(no subject)

Every now and then my father gets into a good lather at synagogue about what he calls 'the Word Repetition Police'. These are the people who are opposed to any repetition of words during the sung prayers, and who use a variety of passive-aggressive tactics to try to prevent others from doing so. Why this angers my father is a fascinatingly complicated sociological issue that people might find it interesting to delve into.

At issue: Many of the tunes that American Jews use to sing prayers don't actually perfectly match the words of the prayers. This is for a variety of reasons: Sometimes it's because a tune originally from something else- an American pop melody or advertising jingle, a European march, a Yiddish or Israeli folktune- has been borrowed and made against its will to serve the purpose. When you do that, you have to make a choice between elongating words, repeating words, or adding nonsense syllables to make the prayer fit. Sometimes it's because Jewish prayers are variable in length depending on context, with words added or removed based on the day of the week, the season of the year, the particular holidays, the person reciting them, the phase of the moon, etc. And sometimes it's because the tune designed for the prayer by an American Reform or Conservative Jew deliberately uses part of the prayer as a chorus.

This is, technically speaking, religiously proscribed by the Talmud. Interestingly, the idea isn't that prayer is so sacrosanct that one cannot make a single misstatement of the required words. That is untrue. The Talmud understands that people make mistakes, and has lots and lots of accommodation for mistakes in prayer, explaining when you have to repeat the prayer again, when you can back up and fix just your mistake, when you don't even need to fix your mistake. Rather, the fear is that repeating a word will lead to reciting a sentence that contradicts the intent of the prayer. Hebrew is a language with complicated polysemy, so it's possible in extreme edge cases that by repeating a word you'll end up saying the exact opposite of what you meant. Unlikely, but possible. The Talmud, after all, is built on reading this sort of contradiction into the polysemy and trying to learn law and philosophy from it.

So theoretically, Orthodox Jews are opposed to repeating any words in prayer. So when is there a conflict? It depends on what you mean by Orthodox, is the answer.

My family is descended from pre-War immigrants to New York from Poland, Russia, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe. In Europe, they were all Orthodox, but they most likely wouldn't have called themselves Orthodox. They were Jews. Reform Judaism was a largely German phenomenon, Conservative Judaism only existed in America, and in the places where they lived, if you were Jewish, there was only one kind of Jewish, doctrinally. But don't imagine that meant that all Jews were as devoted to their practice as all other Jews. Some Jews practiced Judaism out of deep devotion to their faith. Some did it because it was what their parents had done. Some did it because everyone did it, and were frustrated and angry with it. Some secretly didn't practice as well as they pretended they did. There was a spectrum of Jewish practice even in the shtetl- it was just that everyone operated under the default expectation that they were (Orthodox) Jewish.

So who were the Jews who moved to America before the War? They were the ones who were looking for a better life. Economic freedom and opportunity. Protection from persecution. Fair treatment under the law. Jobs. And also, freedom from some of the stricture of Jewish communal life. I can't say exactly which of these reasons motivated my great-grandparents, because I've never known them, and my conversations with my grandparents about it have been difficult, frustrating, and driven by the wide cultural gap between us. I do know that my grandparents on my mother's side attended a Reform temple, and my grandparents on my father's side attended a series of Orthodox synagogues that, to hear my father's stories about them, were shockingly liberal by the standard of any Orthodox synagogue today. And I believe my father's stories, mostly.

I believe him when he tells me that people would sit outside the shul on Yom Kippur, sneaking out of the service to grab a smoke. I believe him when he tells me that the present 'Orthodox tradition' of standing for all kaddishes was not part of any shul he attended growing up. And I believe him when he insists that there was no word repetition police when he was growing up, that the tunes he sang were the same as the ones used in Conservative shuls, full of repeated words used to make the prayers fit the melodies. They did all these things, and they still considered themselves Orthodox, because they kept kosher (mostly), they attended a synagogue with a (short) mechitza, they wore kippot and observed all the holidays and the Sabbath, and the Torah was the center of their existence.

Back in Europe there was a powerful, highly organized Rabbinic structure setting the rules for worship. Those Rabbis, who held status and power in Europe as the leaders of major yeshivos, almost never moved to America. So America's Rabbinic structure consisted of the outcasts, the outliers, the visionaries, the people who had an ambition for a Judaism that looked different from the one in Europe. And eventually it consisted of American born Jews trained at home-grown Rabbinic seminaries, who didn't have European Judaism as a particularly vivid model. American Jewish practice before the War was a lot more relaxed, a lot less dependent on exact recapitulation of the specific details of the Talmud. They didn't care as much about the minute details of minhag, Jewish custom. And they were set next to the strong presences of American Reform and Conservative Judaism, so that even the comparatively lax Orthodoxy I describe placed more rigor on ritual than the Jews living next door to them.

It wasn't until the Holocaust forced the Jewish establishment out of Europe that Yeshivish, European-style Judaism took root in American Orthodoxy, at the hands of those who established Beis Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey, Yeshivas Ner Yisrael in Baltimore, Maryland, the Telshe Yeshiva of Cleveland, the Mirrer Yeshivah in Brooklyn, and others. These were mostly transplanted European yeshivas that didn't leave Europe until they had to. And gradually they started to populate the American Rabbinate with their number, to influence the practice of American Orthodox Jewry toward a praxis aligned much more closely with Talmudic prescription. Gradually they started to run the Jewish day schools that taught young Orthodox Jews what Orthodox Judaism meant.

So if you attend a Modern Orthodox synagogue today and the prayer service is led by someone whose upbringing was like my father's, you'll hear him occasionally sing to melodies that call for words to be repeated. And what happens in our shul when this happens is that the members of our shul who are more closely aligned with the European Jewish ideology world will, at the top of their lungs, sing over the repetition with nonsense syllables like "Na na Na" or "Ay Ay Ay". They're not trying to drown out the repetition. God hears all of our prayers, so the act of singing over the repetition doesn't mean it didn't happen. They're trying to passive-aggressively assert, to the people repeating words, that they don't find it acceptable. And then my father and his ilk will sing louder.

Because Jews are a stiff-necked people, and we like a good fight now and again. Because it's the way my father did it at his Orthodox shul growing up, and he doesn't like the way the past thirty years have seen shuls add more and more rules to their prayer service that weren't there when he grew up. Because "That's the way we always did it" is the fundamental tenet of Jewish practice, is the basic building block of our self-identity, is the reason why Mount Sinai and the Torah means so much to us. It's not sufficient to tell someone who was brought up with a certain Jewish practice that "The Talmud says you're wrong." The Talmud is fluid and questioning and ambiguous. Jews depend on copying their parents' Judaism as the best available, most reliable way to ensure continuity of practice.

But Jews are also self-questioning, doubting people. So sometimes we step outside ourselves and ask why we do the things we do. And then you get essays like this, because the answer to any question about Judaism, as I've said before many times, is "It's complicated, and there's a difference of opinion."


Today is the ninth day of the Omer