Berakhot 077

In Berakhot 069 I wrote: Very many modern Conservative congregations … give the First Mothers their rightful place next to the First Fathers in this first berakhah of the Amidah – not only ideologically but textually as well. This prompted the following comment from Jacob Lewis:

I myself do this, but it seems to me to be a rather problematic practice. I believe it was Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan who said that at the root of the Avot is the personal relationship of each "father" with God. These relationships are well documented in the Torah. Is there anywhere we see the "mothers'" relationships with God? Additionally, how do we resolve the need to restore the feminine to our prayer with the fact that, halakhically, the first three berakhot of Amidah are a fixed text?

I respond:

Jacob raises two questions here, and I am going to relate to the second one first: are the berakhot of the Amidah a fixed text, an immutable text similar to the immutability of the text of the Torah? The answer is that they are not immutable. In Berakhot 020 I wrote the following explanation, which concerns the texts of berakhot:

Ezra and his Bet Din established, for example, that the first berakhah of the Amidah must be concerned with Avot [First Parents], but the worshipper has free reign for improvisation. There is ample evidence that the actual texts of these berakhot were never intended to be sacrosanct. Hence the necessity for the mishnah to elaborate on the parameters within which the improvisation can take place. If this were not the case we would not be able to explain how it is that different rites obtain: why are there (slight) differences between the Ashkenazi rite and the Sefardi rite? More to the point, how could we explain the (much greater) differences between our present 'accepted' text and texts of the Amidah found in the Cairo Genizah? Furthermore, if the text itself were sacrosanct how would the Mishnah have been able to permit the recitation of these prayers in any language other than Hebrew? By way of illustration only, I present here my translation (in pseudo-Shakespearian English) of the text of the second berakhah of the Amidah as found in the Cairo Genizah:

Even the most casual comparison of this version with the translation of any version 'accepted' today will disclose substantial differences. My guess is that it was Ĥassidei Ashkenaz in the 13th century who first started us on the road towards a standard text, by counting the number of words in each berakhah and giving this number a mystical significance. The invention of the printing press served to escalate the tendency towards standardization. It was the Lurianic Kabbalists in the 16th century who first turned the immutability of the text into a virtue – but even they recognized that each individual must remain faithful to his customary text and that there was not and could not be one identical text for all Israel because no 'ur-text' had been inherited.

We often hear from less learned people that one may not add to the text of the berakhot in the first and last sub-sections of the Amidah. This is not really accurate. The Tur [Oraĥ Ĥayyim 113:1], for instance, reminds us that we may not add petitions to these berakhot since there are intended to be purely laudatory; the prohibition of petitions does not preclude the inclusion of non-petitionary items – look at the large amount of poetry that all streams of Judaism add to these berakhot on the High Holydays! Indeed, in that very same paragraph the Tur points out that during the Ten days of Penitence from Rosh ha-Shanah until Yom Kippur we habitually add to these berakhot petitions (!) such as zokhrenu, which have no basis in the Talmud whatsoever. The addition of the names of the Matriarchs to those of the Patriarchs in Avot is in no sense petitionary and does nothing whatsoever to affect the laudatory nature of the passage. I would add but one word of caution: the fact that something is permitted does not make it mandatory. (Indeed, my own guess is that the more the addition of the Matriarchs is left to the personal decision of the worshiper the faster it will become a universal one – in Conservative Judaism at any rate.)

To be continued.