Tefillah 038

Here the author is taking poetic licence; because it was not God who called the Sabbath day a day of delight but the prophet whose message is preserved in the book of Isaiah:

Presumably, our author relies on the fact that the prophet is speaking in God's name.

44:
The hymn now continues as the author makes the connection between his hymn and the psalm of the day:

Clearly, the author of our present hymn understands the heading of this psalm as being "A psalm a song by the Sabbath day" and therefore what follows are the words of praise uttered metaphorically by the day of rest.

45:
There are some who hold that remainder of this hymn may be a later addition since the following passage forms a kind of bridge to the next item in the liturgy. But I do not think that it is necessary to make such an assumption, because what remains of the hymn is also a very suitable conclusion to what has preceeded:

And thus, with considerable artistry, the author has finally brought his composition back to what is the required main theme of this benediction: the passage from night to day and the arrival of daylight.

To be continued.

It is now several times that we have discussed the origin of the custom that ten adults constitute a minyan [quorum] for certain liturgical elements (d^evarim she-bi-k^edushah). Originally I offered the rabbinic explanation that the number ten was based on the number of spies who gave a negative report to Moses in the desert. Others suggested that it was better to base the requirement for ten on the lowest number of righteous people to be found in the town of Sodom in the Genesis story. Now Dov Goldberg counters this latter suggestion:

My father, Rabbi Solomon Goldberg, always suggested that were the number 10 for the minyan tied by the rabbis to the Abraham story, then we might be inclined to suppose that a minyan can only be composed of 10 righteous Jews (tzadikim). However, by being tied to what God calls in Numbers 14:27 the edah ra’ah (“evil community”) precisely the opposite point is made. As long as 10 Jews come together for the purpose of worshipping God they form a praying community capable of sanctifying God regardless of the degree of their individual imperfections.

I respond:

I love it! Indeed, often the rabbis say that for a congregation to be effective it must be assumed to have both righteous and sinful people in it.