Liturgy: An anchor to the past or a sail into the future.

What is liturgy? Liturgy is, broadly, a description of the drama of worshipping God. After reading an article “on line” about Jewish prayer, I added some of my own thoughts to it and offer it to you for your consideration. Liturgy is not just the words that are recited, whether fixed or spontaneous, it also includes the actions and the occasions for the worship. Liturgy is in some ways akin to a screenplay, but just as screenplays have differing degrees of flexibility in the hands of different directors, so do different liturgical moments.

Judaism has a broad range of liturgy: Worship in formal prayer in a synagogue at one of the appointed times is only one kind of Jewish liturgical expression, and it is not even the most common. The most common liturgical moments are the occasional blessings that a person recites upon performing certain commandments. Rituals such as wedding ceremonies, Funerals, the Passover Seder, Brit Milah, and putting up a mezuzah on the doorposts of a new home, are all liturgical activities that have their own choreography and texts. The basic challenge of liturgy is that, on the one hand, we expect conversation with God to be intimate and real and spontaneous, as one might speak with a parent; on the other hand, we approach God with the images of royalty, and royalty has a defined and fixed protocol.

Jewish law defines a requirement of three daily prayers with set liturgies, and it is very difficult to be spontaneous on a schedule with a familiar text. Through our history, Jewish liturgy has swung back and forth between these poles of the spontaneous versus the fixed. On the side of fixed prayer are the established texts that have been used for centuries: the Siddur for daily prayer, the Machzor for prayer on the High Holidays and Festivals and the Haggadah for the ritual of the Passover Seder. On the spontaneous side are the new Siddurim, machzorim, and haggadot that are continually published, along with the new commentaries, poetry, and melodies that are designed to accompany them, and the entire area of private, personal prayer.

Compare Jewish liturgy to music to its accompanying music. Different Cantors can sing identical notes off of the same sheet of music, but produce startlingly different musical experiences. Alternatively, some Cantors would not consider a piece of music "their own" without adding personal embellishments. Some Cantors need the whole service musically planned out (fixed), while others can take the short melodic motives of Nusach, improvise and produce an entire performance (spontaneous). Similarly, some Jews can personalize the traditional texts of the liturgy simply by focusing their own associations and emphases differently, while others need to modify the prayers in different ways in order to "own" the experience.