{"id":263,"date":"2026-09-11T01:10:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T01:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/?p=263"},"modified":"2026-09-11T01:10:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T01:10:23","slug":"pulse-of-the-machzor-rosh-hashanah-5787-paradoxical-piety-passion-and-prayer-in-pre-war-vilna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/?p=263","title":{"rendered":"Pulse of the Machzor – Rosh Hashanah 5787 |\u00a0Paradoxical Piety: Passion and Prayer in Pre-War Vilna"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

According to satirical news site Pre<\/em>Occupied Territory, a terrorist was recently thwarted when the synagogue service put him to sleep.[1]<\/a> \u201cThe soporific[2]<\/a> effect of a snail\u2019s-pace Torah reading combined with a droning Rabbi\u2019s address to spare a congregation from disaster this past Saturday morning, when the would-be attacker drifted off [into a deep, satisfying slumber] instead of committing his intended atrocity, police disclosed today.\u201d While this portrayal of contemporary shul life may be darker than we might prefer, it speaks to the challenges Jews currently face, both externally in society and internally in our communal infrastructure. On the latter, we have come to expect more boredom and dullness in shul than excitement. But it was not always this way, especially on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. What did shul look like 100 years ago, in Eastern Europe, for example? In his memoirs about life in pre-war Lithuania, celebrated Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade paints a beautiful, unforgettable, yet poignant image of the charged atmosphere in a typical pre-WWII Vilna shul on Rosh Hashanah, at the climax of the Machzor.[3]<\/a> Despite the obvious poetic license in Grade\u2019s embellishment (anyone who has read Grade would not want it any other way), his description reveals the capability of these days to unlock powerful emotional experiences.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The passages under consideration focus solely on the Ezras Nashim, the women\u2019s section, and the scene emerges as serious but quite chaotic. Because of her stronger religious background, his widowed, impoverished, but extremely pious mother (who eked out a living as a street fruit merchant) spent the morning constantly helping an unending stream of fellow less experienced congregants figure out which page the Chazan was on. Grade spares no ink describing the wealthier women’s fancy Machzorim, and he relishes pointing out that their ignorance prevented full appreciation of what the prayer books contained because they were unfamiliar with the liturgy and davening in general. To his credit, he credits these women with deep spirituality. Reflecting on the scenes he witnessed with his mother as a young boy, he notices that their lack of knowledge did not interfere with their visceral, passionate connection to the theme of the day. At the crescendo of the Rosh Hashanah Mussaf service, Grade writes, these same women would flock to his mother:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the cantor reaches the climactic Unessa’neh Tokef<\/em> prayer, there is such a crush of rich matrons and their prayerbooks about my mother that, if only she had as many customers pressing about her baskets, she herself would become a wealthy woman. \u2026 The women’s section has become still, like a cooing dovecote where silence falls just before a storm. A cloud of long-pent-up bitterness seems to hang in the air; a sobbing arises from heavy-laden hearts. A clap of thunder resounds through the synagogue. The cantor begins to chant: “Unessa’neh tokef kedushas ha-yom<\/em>….” and before he has reached the words “who shall live and who shall die,” the women’s section is already drowning in a flood of tears.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, Grade portrays the Vilna women as not only ignorant of basic synagogue ritual but also indifferent to religious observance – one of the women, he reports, had recently desecrated Shabbos and, to add to the shanda<\/em>, was not even concerned about concealing it from her neighbors! On the other hand, their faith in the reality of God\u2019s judgment on Rosh Hashanah runs deep. In establishing this contrast, Grade artfully conveys his keen observation of the paradoxical but devout faith he observed in Jewish Lithuania in his youth. One gets the impression that Grade, despite his own struggles with Halachic observance, admired and mourned the loss of all of Vilna\u2019s characters and the Yiddishkeit they represented, warts and all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On one Yom Kippur, Dr. Haym Soloveitchik experienced a similar simple, profound faith in his childhood Boston shul of the 1940s and has analyzed this topic at length.[6]<\/a> He also goes beyond Grade to describe and document how the emotional element of these holidays now appears to have changed. Here is an excerpt of his longer writings, originally published in 1994:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1959 I went to Israel before the High Holidays. Having grown up in Boston and never having had an opportunity to pray in a haredi yeshivah, I spent the entire High Holidays period-from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur-at a famous [Haredi] yeshivah in Benei Berak. The prayer there was long, intense, and uplifting, certainly far more powerful than anything I had previously experienced. And yet there was something missing, something that I had encountered before, something that perhaps I had taken for granted. Upon reflection, I realized that there was introspection, self-ascent, even moments of self-transcendence, but there was no fear in the thronged student body, most of whom were Israeli-born. Nor was that experience a solitary one. Over the subsequent thirty years, I have passed the High Holidays generally in the United States or Israel, and occasionally in England, attending services in haredi and non-haredi communities alike. I have yet to find that fear present, to any significant degree, among the native-born in either circle. The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now Holy Days, but they are not Yamim Nora’im-Days of Awe or, more accurately, Days of Dread-as they have been traditionally called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grew up in a Jewishly non-observant community and prayed in a synagogue where most of the older congregants neither observed the Sabbath nor even ate kosher. They all hailed from eastern Europe, largely from shtetlakh<\/em>, such as Shepetovka and Shnipishok. Most of their religious observance had been washed away in the sea-change, and the little that was left had been further eroded in the ‘new country. Indeed, the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High Holidays. Even then the service was hardly edifying. Most didn’t know what they were saying, and, bored, wandered in and out. Yet at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the Ne’ilah, the synagogue filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable and tears were shed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What had been instilled in these people in their earliest childhood, and which they never quite shook off, was that every person was judged on Yom Kippur, and, as the sun was setting, the final decision was being rendered, in the words of the famous prayer, ‘who for life, who for death, who for tranquility, who for unrest?” These people did not cry from religiosity but from self-interest, from an instinctive fear for their lives. Their tears were court room tears, with whatever degree of sincerity such tears have. What was absent among the students in Ponevezh [Yeshiva, alluded to above,] and in other contemporary services -and, lest I be thought to be exempting myself from this assessment, absent from my own religious life too-was that primal fear of Divine judgment, simple and direct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To what extent God was palpably present on Yom Kippur among the different generations of congregants in Boston and Benei Berak is a matter of personal impression, and it is one about which opinions might readily and vigorously differ. The pivotal question, however, is not God’s sensed presence on Yom Kippur or on the Yamim Nora’im, the ten holiest days of the year, but on the 355 other-commonplace-days: to what extent is there an ongoing experience of His natural involvement in the mundane round of everyday affairs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Considering Soloveitchik\u2019s observations, it is interesting to compare Grade\u2019s vivid description to our shul experiences a century later in a different golus,<\/em> exile. Our Jewish education, as well as our commitment to Halacha, may be stronger. In contrast, to borrow from the satirical perspective above, our shul experience might best be described as soporific, and it routinely lacks the emotional crescendos felt and lived even by Eastern Europe\u2019s less-sophisticated Jews. Considering our knowledge and commitment, wouldn\u2019t it be great to be able to describe, at least once, our Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur men\u2019s or women\u2019s sections as \u201cdrowning in a flood of tears?\u201d Each era has its own religious character and qualities, with benefits and drawbacks; ours is no exception. If we lack emotional charge, we have other spiritual assets. Nevertheless, without that visceral experience of Yiddishkeit, something important is missing, and if we are at least aware of its absence, we can find a way to restore it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> “Terrorist Thwarted As Synagogue Service Puts Him To Sleep.” Preoccupied Territory<\/em>, 2026, https:\/\/www.preoccupiedterritory.com\/terrorist-thwarted-synagogue-service-puts-him-to-sleep\/. Accessed 10 Sept. 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> Adjective: Tending to dull awareness or make someone feel sleepy. It must be an SAT word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Grade, Chaim. My Mother\u2019s Sabbath Days.<\/em> New York, 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> The following is based on an essay I originally published in 5783.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., P. 28.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/a> Soloveitchik, Haym. Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Modern Orthodoxy. 2021. P. 38-39.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to satirical news site PreOccupied Territory, a terrorist was recently thwarted when the synagogue service put him to sleep.[1] \u201cThe soporific[2] effect of a snail\u2019s-pace Torah reading combined with a droning Rabbi\u2019s address to spare a congregation from disaster this past Saturday morning, when the would-be attacker drifted off [into a deep, satisfying slumber] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,41,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halacha","category-machshava","category-yamim-tovim"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yiphoenix.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}