Liturgical, and Ideological Aspects,'' Tarbiz½ 67, no. 3 [1998]: 301±50) should be reworked into a book. A decade of dialogue over these issues has brought him to the clearer articulation of his methodology evident in his response. Most of the points that Prof. Fleischer raises here already receive adequate response in my original review, and my interpretations need not be reiterated. The critical point on which he and I do indeed disagree is not whether there was a revolutionary call for the institution of obligatory verbal worship of God at Yavneh that (gradually, I think) found a home in the preexistent institution of the synagogue, but rather whether it is demonstrable (or even plausible) that this revolution included the dictation of a precisely de®ned prayer text. Prof. Fleischer's argument is attractive; it certainly ®ts the eventual state of Jewish prayer and the
Controversy
❙
385
way that Jews of the past millennium (who knew only authoritatively ®xed prayer) have assumed that they should read the rabbinic sources. But do we have reliable evidence for such a text? Rabbinic traditions after Yavneh were oral for generations Ð many of them for centuries. If we know that medieval scribes did not hesitate to insert their own liturgical texts into received and ``authoritative'' manuscripts, is there any reason to suppose that talmudic and midrashic texts in the period of their formulation were any less ¯uid, that those repeating these texts did not either deliberately or accidentally insert their own preferred formulations? The presence of recognizable liturgical texts in received rabbinic literature teaches only two things. First, these were, at the earliest, the active prayers at the point of the redaction of the larger text, hundreds of years after Yavneh. Second, our familiar prayers often match those of the Talmud because they were shaped by it. As, under the geonim and rishonim, the Babylonian Talmud gained its status as the authoritative and holy embodiment of the Oral Law, local liturgical customs were brought into gradual conformity with it. The best-documented example of this, studied extensively by Prof. Fleischer and others, is the Palestinian rite. Thus our earliest rabbinic prayer texts of any historical value date from half a millennium and more after Yavneh! Even in the following ®ve hundred years, we have only very limited evidence for how Jews prayed. That evidence, coming primarily from the Cairo geniza, still displays enough diversity (and a diversity that dwindles as Babylonian in¯uence grows) that it led Fleischer's predecessors to question the validity of positing an Urtext for Jewish prayer. We simply cannot know with any certainty what was decreed at Yavneh or how Jews ful®lled its decrees in late antiquity. We can give much more credibility to the records of deviance than to transmissions of what does become authoritative text because the person transmitting the tradition would not have had a familiar liturgy to insert. These are among the rabbinic traditions that Prof. Fleischer de-emphasizes in his studies. The stories of prayer leaders erring in the opening blessing of the ¦amidah (and the rabbinic objections to their texts) indicate that it was not obvious to these men that their texts were ®xed! (B. Berakhot 33b; B. Megillah 25a; P. Berakhot 9:1, 12d; Midrash Tehillim 19:2). Not a single text suggests that these were incidents of deliberate challenges to rabbinic authority, even though the presiding rabbis did,
386
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Prooftexts
in fact, object (in terms of the text of the Men of the Great Assembly, note, and not Yavneh!). Nor did these innovative texts invalidate the recited prayer; the rabbi merely waited until the leader ®nished and then instructed him to do it properly next time. That the Gemara includes these examples as commentary on the following Mishnah only underscores this point. The Mishnah instructs: We silence the one who says, ``May Your mercies reach the bird's nest,'' and ``May Your name be remembered for good,'' and ``We give thanks, we give thanks.'' When someone leads the ¦amidah [lit., passes before the Ark] and errs, someone else should take his place [immediately]. (M. Berakhot 5:3; comp. M. Megillah 4:9) Clearly, there are theologically heretical errors that cannot be tolerated, like those detailed in the Mishnah, and then there are emerging preferences in wording about which the rabbis and their students can legitimately argue, but that do not invalidate the prayer. Had the Yavnean court decreed a speci®c language, there would have been little point in decreeing certain phrases heretical. Would it not have been simpler just to indicate the correct prayer language? Yet that is precisely what these rabbinic texts never do for the ¦amidah or other statutory prayers in their regular forms. I suggest that this is evidence for a gradually emerging consensus on the ``right'' prayer text, evidence that muddies the clarity of Prof. Fleischer's reconstruction. Prof. Fleischer objects to my suggestion that we allow ourselves to acknowledge that our understanding of the origins of rabbinic prayer may never emerge from the murkiness cast upon them by our lack of clear evidence. Here we have a philosophical di²erence over scholarly voice. Do we serve the world best by propounding theories as if they were facts? By speaking a voice of certainty even as we are aware of the necessary hypothetical nature of our proposals? ``In house,'' this may be justi®ed, for we know that critical eyes will not hesitate to question our certainty. But the sheer volume of misinformation about Jewish liturgy (and other ®elds of Jewish studies) that is quoted and perpetuated by those outside the ®eld based on ``facts'' propounded con®dently by our illustrious forerunners in this endeavor should teach us that another, more humble, voice is merited. Can we
Controversy
❙
387
shed light on the murk? That is our scholarly task; that is where Prof. Fleischer's publications make contributions of the highest value. Can we eliminate the murk completely? I doubt it. Ruth Langer Theology Department Boston College
Copyright of Prooftexts is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
❙
C O N***FILENAME***0006.bbt TROVERSY
On the Origins of the ¦Amidah: Response to R uth Langer I am grateful to Dr. Langer for her discussion (vol. 19, no. 2) of my ideas concerning the nature and development of obligatory Jewish prayer. Since 1990 I have devoted a series of detailed articles to a critique of the received wisdom on this subject and to the presentation of an alternative thesis. I am grati®ed that Dr. Langer, despite her obvious doubts and reservations, has presented English readers with substantial components of this argument. She has done this, moreover, with depth and fairness, qualities not always in evidence when scholars take issue with one another's work. She deserves not only my gratitude but that of the readers of this journal as well. In the few remarks that follow, I refrain from o²ering a detailed response to all the issues raised by Dr. Langer. I have laid these out at length in a private communication to her, and there is no need to rehearse them for the general reader, who I'm sure will take me at my word when I say that I have a response to each of the points raised by Dr. Langer, as I'm sure she has to mine. Instead I would like to present the overall principles of my approach, even if only in schematic outline. In Dr. Langer's exposition, these principle were presented Ð perhaps unavoidably Ð in a truncated manner that took them out of order and placed emphases in inappropriate places. The result was an inevitable diminishment of the coherence and integrity of my argument. Because my articles appeared only in Hebrew, it is therefore important to me to give the reader who is unlikely to read my work in the original a chance to have a clear perception of it. I wish to begin by emphasizing the fact that the di²erence between my approach and the conventional view does not lie, as Dr. Langer claims it does, in the way the few direct talmudic passages describing the emergence of the ¦amidah
Controversy
❙
381
are interpreted. These sources, as Dr. Langer correctly observes, are elusive and can sustain contradictory interpretations. The distinction of my approach lies rather in its taking into account blocs of sources and chronological parameters that were ignored by others. It attempts to explain the phenomenon in question within its real historical context. Both positions agree that it was the sages of Yavneh who promulgated the requirement that all Jews pray three times a day, either privately or communally, and that they recite on this occasion a prayer of eighteen blessings, i.e., the ¦amidah. Yet standard scholarship assumes that they did not ®x the text of this compulsory prayer, considering, as Dr. Langer puts it, that the people had already ``developed linguistic registers for appropriate prayer to God . . . and were capable of composing, and expected to compose, their own prayer in it'' (190). Implied in this argument is the assumption that long before the Yavnean period, necessarily during the period of the Second Temple, people were already accustomed to reciting prayers that resembled in character the ¦amidah that the Yavneh sages sought to institutionalize. I have demonstrated in my published articles that this assumption is mistaken. Examination of the large corpus of literary and other evidence that re¯ects the realities of life in Erets Israel at the end of the Second Temple period (the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, Philo, the New Testament, and more) proves that there existed at this time no sort of verbal worship that resembled the liturgy that was established at Yavneh. To be sure, Erets Israel was ®lled with synagogues during the Second Temple period; however, these were not houses of prayer but rather places where people gathered to hear the Torah read and expounded, never to pray. Jews in those times would pray individually, each in his own way and language, and at times or places they desired. Prayer was considered neither an obligatory nor a communal endeavor. As with prayer from time immemorial, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, it was man's intimate and personal communication with God. Close inspection of the characteristic structures and themes of the shemoneh ¦esreh as attested by all available sources from the earliest layers of the tannaitic corpus to the canonical form familiar to us today demonstrates that the ¦amidah was not meant to be a prayer in the common meaning of the term, but rather a
382
❙
Prooftexts
ritual of collective worship, a divine service in the strictly formal sense: its recitation is compulsory; it is performed at set times in a solemn cultic setting; its contents are ®xed and concern exclusively the welfare of the collective; and it must be recited in the presence of the community. The shemoneh ¦esreh, then, does not resemble the kind of prayers uttered by individuals before (and, of course, after) the Destruction; it resembles instead the sacri®cial worship conducted by the priests in the Sanctuary. This new kind of verbal worship was conceived at Yavneh as a way to o²er the nation, in the absence of the sacri®ces, an alternative form of worshiping God. At the time it was promulgated at Yavneh, the shemoneh ¦esreh was an utter innovation on all levels, whether institutional, functional, or theological. The ``linguistic registers'' that people used while the Temple stood Ð if indeed, such existed Ð were utterly inappropriate to this new purpose. The assumption put forward by standard scholarship, namely, that the Sages created ex nihilo this new form of ritual prayer, mandated its recitation three times a day, required it to be said in Hebrew, ®xed the exact number of its components and established their subject and order, but did not also ®x its precise wording, is highly illogical. No ancient religion left room for improvisation in cultic matters. Nor did the Sages leave room for improvisation in halakhic matters. There is therefore no way to imagine that they left the nation's new way of worshiping God to be shaped by the free will and inspiration of common people. Anyone who examines the abundance of evidence in the talmudic corpus, beginning with the earliest tannaitic strata, will quickly discover that these sources speak of the ¦amidah as of a precisely worded text, repeated again and again by the worshipers. In Leviticus Rabba (23:4), for example, we ®nd the tanna El¦azar Hisma, a disciple of Yehoshua¦ ben ¼ananya (one of the older sages at Yavneh), leaving the synagogue in shame because he was not su³ciently familiar with the text of the ¦amidah to serve as shelia¶ tsibbur. In B. Berakhot (28b±29a), we learn of the congregaton waiting ``two or three hours'' (!) for Shemu¥el Hakatan to recall the proper wording of birkat haminim (which he himself had composed!). Then there is the amora Rabbi Yonah, who used to raise his voice while reciting the prayer so that members of his household would learn the wording of the ¦amidah (P. Berakhot 4:1). Elsewhere, the sages take up the case of whether a man who
Controversy
❙
383
``®nds himself '' at shomea¦ te®lah while reciting the ¦amidah should repeat the prayer or not (ibid., 2:4); they also discuss the question of whether reciting the ¦amidah requires kavanah, (ibid., 2:5). R. Matanyah commends his head for automatically bowing at the modim prayer. Amora¥im confess that they have never said the ¦amidah with kavanah and, to the contrary, that any time they tried to do so they thought about extraneous matters (ibid., 2:4). R. Zeira admits that each time he sought to introduce an innovation into the ¦amidah he got confused (ibid., 4:3; see also B. Berakhot 29b). And how are we to explain the fact that all the references to the wording of the ¦amidah that occur in talmudic literature (and these are many more than we are accustomed to think) are familiar to us from recognizable, canonical versions of the liturgy? The conclusion that the language of the ¦amidah was formulated in a binding version at Yavneh (B. Berakhot 28b; Megillah 17b) is thus an inescapable outcome of the analysis of the nature and status of prayer during the Second Temple period, as compared with the speci®c nature and purpose of the ¦amidah. It is also attested by the explicit and implied statements made in a multitude of ancient sources. It also o²ers a key to clarifying many of the cruxes that have long existed in the study of the development of Jewish prayers. It explains not only why the ¦amidah was established but also why it was meant to be performed in public; why it is obligatory upon both the individual and the congregation; why the individual uses the language of `we' in reciting it; what accounts for its literary, stylistic, conceptual, and ideological unity; how its appearance in the synagogue gave birth to the kedushah and how it in¯uenced the system of Torah reading and the status of the derashah; how later additions to the liturgy came about; how it enabled and in¯uenced the emergence and development of liturgical poetry; and even how, over time, its own wording changed and diversi®ed, until it became what it is nowadays. Such is the explanatory power of the conception I have developed, and I would be happy to have it compared with that of the conventional approach. How is it, then, that Dr. Langer concludes her review essay pondering which of the two approaches makes more sense? There can be no doubt that she considers the conventional approach superior. The reasons are obvious as well: it is the one we learned in our youth; it leaves scholarship plenty of unresolved
384
❙
Prooftexts
problems to busy itself with; and it leaves undisturbed the mysti®cation and murkiness that some ®ner minds enjoy so much. Ezra Fleischer Jerusalem
Considerations of Method: A Response to Ezra Fleischer With his response, Prof. Fleischer himself sketches out the central argument of his series of articles. With this, he furthers one of the primary factors motivating my original review essay: to provide a summary of this signi®cant discussion of early Jewish liturgy for those many students of the ®eld who are unable themselves to read Fleischer's elegant, poetic Hebrew prose. We should all be grateful. As he acknowledges, it was obviously impossible in reviewing a book's worth of articles to present any one argument at the level of detail allowed by Prof. Fleischer's more speci®c focus here. It is also apparent to me, having studied Prof. Fleischer's briefer public and lengthy private responses, that his articles (which now include ``The Kedushah of the ¦Amidah [and other Kedushot]: Historical, Liturgical, and Ideological Aspects,'' Tarbiz½ 67, no. 3 [1998]: 301±50) should be reworked into a book. A decade of dialogue over these issues has brought him to the clearer articulation of his methodology evident in his response. Most of the points that Prof. Fleischer raises here already receive adequate response in my original review, and my interpretations need not be reiterated. The critical point on which he and I do indeed disagree is not whether there was a revolutionary call for the institution of obligatory verbal worship of God at Yavneh that (gradually, I think) found a home in the preexistent institution of the synagogue, but rather whether it is demonstrable (or even plausible) that this revolution included the dictation of a precisely de®ned prayer text. Prof. Fleischer's argument is attractive; it certainly ®ts the eventual state of Jewish prayer and the
Controversy
❙
385
way that Jews of the past millennium (who knew only authoritatively ®xed prayer) have assumed that they should read the rabbinic sources. But do we have reliable evidence for such a text? Rabbinic traditions after Yavneh were oral for generations Ð many of them for centuries. If we know that medieval scribes did not hesitate to insert their own liturgical texts into received and ``authoritative'' manuscripts, is there any reason to suppose that talmudic and midrashic texts in the period of their formulation were any less ¯uid, that those repeating these texts did not either deliberately or accidentally insert their own preferred formulations? The presence of recognizable liturgical texts in received rabbinic literature teaches only two things. First, these were, at the earliest, the active prayers at the point of the redaction of the larger text, hundreds of years after Yavneh. Second, our familiar prayers often match those of the Talmud because they were shaped by it. As, under the geonim and rishonim, the Babylonian Talmud gained its status as the authoritative and holy embodiment of the Oral Law, local liturgical customs were brought into gradual conformity with it. The best-documented example of this, studied extensively by Prof. Fleischer and others, is the Palestinian rite. Thus our earliest rabbinic prayer texts of any historical value date from half a millennium and more after Yavneh! Even in the following ®ve hundred years, we have only very limited evidence for how Jews prayed. That evidence, coming primarily from the Cairo geniza, still displays enough diversity (and a diversity that dwindles as Babylonian in¯uence grows) that it led Fleischer's predecessors to question the validity of positing an Urtext for Jewish prayer. We simply cannot know with any certainty what was decreed at Yavneh or how Jews ful®lled its decrees in late antiquity. We can give much more credibility to the records of deviance than to transmissions of what does become authoritative text because the person transmitting the tradition would not have had a familiar liturgy to insert. These are among the rabbinic traditions that Prof. Fleischer de-emphasizes in his studies. The stories of prayer leaders erring in the opening blessing of the ¦amidah (and the rabbinic objections to their texts) indicate that it was not obvious to these men that their texts were ®xed! (B. Berakhot 33b; B. Megillah 25a; P. Berakhot 9:1, 12d; Midrash Tehillim 19:2). Not a single text suggests that these were incidents of deliberate challenges to rabbinic authority, even though the presiding rabbis did,
386
❙
Prooftexts
in fact, object (in terms of the text of the Men of the Great Assembly, note, and not Yavneh!). Nor did these innovative texts invalidate the recited prayer; the rabbi merely waited until the leader ®nished and then instructed him to do it properly next time. That the Gemara includes these examples as commentary on the following Mishnah only underscores this point. The Mishnah instructs: We silence the one who says, ``May Your mercies reach the bird's nest,'' and ``May Your name be remembered for good,'' and ``We give thanks, we give thanks.'' When someone leads the ¦amidah [lit., passes before the Ark] and errs, someone else should take his place [immediately]. (M. Berakhot 5:3; comp. M. Megillah 4:9) Clearly, there are theologically heretical errors that cannot be tolerated, like those detailed in the Mishnah, and then there are emerging preferences in wording about which the rabbis and their students can legitimately argue, but that do not invalidate the prayer. Had the Yavnean court decreed a speci®c language, there would have been little point in decreeing certain phrases heretical. Would it not have been simpler just to indicate the correct prayer language? Yet that is precisely what these rabbinic texts never do for the ¦amidah or other statutory prayers in their regular forms. I suggest that this is evidence for a gradually emerging consensus on the ``right'' prayer text, evidence that muddies the clarity of Prof. Fleischer's reconstruction. Prof. Fleischer objects to my suggestion that we allow ourselves to acknowledge that our understanding of the origins of rabbinic prayer may never emerge from the murkiness cast upon them by our lack of clear evidence. Here we have a philosophical di²erence over scholarly voice. Do we serve the world best by propounding theories as if they were facts? By speaking a voice of certainty even as we are aware of the necessary hypothetical nature of our proposals? ``In house,'' this may be justi®ed, for we know that critical eyes will not hesitate to question our certainty. But the sheer volume of misinformation about Jewish liturgy (and other ®elds of Jewish studies) that is quoted and perpetuated by those outside the ®eld based on ``facts'' propounded con®dently by our illustrious forerunners in this endeavor should teach us that another, more humble, voice is merited. Can we
Controversy
❙
387
shed light on the murk? That is our scholarly task; that is where Prof. Fleischer's publications make contributions of the highest value. Can we eliminate the murk completely? I doubt it. Ruth Langer Theology Department Boston College
Copyright of Prooftexts is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
