Eshet Hayil - MyJewishLearning.com. Explaining this ancient song for the present day. Excerpted with permission from JOFA, The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. We Also Recommend I cannot remember exactly when my family began singing Eshet Hayil at the Friday night table. I do know that it was we, the kids, who brought this custom into the house. When I was five years old, my family moved to Toronto from Sarnia, a small town in Western Ontario where my father had owned a furniture store that was founded by his father, an immigrant from Galicia. Singing as a Renewed Commitment When we first introduced the singing of Eshet Hayil at the Shabbat table, my father, who had received but a rudimentary Jewish education growing up in Sarnia, struggled with the complex Hebrew words, yet persisted in going through it every week.
The Origins of Eshet Hayil There is allegory, and then there is literal reading. Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. The Amidah. Moving from praise to petition to thanksgiving, the Amidah inculcates a sense of connection to God. The Amidah is the core of every Jewish worship service, and is therefore also referred to as HaTefillah, or “The prayer.” Amidah, which literally means, "standing," refers to a series of blessings recited while standing. Using the image of master and servant, the Rabbis declared that a worshipper should come before his or her master first with words of praise, then should ask one's petitions, and finally should withdraw with words of thanks. Thus, every Amidah is divided into three central sections: praise, petitions, and thanks. Originally, Jewish prayer was largely unstructured. The Amidah is recited silently by all members of a congregation--or by individuals praying along--and then, in communal settings, repeated aloud by the prayer leader or cantor, with the congregation reciting "Amen" to all the blessings of the Amidah.
The First Three Blessings Did you like this article? Shabbat as a Sanctuary in Time. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals, the Jewish equivalent of sacred architecture. Reprinted with permission from The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, published by Noonday Press. Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. We Also Recommend Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, quality-less, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time.
There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year. Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time. Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. Siddur Contents: Shabbat & Holiday Liturgy. This description of the Shabbat and holiday morning service includes most of the elements that appear in weekday services as well. Jewish prayer is as ancient as the Hebrew Bible, for the Torah records that even the patriarchs prayed to God in times of distress or to give thanks. We Also Recommend In late antiquity, the Rabbis of the Talmud established formal structures and blessings to be recited for the various worship services.
Two of the earliest written versions of the prayerbook, called a siddur (meaning "order") in Hebrew, were compiled in Babylonia by the sages Amram Gaon and Saadia Gaon in the ninth century CE. Denominational movements, and different ethnic communities within the Jewish people continue to update and publish new siddurim. Nearly all Shabbat and holiday siddurim are structured around significant liturgical units. Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. Rabbi Daniel Kohn, a native of St. Shabbat's Work Prohibition. A discussion on prohibitions for the Jewish day of rest.
Reprinted with permission from The JPS Guide to Jewish Traditions, published by the Jewish Publication Society. The Bible does not specifically list those labors that are prohibited on the Sabbath, although it alludes to field labor (Exod. We Also Recommend 34:21; Num.15:32-36), treading in a winepress and loading animals (Neh. 13:15-18), doing business and carrying (Isa. 58:13; Jer. 17:22; Amos 8:5), traveling (Exod. 16:29-30), and kindling fire (Exod. 35:2-3) as forbidden work. Beyond Torah: What Can and Can't We Do? In the Mishnah, the Rabbis enumerated 39 major categories (with hundreds of subcategories) of labor that were forbidden (avot melakhah) based on the types of work that were related to the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, which ceased on the Sabbath (Shab. 7:2).
The rabbinic enactment of measures to prevent these possibilities was termed "putting a fence around the Torah" (Avot 1:1). Ronald L.