How Jewish liturgical responses evolved from Maimonides to today - opinion

In two major essays, written in the mid-1940s within a few months of each other, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Rav, noted the parting of ways between a critical Maimonidean theological construct about the nature of the Almighty and the approach that the Jewish people, the historic Knesset Yisrael – to use the Rav’s favored phrase – chose to adopt in its liturgy.

In Halakhic Man, the Rav noted:

“Halakhic Man never accepted the ruling of Maimonides opposing the recital of piyyutim, the liturgical poems and songs of praise. Go forth and learn what the Guide [to the Perplexed] sought to do to the piyyutim of Israel!...

“‘In these prayer and sermons they predicate of God qualitative attributions that, if predicated of a human individual, would designate a deficiency in him.... This kind of license is frequently taken by poets and preachers or such as think what they speak is poetry, so that the utterances of some contain rubbish and perverse imaginings’ (Guide I:59).

“Nevertheless, on the high holidays, the community of Israel (Knesset Yisrael), singing the hymns of unity and glory, reaches out to its Creator. And when the Divine presence winks at us from behind the fading rays of the sun, and its smile bears within it forgiveness and pardon, we weave a ‘royal crown’ of praise for the Atik Yomin, the Ancient One. And in moments of divine mercy and grace, in times of spiritual ecstasy and exultation, when our entire existence thirsts for the living God, we recite many piyyutim and hymns, and we disregard the strictures of the philosophical midrash concerning the problem of negative attributes.”

In a similar vein, in The Halakhic Mind, the Rav wrote:

“Indeed, not even Maimonides succeeded in his attempt to purge Jewish liturgy of poetic elements and anthropomorphic symbols derived for our sensational experience. His endeavor to raise the prayer book to the lofty levels and peaks of philosophical abstraction failed abysmally. Jewish God-worshipers have ignored the teaching of their master, Maimonides, and still sing hymns teeming with poetic refrain drawn from the well of human passion and emotion. Moreover, Jewish liturgists were not inclined to dispense even with anthropomorphic metaphors that lend warmth and color to the personal man-God relation.”

The Rav’s spiritual hero, Maimonides, was defeated in this philosophical battle and the deep-rooted religious and spiritual instincts of the Jewish people, of “Jewish God-worshipers,” triumphed, bringing the Halacha and Jewish practice along.

It is interesting to note that a similar phenomenon has occurred in our generation, albeit in a more limited form, to the Rav himself! A liturgical/theological perspective championed vigorously by the Rav in his lifetime has slowly and now almost completely been abandoned. I refer to the specific issue of the writing and recitation of new kinot on Tisha B’Av for the tragedies of the Shoah.

A number of scholars have documented that while individual rabbis and laymen authored elegies for the events of the Shoah immediately after the conclusion of the war and throughout the 1950s-1970s, in most communities it was not common to add these kinot to the service on Tisha B’Av. This was true for both the Modern Orthodox and haredi communities. The general hesitancy to introduce new prayers, and the more limited role that the Shoah played in American and Israeli public Jewish life in those first decades after World War II until after the Eichmann trial and the Six Day War, possibly played a role.

In the Modern Orthodox community, Rabbi Soloveitchik was also a powerful voice in opposition to adding any new liturgy to the mourning service of Tisha B’Av. The Rav argued that we, who were not endowed with Divine inspiration, and who were not on the level of the medieval scholars, had no authority to author and introduce new kinot. He argued that all Jewish tragedy can be subsumed and included under the umbrella of the language of the medieval kinot that are part of the traditional liturgy. Ignoring the historical evidence that Jews had continued to author kinot well into the early modern period in reaction to the exile from Spain in 1492, the Chelmnitzki pogroms of 1648 and other tragedies, the Rav argued forcefully to his students and rabbis in the field against any such innovation.

In the 1980s, due to the work of a number of lay Orthodox haredi survivors, such as Mr. Pinchas Hertzke, the yeshiva and hassidic communities began to embrace the notion of mourning for the Shoah on Tisha B’Av and adding kinot written specifically for that purpose. Elegies were written by prominent haredi rabbis such as Rabbi Shimon Schwab and the Bobover Rebbe and slowly made inroads into the Orthodox community, both haredi and Modern.

These kinot were included in the Mesorah/Artscroll Kinnos that came on the scene in 1991, giving them wide exposure and use. More and more communities adopted some custom to recite one or more kinot for the Shoah, so much so that even when Koren Publishers issued its Mesorat HaRav Kinot in 2010 based on the teachings of Rabbi Soloveitchik from his celebrated daylong Tisha B’Av lectures and explanatory kinot services from the 1970s and early 1980s, it included a number of elegies written for the Shoah, though he surely would have opposed their recitation.

In the preface to the volume, the editor notes that “the Rav was not in favor of reciting kinot that were composed to commemorate the Holocaust.... Nonetheless, the practice has arisen in many communities to recite kinot for the Holocaust, and we have included several, consistent with our view that this edition should be of practical use for the general Jewish community, and not a reflection of the Rav’s personal practice.”

The religious impetus and drive, what Prof. Haym Soloveitchik termed in other contexts the “ritual instinct” of the people, of the community, driven by the powerful impact of the Shoah and its legacy, simply overwhelmed any halachic or philosophic argument for conservatism. Jews felt the need to express themselves in traditional forms, as the difficulty, nay for some the absurdity, of reciting kinot for the murder of a few dozen or a hundred Jews in the Rhineland during the First Crusade but ignoring any liturgical expression for the murder of six million of our brothers and sisters was simply not tenable ethically or religiously.

History repeats itself

On Tisha B’Av 5784, it is clear that the same phenomenon is bubbling up in the Modern Orthodox community in America and the religious-Zionist community in Israel regarding the events of Oct. 7. New kinot are being written by laypeople and rabbis, and they are spreading over the Internet, being promoted by rabbinical organizations to their members, and being shared by colleagues on listservs, to incorporate into the long and tragic history of liturgical responses to Jewish suffering and tragedy.

The religious need to cry out to God in the face of contemporary evil and the suffering of the Jewish people, and place it with the framework of ritual and prayer that will stand the test of time, is palpable and real.

The writer is rabbi of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Teaneck, New Jersey, and chairman of the department of Talmud and Halacha at SAR High School in New York City.