Jewish Prayers
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How many allusions to the language of the Bible are hidden inside the piyut "Bezochri al Mishkavi", and what changes in their meaning when the poet weaves them together into a single prayer?
There is a genuine biblical weave here. More than twenty allusions and linguistic echoes in the piyut of Rabbi Yehuda ibn Bal'am, and the fascinating part is not the quantity but what the poet does to the verses.
Is the foe the speaker asks to be saved from necessarily an external enemy, or can part of the piyut be read as though the great enemy is also inside the person himself?
The word "foe" can be read on two levels at once, as a real external enemy and also as an inner one. The first threat in the piyut is not a pursuer but the wilfulness of the heart, which is why the poet asks for redemption and not only for rescue.
What is the connection between the opening of the piyut "Mah Lecha Nirdam" and the story of Jonah on the ship, and can that choice change the way the piyut is understood?
The opening of the piyut is an almost direct reworking of the captain's words to Jonah. The poet takes a call spoken inside a sinking ship and turns it toward us, so that "sleeper" becomes a spiritual condition rather than tiredness.
In the piyut "Bezochri al Mishkavi", why did Rabbi Yehuda ibn Bal'am choose to return again and again precisely to "Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great"?
The word that sounds most frightening in the piyut, "let us fall", turns into a word of confidence. The refrain rests on David's words after the census, and stops exactly before "but let me not fall into the hand of man".
What is special about the moment when the speaker stops talking about himself and mentions "Your servants", "the merit of the fathers" and "Your congregation", and what does that teach about the relation between personal repentance and national identity?
In the final stanza the prayer changes size. The speaker stops being an individual before God and discovers that he is part of a story larger than himself, and two memories stand facing each other: the memory of sin and the memory of the fathers.
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