Tefillah 002

2:
The long 'diatribe' concerning the diligence with which one should be prepared to serve God is, in fact, 'borrowed' and 're-worked' from one of the last chapters of Rambam's epoch-making book on Jewish theology, The Guide for the Perplexed. However, what Isserles rather cleverly hides is that in the original [Book 3:52] that which is with us at all times and is observing our every action is our intellect (which is the means whereby there is contact between the individual and God). The main burden of both Karo's rather succinct admonition and of Isserles' rather verbose exposition is that people should not laze around in bed after waking but should immediately get up. And the fact that Isserles sees necessary to emphasize this point and to warn us not to be ashamed of our alacrity should be enough to assure us that most of the contemporaries of these two great rabbis were no different from us today!

3:
Perhaps, for us today, the most salient point should be the rather grudging warning of Rabbi Isserles that "at any rate one should not arise at a time that would make one be late for the service at the time the congregation worships." For it is true that if one attends public worship right from the beginning there is a greater possibility of achieving kavvanah. (I think that the best way to explain kavvanah is to imagine someone so intimately involved in the text and meaning of their prayers that they become for them a meaningful 'conversation' with God rather than a ritual which one is acting out. True kavvanah is very hard to achieve.) In most congregations nowadays the "time when the congregation worships" on Shabbat morning is sufficiently late to permit most people to disobey these pious admonitions. And we do, because, as the great kabbalist Rabbi Yeshayah Horowitz [1555-1630] wrote in his book Shné Luĥot ha-B^erit [Shabbat 53], "sleeping is part of Shabbat delight."

4:
Most siddurim begin the morning service with the short prayer Modeh Ani [females say Modah Ani]. This prayer is a typical example of the influence of Kabbalah on the development of our liturgy. None of the great codes from before the end of the middle ages mention this prayer – not Rif, not Rambam, not the Tur. Its introduction is surely connected with the line of thought outlined by the Rema (Rabbi Moshe Isserles) above: that one must be aware constantly that one is in the presence of the divine. No doubt in earlier times the first act of worship that a person performed upon arising in the morning was to recite the benediction upon washing the hands and the bendiction upon leaving the toilet. (We shall examine this in detail later on.) But for the kabbalists this was not enough. They wanted a person's first thought upon awakening to be directed towards God. However here they had created for themselves a problem.

5:
The Zohar was a magnificent work of kabbalistic thought, written in the middle ages. There is almost no doubt that its author (or collator) was Moshe ben-Shemtov de Leon [1250-1305]. He called the book Midrash de-Rabbi Shim'on bar-Yoĥai, and this is no doubt the reason why until this very day devout kabbalists will assure you that the work was indeed written by that great Mishnaic sage 1200 years before the book was first published. One of the ideas of which the book made much was that a 'malevolent spirit' rested on a person's hands upon waking and that spirit could only be removed by washing one's hands by pouring water over each of them three times (and perhaps four). (The idea first appears in the Gemara [Shabbat 109a ].) But how can a person's first thought every morning be of God if his hands are still inhabited by a 'malevolent spirit'? The problem was 'solved' by the introduction of the short prayer Modeh Ani. It was deemed permissible to recite this prayer even before one had washed one's hands because it carefully avoids using the name of God and only refers to the Deity by way of circumlocution. [Siddur Sim Shalom, page 61; Siddur Va'ani Tefillati, page 15]

6:
All this is very different from the way that the Talmud sees us as starting our day. The Gemara [Berakhot 60b] gives a list of benedictions that a person should recite as he or she does or hears certain things every morning. The first is what one should say upon awakening (and this prayer is obviously the inspiration for the kabbalists' Modeh Ani:

7:
Following this benediction the Gemara continues with the following list of benedictions [Siddur Sim Shalom, page 63; Siddur Va'ani Tefillati, page 17]:

• Upon hearing the cock crow;
• Upon opening one's eyes from sleep;
• Upon sitting up in bed;
• Upon getting dressed;
• Upon getting up from one's bed;
• Upon standing on the floor;
• Upon moving away from the bed;
• When putting on one's shoes;
• When putting on one's belt;
• When putting on one's headgear.

Clearly, this list of benedictions follows a natural course and reflects the waking customs of a bygone age – an age when it was the crowing of the cock that served as an alarm clock, when one dressed while still in bed, when the bed was so high off the floor (because of the storage space underneath it) that one had to use a ladder to climb down, when one's belt or sash was the outermost garment one wore, and where one's headgear was a large cloth which had to be expertly wound around one's head and carefully arranged.

8:
This list is still to be found in our modern siddurim. However, later halakhic considerations changed the order of many of these prayers, as we shall see. In order not to make this shiur too long we shall continue this review of the early morning ritual in our next shiur.

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