I had broken faith, broken trust—or so they said. When I joined Jews for Jesus, the rabbi of the synagogue that my family and I were part of decided to “re-kosherize” the scroll. Re-kosherizing a Torah scroll is a painstaking (and expensive!) task, requiring checking every letter, every seam, every crown to make sure it hasn’t become pasul (not kosher). Their idea was that in my new profession of faith in Jesus, they could not be sure I had not somehow desecrated the holy Torah.

I felt ostracized by my Jewish community, to say the least. I wondered if I was still welcome to enter the synagogue. No more would the rabbi invite me to assist with the reading of liturgical prayers as I had done before. And yet, I still cherish the memories I have of davening1 alongside him, inspired by words of ancient liturgy, just as our fathers did long ago.

I love liturgy and I love Jewish liturgy. Is it the poetic stanzas? Is it because I love music, and I am convinced that Jewish religious music is unique in its genre? Those are good reasons. But I also believe that liturgical words have played a formative role in what it means to be Jewish, and that they can still play a key role today—wherever we find ourselves in our respective journeys of faith.

Here are four of my favorite liturgical prayers.

Song of the Sea

For generations, our ancestors had only known slavery. Then God redeemed us out of Egypt and parted the Red Sea. When the Israelites reached the other side, Moses led them in a song of praise. Those poetic lines are recorded in the siddur2 for daily prayers as well as in Exodus 15. It’s also known as Shirat HaYam and the Song of Moses. Here are the opening lines:

I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation;3 this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him. The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name. (Exodus 15:1–3)

This song is full of anthropomorphisms; throughout, it refers to God’s right hand (v. 6 and others), the blast of His nostrils (v. 8), and His arm (v. 16). There’s a mystery in Moses’ song: God is likened unto a man.

That may make Jewish people uncomfortable, because it sounds like Christian incarnational theology. And to a Jewish believer in Jesus, it is evocative of our beliefs about the Messiah. So to me, the Song of the Sea is a reminder that when God redeems us, He does it in a very personal way.

High Holy Day Prayers

The High Holy Days are our yearly chance to seek forgiveness, to seek peace with God. Yet we sometimes wonder—is it enough?

At Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we say the Unetanah Tokef,4 a magnificent liturgical poem. It contains this chilling note:

Behold, it is the Day of Judgment, to muster the heavenly host for judgment!—for even they are not guiltless in Your eyes in judgment.5

This Selichot6 confirms our guilt. We are separated from God. So, are our prayers an exercise in futility? Are we doomed, year in and year out, to roll up the hill with the rock of our sins like a Jewish Sisyphus?

But as we keep reading, the Unetanah Tokef continues like this:

For Your praise is in accordance with Your name. You are difficult to anger and easy to appease. For You do not desire the death of the condemned, but that he turn from his path and live. Until the day of his death You wait for him. Should he turn, You will receive him at once.

So, yes, our holiest of holy days reminds us of our own shortcomings. But I love the liturgy (and not only because of the haunting melodies). I love that, though the words for the day reveal the rock of our sin, they also promise that God will lift the rock.

The Amidah

Sometimes just called “The Prayer” because it’s a part of every synagogue service, the Amidah morphs for the occasion (Shabbat, High Holidays, etc.).

However we may adapt the rest of the prayer, we always open with the idea of Zechut Avot (the merit of our forefathers):7 “Blessed are You, Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob.”8

We ask God to remember the faith of our ancestors and to remember their good deeds. Some even say that we are “banking” on their merit.

But it seems there is also evidence for early liturgy contrary to that thinking. The petyan9 Yossi Ben Yossi wrote during the fourth and fifth centuries BC:

I have trusted in the fathers and consumed their deeds. They had existed for me previously for remembrance.10

In other words, the reserve of Merit of the Fathers that would have stood on behalf of the sinner in the past has been depleted; literally, he has “eaten” them up, like a greedy child.

So, what can it mean for you and me to remember them? My Jewish Learning suggests: “Repeating ‘God of’ suggests that the God of Abraham wasn’t precisely the God of Isaac and Jacob, which in turn invites us to ponder the nature of our own particular faith.”

So, the opening lines of the Amidah remind me of our shared heritage and our collective faith. But they also tell how each of our fathers had his own story, his own experience of knowing God.

Avinu Malkeinu

It’s not just popular because Barbra Streisand made it so—the Avinu Malkeinu11 is a famous prayer, a cry to God our Father, our King.

It’s regularly prayed during the High Holy Days but can be used at other times too. Here are a few lines:

Our Father, our King, we have sinned before you.

Our Father, our King, cleanse us from our sins.

Our Father, our King, bring us back to you with true repentance.

Our Father, our King, for your glory, save us.12

We’ve also seen how our liturgical prayers can be adapted for other situations. Avinu Malkeinu could be heard in Israel when it was sung by mourners at the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the hostages whose body was recently recovered from a tunnel.

Israel scholar Daniel Gordis attended that funeral and gave this eyewitness account:

The mournful singing was spontaneous. No one was “in charge,” and it was impossible to tell who was starting the melodies. So I’ll confess to having been momentarily taken aback when the thousands of people assembled began to sing a very well-known line from the High Holidays liturgy.… Our Father, our King: favor us and answer us for we are undeserving; deal with us charitably and kindly and save us.13

Gordis goes on to wonder why that song was chosen at that moment. He gives a few possible reasons, but the one he concludes with is this: “In so many ways, in ways more numerous than we could begin to point to, we desperately need to be saved.”14

David’s Dilemma

Some critics might say that when we adopt a certain posture of prayer or read scripted liturgy, we’re trying to perform for God or for others, and I admit that’s been a temptation for me. Am I treating God like a genie in the lamp? Or am I aware that nothing I do can oblige Him to do my bidding?

And I’m not the first Jew (or the first person) who’s tried his hand at “helping” God. King David asked to build a magnificent temple that would reflect God’s lofty ideals and justice in the world as a standard of His cosmic significance. It was an ancient custom that a successful (conquering) king would create a sacred space like a milestone. He brought this request to God via the prophet Nathan (who was at first ecstatic).

But God responded:

Go and tell my servant David, “This is what the LORD says: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’” (2 Samuel 7:5–7 NIV)

David’s dilemma is also my dilemma. But David’s truth is also my truth.

God did dwell with the Israelites when they wandered in the desert. And when I read about promises that are yet to be fulfilled, this one stands out: “The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people” (Revelation 21:3). Those New Testament verses are an echo of Old Testament truths: God’s plan to walk among us doesn’t require any adornment on our behalf.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t practice scripted prayers or build beautiful buildings to worship in (the idea that all materiality is evil is a Hellenistic one, not a Jewish or a biblical one). It’s just to say that liturgy doesn’t force a thing to become true. Rather, liturgy reminds us of what’s always been true.

Endnotes

1. Davening is the Yiddish word for prayer, but most specifically Jewish liturgical prayer.

2. Siddur is a Hebrew root from the word “order” or seder … an order or liturgy. The siddur is the daily/weekly prayer book used in synagogues all over the world.

3. In Hebrew, the word for salvation here is “yeshua,” which is Jesus’ Hebrew name.

4. Untanneh^[1] Tokef, Unthanneh Toqeph, Un’taneh Tokef, or Unsanneh Tokef (ונתנה תקף) (“Let us speak of the awesomeness”).

5. You can read the Unetaneh Tokef in Hebrew or English here: Unetaneh Tokef 1.

6. Prayers of penitence or repentance that are said during the High Holidays and at other times of the year … regularly.

7. On this concept see Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 170–98, and Shalom Carmy, “Zekhut Avot,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed., 15 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005), XIV, 9940–42.

8. Rabbi Danielle Upbin, “Beginning the Amidah by Connecting to Our Ancestors | My Jewish Learning,” accessed October 1, 2018.

9. Peytan is the author of the Peyut … the Hebrew poet.

10. Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, eds., Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1,000 CE (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021).

11. Avinu Malkeinu means “Our Father, our King.”

12. Any High Holiday Mahzor (High Holiday prayer book).

13. Daniel Gordis, “When Israel Buried Hersh Yesterday,” Israel from the Inside, September 3, 2024.

14. Gordis, When Israel Buried.