Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour through each tractate, the entirety of the Talmud. We always talk a little bit about history at the end of the week, and I want to talk about the history related to tractate Brachos. And I want to focus specifically on the history and development of the prayer book, the siddur. How did the siddur come about? Where is it from? What’s it about?
There is no question that if you go through tractate Brachos, you will find little parts about what prayer is and the mechanisms of prayer. It opens up with the saying of the Shema twice daily. We have the blessings of what we call the Shemoneh Esrei, which is 18 blessings. Itis really 19, which tractate Brachos also explains how an added blessing was taken into the daily prayer, known as Shemoneh Esrei or the Amidah, which literally means just standing. But how did the actual siddur develop, and where does it come from? We call a prayer book a siddur, which literally means to organize, to set up in a specific order.
Most of the obligations are described in our tractate [such as]when you need to daven. But a lot is missing. It doesn’t really have everything. And to really understand how the siddur actually evolved, we have to go all the way back in history, right in the shadow of the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem.
After the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem, there was a sense of despondency. Like, even the prophets were looking around and saying, “I don’t know what to tell you. This is very dark. This is very bleak.” In fact, the Talmud tells us an incredible story where in each generation following the destruction of the Temple, and how bad it got, they stopped using so many superlatives to describe God. They said, “How can we describe God as awesome, as great, as mighty? The Jewish people are scattered in exile. We’re broken. We don’t have a Temple. How can we talk about these things?”
And that is where the Talmud introduces a body that really existed over generations, that is the bridge between the First Temple period and the Second Temple period. And that body is known as the Men of the Great Assembly, the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly. Now, this wasn’t necessarily a literal assembly of people. These were people who were the leaders of the Jewish people during this transitional time of stepping away from a world of temple, of unity, of redemption, of prophecy, of miracles, and going into this world where Godliness is slowly fading from that palpable sense in the world.
And the Men of the Great Assembly, after each of the prophets, basically they [the prophets] got up and they said, “Look, how can we praise God in this way? How can we call Him awesome? How can we call God mighty?” And they did something absolutely amazing. They were called the Great Men of the Assembly, Anshei Knesset HaGedolah. The Talmud says what made them so great is that they restored our capacity to have greatness within our relationship to God. They restored our relationship to God within exile. And they, the Talmud tells us in our tractate, were the ones who set up the system of prayers and of blessings and really this idea of being able to sanctify daily life—without a Temple in Jerusalem, without prophetic experience, without open miracles. People used to pray in those times, but now we needed it desperately just to make sense of the world, to have the interpretation of the dream of life itself.
And they came up, and it’s very beautiful. The Talmud says this story that the prophets stopped praising God, and the Men of the Great Assembly came forward and said, “We’re still going to call God awesome, because you want to know where we see God’s awesomeness? Not from the miracles, not from the prophecy, not from conquering. We see God’s greatness from the continued survival of the Jewish people. How else could such a small nation, like a small flock of sheep, continue to endure among a den of wolves? Through the continued existence of the Jewish people themselves—that is how we find the greatness and the awe-inspiring relationship that we have with God. It is through the Jewish people.” And that is the beginning of setting up daily prayers.
We are supposed to pray three times a day. We learned that in the fourth chapter of tractate Brachos. But that still is way before there is a very formal siddur.
Prayer began with really just focusing on Shema twice a day, and then we would have the Amidah, where we literally stand before God and ask God for our needs, and we literally bring the entirety of our life before God. There was no formal prayer going step by step. That came much later. The beginning of the siddur actually begins with the siddur known as the siddur of Rav Amram Gaon. That is probably in the ninth century already. This is when the Talmud is really more or less coming into canonization, and he looks around and says, “We need to formalize to make sure the prayers stay unified throughout the Jewish people scattered throughout the world.” And it is Rav Amram Gaon who goes and creates the basic structure for the siddur.
Now, after the siddur of Rav Amram Gaon, then it becomes diffuse. The Jewish people start to move in really two places. In the turn of the millennia, we start to have settlements in Europe, and that gives rise to the Ashkenazi community. And we have settlements that kind of stay in Sephardic lands, whether it’s in Spain, in Iraq, and this becomes the kernel that gives rise to a second type of siddur known as Sefard.
Ashkenaz and Sefard are not really competing in any ways. They’re two very slight differences in customs, some of the practices, and there are some slight differences in the siddur. None of them are really, really major. The structure is more or less the same. But it’s because we developed the siddur in these two different lands that if you go into any synagogue, more or less, you will find two types of prayer books. One that is called Ashkenaz that is associated with the tradition that is in European, in France, in Germany, as opposed to the Sephardic tradition.
Now, these were all very fluid, and if you go back to the 14th century, the 13th century, it wasn’t even just these two major—Ashkenaz and Sefard. Every little community kind of had their own approach and their own little flavor to the siddur. The siddur, the prayer book, really only gets formalized, as so much of Jewish life gets formalized and canonized, with the advent of printing.
Soncino prints a siddur, and now, with the printing of the siddur, we don’t really know, or people become oblivious to how it actually developed. But the siddur is a remnant of the original project of the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah. In a world without prophecy, in a world where God is not actively and obviously communicating to us, we still need access to that prophetic experience. How do we access that prophetic experience? That is through prayer itself.
And they set up this prayer, the core being the Shema and the Amidah. Then Rav Amram Gaon, centuries, almost a thousand years later, develops it more formally, takes all of the traditions: What do we lead up into Shema? How do we lead up into the Amidah? What do we say afterwards? These two traditions are then filtered throughout the communities of the exile, but the siddur really only becomes more fixed and serious once printing comes.
And I’ll tell you something really fascinating. The opening prayer in nearly every traditional siddur is extraordinarily late. And this is the prayer that we wake up and we say, the first prayer of every single morning, which is the prayer of Modeh Ani. This is a very late 16th-century prayer. It was written by a mystic from Tzfat named Moshe ben Machir, and he creates this prayer, which is so beautiful and so moving: Modeh ani lefanecha, “I admit, I confess, I thank You, God, before You,” Melech chai vekayam, “the living God,” shehechezarta, “that has returned to me,” nishmati, “my own soul,” bechemlah, “with graciousness,” rabbah emunatecha, “great is Your faith, God.” God’s faith.
What is God’s faith about? That’s God’s faith in us. This is the opening prayer, and it’s extraordinarily late. It’s the 16th century, coming from a mystic, really on the cusp of the 16th century. And this is the opening prayer. This is the opening prayer because, number one, it doesn’t include the name of God, so you can say it even if you’re, you know, in bed, in your pajamas, upside down, whatever happened the night before. You can always say it and feel comfortable saying it.
And there’s also something very beautiful. The words from this prayer, as the words in nearly all prayers, have anchors in the Written Torah itself. And the words for this prayer of Modeh Ani come from the third chapter in Eichah. Eichah is the Book of Lamentations. It is about the destruction of the Temple. And in the third chapter, we have this very issue that the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly, are talking about, which is a world that is desolate, in exile, seemingly absent from divinity. And in the middle of this chapter of Lamentations, which is about mourning and depression and pain, there’s this turn, there’s this glimmer of hope where we say God’s still involved in our life. The fact that we are alive, the fact that we exist, the fact that we have the treasure of existence itself, we need to thank God for this as well. And the fact that we continue to exist is a remnant, is an indication, that God is still in this world. There is still something beyond the purely materialistic. Tthere is something that transcends, and that is the opening prayer of Modeh Ani. And in the same way that the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly, established prayer even though the awe of God was not that palpable. But they said, “You know where we can find awe? From the continued existence of the Jewish people.”
So our opening prayer is in the same vein. Our opening prayer, Modeh ani lefanecha, “Thank You, God,” Melech chai vekayam, “the living God, for returning my soul.” What are we doing? We’re saying, “Look, I may not have clear prophecy. There may not be clear miracles. But the fact that I still am given life every single day, the joy of existence, the sanctity of existence, I can thank God for that, and I can see and discover God through that.” And that is the basis of prayer itself.
And I want to leave you with one idea. You know, in other religions they have a real emphasis on what you need to believe. I think they call it a catechism. Like all of the standard beliefs.
I heard a beautiful idea, and I’m trying to find where he writes it, from Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks—not the Lord, but Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said something amazing that really resonated with me: Do you know where you can find the organized theology of the Jewish people? We don’t have a list of beliefs. The theology of the Jewish people is baked into the siddur, into the prayer book. Prayer is how we discover and how we grasp the theology of the Jewish people. And the words of the prayer, which are so deep, are so poetic, are anchored more times than not in the written words of the Torah, in passages of the Talmud, etc., etc. What is the book of theology of the Jewish people? That is the prayer book itself. It is where we discover how to find godliness. How God works within this world. So the next time you open up a siddur, it’s not only that you’re praying. You are learning about the theology of Judaism itself.
Quick shout-out to my friend. If you want to know more about the siddur, there’s a little prop over here. This is a book from someone who I know. It’s been many years since I’ve seen him: Rabbi Moshe Walter, The Making of the Siddur. It’s a really nice introduction to how the siddur came about. The siddur is the theology of the Jewish people, is how we find and build relationship with divinity even in this exilic world.
Hope you enjoyed, and let’s keep making Torah sweet.