Tag: liturgy | נוסח התפילה
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A Closer Look at Maoz Tzur
Update: I was interviewed by Sarah Ogince of the Jewish News Syndicate for an article on the history of Maoz Tzur, “Everyone knows ‘Ma’oz Tzur,’ except they don’t,” Dec. 15, 2022. This is revised with added notes from a short piece I wrote on the well-known Chanukkah piyyut, Ma’oz Tzur, and its cultural contexts, for […]
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Haftarah
Haftarah refers to an additional selection of text from the Neviim (Prophets), the second division of books of Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), read after the parashah (Torah portion of the week). The haftarah is thematically tied either to the parashah or events on the Jewish calendar. Seeking out the thematic connection is one of the […]
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Parashah
The common meaning of parashah (plural: parshiyot; colloquially, “parsha”) is the weekly Torah portion. The Torah (also called Chumash, or the first five books of the Bible) is divided into sections read cyclically. There are two cycles for reading: (1) An annual cycle of 54 portions, meaning that you read the entire Torah yearly (some […]
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Piyyut
פיוט – pl. piyyutim – Hebrew, and occasionally Aramaic, liturgical poetry, meaning poems added to the prayer service. Piyyutim appear especially in the machzor for the different holidays, but also to the daily siddur, especially in the earlier period of their composition. The earliest piyyutim were written in Eretz Yisrael during the Byzantine period when […]
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The Unbearable Darkness of Being: On Ishay Ribo’s Seder ha-Avodah
Ishay Ribo’s remarkable, melancholy version of the Seder ha-Avodah, the piyyut recited in the Amidah of Musaf on Yom Kippur, traces a different theology of teshuvah than that classically outlined by Rambam in Hilchot Teshuvah. With much of the song drawn directly from the liturgy (which itself relies heavily, often verbatim, on Mishnah Yoma), Ribo’s […]