Weaving Prayer: An Analytical and Spiritual Commentary on the Siddur, by Jeffrey Hoffman. Ben Yehuda Press, 2024
The siddur, the Jewish prayerbook, has inspired Jews for as long as it has existed. The prayers of the siddur express the yearnings, aspirations, and tribulations of the Jewish people and articulate our relationship to God through words of praise, gratitude, faith, supplication, and confession.
In our age, however—particularly, but not exclusively, in the liberal denominations—two impediments exist that challenge the modern contemplative reader’s ability to appreciate and derive meaning from the words of the siddur. The first is a conception of God as a binary choice, what Arthur Green in his new commentary on the siddur, Well of Living Insight: Comments on the Siddur (2023), calls “the simplistic either/or of personified theism versus atheism (‘do you believe in God, the old fellow in the sky, or not?’).” The second is the difficulty that the modern reader has in relating to the prayers of the siddur and the concept of God they express. The vast majority of the material in the traditional siddur is centuries, if not millenia, old, and as such expresses ideas and beliefs about God that can feel antiquated. As a consequence, many people simply turn off to organized prayer and avoid statutory communal prayer experiences, thereby robbing themselves of the profound rewards that can be gained by engaging with the siddur.
Enter Jeffrey Hoffman’s invaluable new book, Weaving Prayer: An Analytical and Spiritual Commentary on the Siddur. This companion to the prayerbook addresses both of these impediments and brings an entirely fresh and much-needed evaluation of the siddur that speaks to the modern worshipper and would-be worshipper. The book systematically goes through the siddur, offering scholarly analyses of the daily, Shabbat, and festival prayers that draw on Hoffman’s extensive knowledge and research as a liturgist. His analytical commentaries, while academically rigorous, are accessible, and they reflect the masterful teaching and communicating skills that I experienced as Hoffman’s student. Utilizing a vast array of sources, both traditional and academic, he situates the tefillot (prayers) in their historical context, offering innovative, well-reasoned insights into their origins and development. Additionally, he provides thorough literary analyses of the prayers, treating them as the poetic formulations that they are. The extensive notes (helpfully presented at the bottom of each page) will appeal to those wanting to go even deeper.
The analytical commentary alone would make Weaving Prayer a valuable addition to any library. But what makes it invaluable are the spiritual commentaries. In these, Hoffman unpretentiously faces the impediments mentioned above with intellectual honesty and a profound respect for the reader. For each tefillah, Hoffman suggests at least one alternative reading that speaks to a modern spiritual sensibility, opening up new understandings of prayers that never resonated or had grown stale. In the first blessing of the Amidah, to cite but one example, Hoffman suggests that invoking our patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—our fellow clan members—creates “a personal and direct connection with God at the very beginning of this central prayer” by reminding worshippers that their own family has “worshipped this God for hundreds of generations.”
The spiritual commentaries guide the reader to new approaches to the prayers. But, in a larger sense, they demand that readers reconsider their own relationship to tefillah in general. In the spiritual commentary on Pesuqei dezimra, Hoffman lays out this spiritual thesis: “We all benefit when we try to attune ourselves to the simplest, most direct question to be asked of any prayer or prayer service; in what way does this, or could this, connect me to God, to the transcendent? And to the extent that it does not serve this goal, we can ask ourselves what we can do to improve our spiritual experience with this prayer or prayer service.”
To this end, Hoffman is unafraid to confront controversial aspects of our liturgy. In discussing “the Chosen People idea” as expressed in the festival prayer Attah veḥartanu, Hoffman writes, “scholarly integrity…requires that I express what the blessing actually says as opposed to what we might wish it to say.” Rather than sanitizing or offering apologias for difficult passages like those that express hostility or vilify “the non-Jewish Other,” he faces them head-on, unapologetically, confessing his own discomfort with them and at times offering helpful takeaways. As Hoffman himself says in his commentary to Birkat haminim (“Blessing of the Sectarians”) in the Amidah, “the only way to progress toward religious pluralism is to forthrightly identify those portions of our own tradition that expressed intolerance toward other religious outlooks. Only then can Jews request with integrity that other religions honestly come to grips with teachings in their own traditions that vilify Judaism.” Offering an alternative, divergent (and lovely) understanding of that particular blessing (based on a Hasidic teaching) in an attempt to grapple with his discomfort, Hoffman boldly asserts that “channeling the words of this blessing…may be a step toward repairing and healing [it].”
The book’s pluralistic approach, which Hoffman also discusses in the introduction, is another unique feature. Hoffman draws upon siddurim (prayerbooks) from all the major denominations, commenting on innovations from those movements that expand our understanding and appreciation of the liturgy.
Hoffman ends the book in an unexpected manner with a short story that he composed. “A Medieval Kabbalist on the Upper West Side” creatively and charmingly fleshes out the concept of God that he articulated in his introduction to the book. The story presents the reader with an image of God that is not “the old fellow in the sky” as it unlocks much of the spiritual commentary in the book and highlights the overall courageousness of Weaving Prayer.
The overriding aim and intent of this brave and inspiring book is to offer the worshipper ways to experience the prayer and the prayer service in a deep, engaged, and meaningful manner. If, at times, this comes at the expense of normative performance, then so be it. The object is connection and communion with the divine through prayer. This willingness to stray from a strictly traditional presentation of the liturgy and lay out a much broader vision of Jewish prayer is what makes Weaving Prayer such a refreshing and essential contribution to the library of books on Jewish liturgy.
Sam Levine serves as rabbi and cantor of the East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the Academy for Jewish Religion rabbinical program and of the H. L. Miller Cantorial School at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town, by Edward Berenson. W. W. Norton, 2019.
On Saturday, September 22, 1928, the chief of police in Massena, New York sounded the town’s fire horn. Barbara Griffiths, the four-year-old daughter of Dave and Marion Griffiths, had disappeared into the woods of Massena, a town of ten thousand residents that borders Canada. Within hours, a search party of hundreds began surveying the woods, looking for the little girl. As the search for Barbara continued, an unknown “someone” started a rumor that the town’s Jews kidnapped and murdered Barbara to harvest her blood for ritual use on the Yom Kippur holiday that was to begin at sundown the next day. Massena was home to approximately twenty Jewish families, including the family of Edward Berenson.
The horrible accusation quickly took hold and was adopted even by Massena’s mayor, W. Gilbert Hawes, who authorized Corporal H. M. (Mickey) McCann, the New York state trooper leading the effort to find Barbara, to begin an investigation into ritual murder. With Hawes’s blessing, McCann interviewed two Jewish residents and even summoned Rabbi Berel Berenglass, Massena’s rabbi, to the town hall for questioning, where, after wading through a menacing crowd of some three to four hundred people, he was asked if “[his] people are offering human sacrifices on a holiday” or if they use human blood (33–34). The rabbi, expressing what the reader is likely feeling as the book unfolds, replied that he was “dreadfully surprised to hear such a foolish, ridiculous and contemptible question from an officer in the United States of America.”
The Jews of Massena began to gather for Yom Kippur services that afternoon, fearing the worst. What would happen if Barbara never returned? Would they be accused of murder? Would there be a pogrom in New York? This threat of violence motivated the president of the local synagogue to phone prominent Jewish leaders in New York City for assistance.
And then it was over. At 4:30 on Sunday afternoon, Just twenty-four hours after her disappearance, Barbara emerged from the woods unharmed, spotted by two teenage girls in a field a mile from home. She had lost her way and fell asleep in the tall grass. She was reunited with her overjoyed parents. Dorothy took Barbara and her sister to New York City to escape the charged atmosphere in Massena. A short story about Barbara’s disappearance and return was written in the local Massena Observer, with no mention of the blood libel. If the Massena press felt the affair resolved, the national media did not; the national press gave “elaborate” coverage to the story. “By early October 1928, the Massena blood libel had been transformed from a strange local event to a huge national scandal.”
In The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town, Berenson masterfully retells this story. A professor of history at New York University and a son of Massena, he first heard of this story from his grandparents, one of Massena’s twenty resident Jewish families in 1928. The book is engaging and interesting, and I found it difficult to stop reading once I started.
Berenson not only tells the events of that fall in 1928, he also travels far beyond this local story, linking the Massena incident to larger historical forces. He traces the history of the blood libel from medieval England to modern Europe, showing how this ancient slander reappears in different historical contexts, almost as part of the collective unconscious of gentile Europeans. Berenson provides a history of antisemitism and its development from religious persecution into racial hatred. I found it horrifying to read this pre-Holocaust history, as we know the unspeakable conclusion of this evolution.
His account of Henry Ford’s antisemitism and the nativism that surrounded the 1928 election sadly resonated. Describing Ford and his demagoguery, Berenson writes: “[h]e distrusted elites, urbanites, and intellectuals and claimed to value folk wisdom over book learning, his own hunches over what passed for scientific truth” (144). These words can be written about any number of today’s politicians. Berenson quotes a Democratic politician who claimed that the greatest threat to the republic is “‘the threatened and complete control of government and society by the body of ignorance, prejudice and superstition’ embedded in [Herbert] Hoover’s Republican Party.”
My experience of Berenson’s book would have been different had I closed the pages for a final time on October 6, 2023. Reading it after the events of October 7 had particular resonance. I am neither a historian, a sociologist, or an anthropologist, so I can only speak of my personal experience, but the book made me realize my own fear of violence against Jews and the precariousness of our sense of acceptance in the broader culture. I have never knowingly experienced antisemitism, yet, like the Jews of Massena (who were much closer in time to the pogroms they feared), I felt that violence was a real and present danger. I was surprised by my own feeling of vulnerability.
The blood libel also seems alive in some of the dialogue and protest around the war in Gaza. Hamas’s false accusation that Israeli forces killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians while bombing a Gazan hospital was instantly reported as fact by the international media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. These false accusations of intentional killing of innocents by Jews had real consequences. I have seen placards showing Bibi, wearing a Hitler mustache, devouring a Palestinian child. The world seems all too eager to accept that the IDF is prosecuting this war with a bloodlust. Berenson’s description of the blood libel and its reappearance in different contexts felt all too relevant.
Jeff Wechselblatt is a lawyer in private practice who lives in the Bronx with his wife and their four children. He has studied at Yeshivat Hakotel and at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Jeff is an active member of the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel Riverdale (CSAIR) in the Bronx.