Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 35

Dr. Dalia Marx of Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem, first surveys spontaneous personal prayer and Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, noting that the majority of prayers are event specific. Marx describes the Second Temple period (538 BCE through 70 CE) as the incubation period for Jewish liturgy. With the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the rabbis substituted prayer for sacrifices. The Mishnah considers essential Jewish liturgical practices: the recitation of the Shemaʿ, and the ʿAmidah prayer, as well as prayers for eating.

The formula, »Blessed are you O Eternal, Our God, king of the world…« opens or closes rabbinic blessings. We do not know when rabbinic prayer was first written down, as the rabbis opposed this practice. Joseph Heinemann contended that from its outset the structure and content of prayer, the number and order of the blessings were all determined, yet there was no single original text fixed by any central body of rabbis. In contrast, Ezra Fleischer held that the liturgy was created in the court of Rabban Gamaliel in Yavneh at the end of the first century CE.

During the seventh century and the years that followed, the first prayer-books were created. The earliest manuscripts of Jewish liturgy also can be dated to the end of this period. Rav Amram (d. ca. 875) of Babylonia responded to a legal inquiry sent to him with the first complete prayer-book that has come into our hands. The liturgical customs of the Babylonians were more crystallized than those of the Land of Israel.

From the 11^th century until the advent of printed prayer-books in the 16^th century is an era of local custom. As the grip of Babylonian Jewry weakened, communal customs grew. The rabbis of Sefarad (Spanish-Portuguese) attended to the Babylonian Gaonate regarding the prayer-book. The permeation of Kabbalistic ideas into prayer marked an important trend.

Jewish demographics changed repeatedly as the result of forced and willing migrations. The printing of prayer-books in Ashkenaz, Sefarad, and Italy in the 16^th century allowed for more plentiful copies of these works. The current era has brought major shifts in every aspect of Jewish liturgy.