Rabbi Yehuda Brandes, the former president of Herzog Academic College and current Chairman of the Council for State Religious Education, likes to remind his students that the siddur is not primarily a book of prayer. This can cause some confusion, as it is usually described as the Jewish prayer book. “Most of the siddur isn’t prayer,” Rabbi Brandes explains. The Shema is not a prayer but a commandment: a twice-daily proclamation of faith found in the Torah itself. Birkat Hamazon (Grace after Meals) is not a petition but a fulfilment of a biblical obligation to bless after eating, expanded over centuries to include thanks for the land of Israel, for Jerusalem, for Torah, for the covenant. The Amidah is a prayer – the defining prayer in Judaism. But it occupies less of the siddur than people assume.
What, then, does the rest of it contain? This is the question at the heart of Brandes’ lecture series at Beit Avi Chai, “The Siddur as a Book of Jewish Thought.” His answer is that the siddur is, alongside the Bible and the Mishnah, one of the three most fundamental texts in the Jewish world, and the most important of the three when it comes to questions of faith. It is, he argues, the Shulchan Aruch of Jewish ideas: a binding code not of law but of belief, establishing what must be affirmed and what cannot be left unsaid.
The book for ordinary Jews
The siddur has been in the hands of ordinary Jews since childhood. “How many people read ‘The Guide for the Perplexed?’” Brandes asks. The answer, now as in Maimonides’s own century, is a committed minority. But most Jews know at least portions of the siddur. They know the Shema, or perhaps Modeh Ani. They will have encountered the Kaddish at a graveside and heard the Sheva Brachot (Seven Blessings) at a wedding.
The siddur developed in the way it did out of the rabbinic conviction that certain things had to be said in a certain order by everyone. “It was an opportunity,” Brandes observes, “to get Jews to recite their basic values.” Birkat Hamazon is not a blessing over food that happens to mention Jerusalem. It is a meditation on the Jewish relationship to land, covenant, and history, attached to the most mundane of daily acts.
What enters the siddur enters the consensus
Brandes reveals that the siddur is anything but static. The blessings surrounding the Shema began as brief affirmations and expanded into elaborate compositions: the angelic praises, the kedushah, the cosmic vision of God surrounded by seraphim – all these were added over time. “It wasn’t enough to just say there’s one God,” Brandes explains. “It had to be illustrated more deeply.”
This dynamism continued and sometimes accelerated. Birkat Hamazon, originally a blessing over food, became over time a meditation on catastrophe and hope: the destruction of the Temple, the exile, the longing for return. The siddur updated itself to reflect Jewish reality. The Kinot – the elegies of Tisha B’Av – absorbed the destruction of communities into the liturgy, century after century. But the Holocaust, Brandes acknowledges, has proven harder to integrate. “We’re weaker in this regard. We’re less capable of doing it.” Yet the establishment of the State of Israel has already generated new liturgy – the prayer for the state, the addition of Hallel of Independence Day. “With time,” he says. “Maybe it will continue.”
There are some things the siddur will not say, and this too is part of its theological character. “Even the order of sections has theological meaning,” Brandes notes. What enters the siddur enters the consensus. What is excluded remains contested. No mainstream community, across all the diversity of Jewish practice, has removed the Shema, even while making radical changes elsewhere. “What’s your faith and what does it believe in?” Brandes asks. “My faith is written in the siddur. The question of whether one believes it themselves is secondary.”
What Judaism believes
The distinction between what Judaism believes and what any individual Jew believes is of particular importance. Brandes is not arguing that the siddur imposes faith on the non-observant. He is arguing that it preserves it, holds it in trust, makes it available. A Jew might say that he doesn’t believe in God, he notes, “but this doesn’t mean he thinks Judaism doesn’t believe in God.” The siddur functions as a common inheritance, its reach extended to those who don’t regularly use it. Brandes mentions, for example, the story of Jewish soldiers on opposing sides during World War I: One is about to drive his bayonet into the other before his victim cries out “Shemah Yisrael!”. The other answers the call, and spares his life.
What the siddur holds
The siddur grew through debate and practice, drawing on the accumulating resources available to it: the Bible, the Talmud, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah, and more. The result is a text that holds within it what Brandes calls “a diversity of beliefs and worldviews,” not as a defect to be resolved but as a record of how Jewish thought actually moves.
In the modern era, the siddur has suffered from a peculiar kind of neglect. It is sometimes treated as a ritual manual of limited intellectual interest – a book for recitation rather than reflection. Brandes wants to change this. If you want to know what Judaism thinks about God’s existence, about providence, about the Jewish people and their relationship to the land, about human life and the possibility of redemption – the answers are in the siddur. It has been there all along.
Main Photo: One of the oldest Sidurim\ Wikipedia
