INTRODUCTION

                      THEOLOGIES  ON  THE  EUCHARIST
                     and  THEOLOGY  OF  THE  EUCHARIST

This book is written as a supplement to our commentary on the
Gregorian Liturgy and, if you will, to take many of its readers on a
voyage of discovery.  We believe that such a long journey is one of
the most exciting that can be offered to those who have some
inkling about the rarely or not all quarried riches of Christian
tradition. We embarked on it ourselves some fifty some odd years
ago.  Being  born into a family of Syrian ancestry that cherished the
tradition of our forefathers and being brought up in the Orthodox
Ukrainian Church [in exile] in the United States with priests who
encouraged me to prove, as best I could our oral tradition. 
Fortunately I have had the rare opportunity to travel throughout the
Near East and Europe and meet many who have either studied or
hold these same traditions.   

     Our intention here is to try step by step to follow the
progressive unfolding of the Christian Eucharist.  Our
understanding of  "Eucharist" here is exactly what the word
originally meant: the celebration of God revealed and
communicated, of the Mystery of Christ, in a prayer of a special
type, where the prayer itself links up the proclamation of the
mirabilia Dei with the re-presentation in a sacred action that is the
core of the whole Christian ritual.

     Many others have undertaken this exploration.  Our aim is not
quite the same as theirs.  In the first place it is not the whole of the
Eucharistic Liturgy which will concern us, but once again, its core:
what in the East is called the Anaphora, inseparably uniting the
equivalents of the Roman Preface and Canon.  But as mindful as we
should wish to be of it, the description of this Eucharist is not our
ultimate objective.  What we shall be attempting is an understanding
of what is common and basic in its different forms, and also the
more or less successful, more or less full blown development of this
kernel or rather this matrix of Christian worship.

     We shall not be concerned with rediscovering the formula of the
Apostolic Anaphora, that was though first to have been found in the
8th Book of the so called "Apostolic" Constitutions, precisely, and
then in many other texts.  Even very close to our own day.  We
shall not be dealing with this question quite simply because such a
formula certainly never existed.  If it had, everyone would know it,
for no one would ever have dared to fashion another one!

     But this is far from meaning that there was not a type, a schema,
a living anima, as it were, of every Eucharist that was faithful to its
original purport, an anima which revealed itself and is projected in
the most ancient Eucharistic formularies. We can grasp it there
again in its innate unity, as in its inexhaustible richness, somewhat
as the Gospel, which eludes any simple formula and could not be
contained in all the books that would fill the earth, is still
authentically given to us in the four canonical Gospels. 
Undoubtedly for the Eucharist there is no inspired, and to that
extent definitive, formula.   But this is because the Eucharist of the
Church, being by nature a human response to the Word of God in
Jesus Christ, cannot be fully accomplished as long as the Church is
not consummated in her perfect union with her Bridegroom, the
whole Christ reaching His adulthood only then in the definitive
multitude and the perfect union of all His members.  It is this
movement, this spiritual burst of energy of the Eucharist, which
from the first is oriented toward the "Sign of the Son of Man", that
the documents of the Christian Liturgy's creative period must allow
us to recapture, and then to rediscover in the great prayers which
have remained classic and which still today continue to consecrate
our Eucharists.  In rediscovering their inner core, and in
encountering, so to speak, the breath of life which penetrated them
to form them from the inside, we shall at least be able to perceive
the sense of what the Church does when she confects the
Eucharist,without which sense the Church herself could nor become
a reality in us and through us.



































                               CHAPTER  ONE

                 JEWISH  LITURGY  and  CHRISTIAN  LITURGY


In order to recount the Genesis of the Christian Liturgy, and even
more importantly to understand it within its own context, we must
get a proper start.  In a work of this kind, the first steps determine
all that follows. To imagine that the Christian Liturgy sprang up
from a sort of spontaneous generation, motherless and fatherless
like Melchizedek, or trustingly to give it a sort of putative paternity
which would definitively erase any perception of its authentic
genealogy, is from the start to reduce all reconstructions to a more
or less scholarly more of less ingenious mass of misconceptions.

     It is true that the Christian Liturgy, and the Eucharist especially,
is one of the most original creations of Christianity.  But however
original it is, it is still not a sort of ex nihilo creation.  To think so is
to condemn ourselves to a minimal understanding of it.  For it
would mean that we should be mistaken about the materials that
went into it construction, but, what is much more serious, we
should already be misled about the movement that hatched them in
order to build this spiritual temple, or rather this great tree of life
that the Anaphora is.  The materials from which the Christian
Eucharist was formed are something quite different from mere
prime matter.  They are stones that have already been polished and
skillfully worked.  And they do not come from some demolition
yard where they would have then been refashioned without concern
for their original form.  Quite the contrary.  It is in a studio which
has consciously inherited both a long tradition of experience and its
finished products that these will be prepared for their new function.
and this will not be to do away with the first result but to complete
them, through some refinishing in which not a jot of the original
engraving will be effaced.

     With the first Eucharistic formulas we can no more start from
zero than we can with the Gospel.  In both cases, by providential
design, there is an Old Testament which cannot be overlooked.  For
if providence evidently did judge this stage necessary, we have
neither the right nor the ability to push it aside.

     Stating this already gives the direction in which we shall have to
look for providence's preparatory work.  It would be at least
surprising if the Old Testament of the Liturgy were not the same as
that of the Gospel.  It is nevertheless just what many scholars seem
to admit as an axiom which needs neither proof nor discussion.  It is
a foregone conclusion, they would like to tell us, that either there is
no prehistory to the Eucharist or else, if there is, if can be found
only outside of Judaism.

     We must admit that the continued persistence of this state of
mind, even with scholars who are as deeply intuitive as they are
well informed, is somewhat disconcerting.

     Orthodox Catholic scholars do admit that in Christianity, stating
with the New Testament, the inspired texts may not be isolated
from that body where the Spirit who inspire them dwells.  they
admit it because they are Catholics and, without this, would no
longer be so.  Having admitted this they have no difficulty in
establishing the well-foundedness of this a priori on the most
irrefutable fact to the extent that Protestant scholars themselves,
willingly or not but more and more decisively, are coming to agree
with them.  However, once we are no longer dealing with
Christianity but with Judaism, the Catholic reflex no longer works. 
The old Protestant a priori then regains the upper hand,  In the case
of Christianity there was no difficulty in admitting and proving the
reality of the statement that the inspired texts cannot be opposed to
tradition nor isolated from it.  To the contrary, it is in it and from it
that they were derived.  Since this truth, for the Old Testament,
seems no long necessary as of faith, it is forgotten that it is first of
all a matter of a truth of good sense.  And although one is
Orthodox Catholic for the New Testament, one becomes Protestant
for the Old testament.  Here tradition can be synonymous merely
with a "superfetation"  that is foreign to the sacred text and ends up
as the degradation and ultimately the radical adulteration of their
content.  This was admitted once and for all by the old Protestant
school. The more modern Orthodox Catholic school, seeing no
obligation to doubt it, accepts it and idly endorses it.

     Still it ought to seem peculiar that what is the condition of the
truth of life in the New Testament is not the same in the Old, - that
the sacred texts in one case cannot be separated from living
tradition, whereas in the other they must be.  Strange that the Word
of God from Christ's time is believed to have inspired that Word
dwells, while before Christ this Word would have fallen from
Heaven, as if the Spirit had directly produced its letter without
having to go through men's hearts, and therefore without having left
any evidence there of His passing through.

     In fact progress in biblical studies, among Protestants first of all,
has shown the artificiality of this dichotomy.  Revealed truth both in
the Old and New Testaments, lives in men's hearts before being
written down.  And even though it becomes once fixed with the
greatest authority, it is still living and susceptible of being
developed in these hearts and this is even truer of the Old than of
the New Testament.  For, before Christ, we do not yet have the
unique and ultimate authority of a transcendent personality,
dominating every other expression of truth and imposing itself as
the ultimate Truth.  To isolate or separate the Holy Word and
tradition, the Word of God expressed once and for all and the life in
the People of God of the Spirit who inspired this expression, is
therefore still more contrary, if that is possible, to the nature of
things in the Old Testament than in the New.  Consequently it is
impossible to imagine the relationship of the New Testament with
the old as a relationship that would be connected here only with the
inspired texts in the strict sense alone and could or should ignore its
contextual surroundings.

     Nevertheless, on first sight, Jesus' objection that He voiced
against the tradition of the Scribes and Pharisees as a corruption of
the Word of Old Testament, which was the prime obstacle to the
translation from this Word to His own word, makes a very strong
impression.  Yet its power is very closely connected with its
ambiguity.  What Jesus denounced is not the tradition as such, but
is aberrant or withered forms.  Such a denunciation is just was valid
in regard to the derteriorzation and decay in Christianity as in
Judaism.  These are the deviations or the petrification which
produce heresies today as they did yesterday.  But it is not by those
who have failed it that one should judge a tradition, whatever it
may be.  Our better acquaintance with the Pharisees, and more
generally with these inspiratory movements in ancient Judaism that
are too easily called sectarian, and which ought better be compared
with our own religious orders, has convinced us of their positive
value.  Even through certain minds could become involved by them
in their denial of the creative newness of the Gospel, those who
found in them an indication to make greater progress were no less
numerous.  And it is perhaps in St. Paul, the Christian Apostle who
was most steadfast in his will for universalism and in his refusal to
enclose Christianity within the ready-made categories of Judaism,
that we find the best evidence of the close connection between
these old categories and the newest formulations of the Gospel.

     Limiting ourselves merely to this unique example from St. Paul,
the manifold studies on the relationship between his thought and
rabbinical thought preclude our believing that the latter could be of
some use to understand him merely inserting the grammatical sense
of a formula or the literary type of a periscope.  Still more grievous
would be the error in believing that what is related to his thought to
Jewish thought is merely dead weight - a sort of straight jacket
which he is not quite able to undo completely.  It is to the very flesh
of Pauline though and to what is most personal in it that this Jewish
thought is related, and not merely to its external clothing.  We
cannot comprehend his Christianity if we separate it from his
Jewishness which antecedes it.  It evolves through a process of
change that lays greater emphasis on the flowering of that tradition
than on its being cast off.

     It will undoubtedly be said that in Christianity we have a simple
criterion for distinguishing certainly authentic traditions from those
that are questionable, or clearly heterogeneous: the former go back
to Christ or at least to the Apostles.  Obviously this criterion no
longer holds when we are speaking of traditions that are anterior to
Christianity.  But from the Christian viewpoint there is a reciprocal
criterion for the latter, and its application is even easier.  It is what
Apostolic Christianity in fact retained from Jewish tradition.

     The more contemporary evidence multiplies, as has been the
case since the Qumran discoveries, the more  obvious it becomes
that the extent of this recreative preservation surpasses by far
anything that could have previously been imagined.  The
supposition of the exegetes influenced by post-Heleglian views that
what is original in Christianity would at the very least be defined in
and by a substitution of essentially universalist themes of Hellenistic
thought for properly Jewish and therefore particularistic themes,
seems groundless and even bereft of substance.  This is merely an a
priori mental fiction that could be imposed on the facts only to the
extent that they were little or poorly known.

     In the first place the knowledge we have today of Hellenistic
Judaism is enough to convince us that the fact that the Christians
used the materials and even the instruments of Greek thought as a
medium of expression, or of reflection, has nothing specifically
Christian about it, and especially nothing that would permit us to
oppose Christianity to Judaism.  Nothing is clearer than that the
Jews did this long before the Christians, and if there ever was any
effective Hellenization of early, if not primitive, Christianity, it was
first of all a product of the school of the Jews and not a reaction
against them.

     Moreover, the best contemporary studies on Philo given even
better proof of  the fact that for the Jews of this time already, it was
much more a question of a judaization of the elements and themes
of Greek through than of a conversion to it or submersion into it.  
For a stronger reason the same must be said of the Christian
authors whose originality, it was thought, could be boiled down to
a Hellenization process.  It is the author of the Fourth Gospel who
was especially thought to betray an evident transference of
intellectual milieu and this religious metamorphosis.  However,
after a more thorough study and with the help of much broader
comparisons, he has been discovered to be much more dependent
upon Judaism and much more faithful to its spirit than we should
ever have imagined one or two generations ago.

     But if there is one element in the whole of Christian tradition
that is all of the forms  in which it is known shows the continuity
with and the dependence on Judaism, it is the Eucharistic Prayer. 
There is surely no more creative creation in Christianity than this,
and we believe that the whole of the following study will show it. 
In spite of this, however, whether we are dealing with the basic
themes, their reciprocal relations, or the structure and the
development of the prayer, the continuity with the Jewish prayer
that is called "berakah" is so unbreakable that it is impossible to see
how we can avoid argument of its dependence.

     It is at this point that the last argument against the examination
of such a hypothesis is raised.  Its very statement, we will not deny,
has such a decisive immediate effect that we might be tempted to
abandon all discussion.  But this would be to say that the argument
either proves too much or else proves nothing at all.

     Some people pose the prejudicial objection that we have not
even one Jewish text that antedates the Middle Ages, which
therefore would seem to preclude any comparison between the
Christian Eucharist and the corresponding texts of the Jewish
Liturgy.  How, they say, would it be possible to make a valid
comparison between such late text and the Eucharist, either in its
primitive state or as it has evolved in those forms which are still in
use, and which became fixed for the most part in the Patristic Age? 
As striking as it may be, the argument is merely a paralogism.  It
relies completely on an implicit confusion between a text's date and
the known date of the oldest manuscript or of the oldest collection
that has preserved it for us.  In this regard it is perfectly correct the
most ancient manuscripts of the Synagogue Liturgy that we have
are more or less recent medieval copes of the Seder Amram Gaon,
a collection which itself was composed only in the ninth century.  
But before coming to too hasty a conclusion, it would be good to
remember that before the Qumran discoveries we also had no copy
of a Hebrew text of the Bible prior to this date.

     More generally, before the more or less recent discoveries of
Egyptian papyri, very few manuscripts of the authors of antiquity
came down to us from before the Carolingian renaissance or the
first Byzantine renaissance which is approximately contemporary
with it.  If there is any validity in the reasoning that concludes that
the Jewish Liturgy as we know it could hardly go back before this
period, who would be ready to uphold a parallel thesis that should
be equally valid for the literature of Greco-Roman antiquity?  In
fact, we might mention that as a matter of fact in the beginning of
the 18th century it did find an erudite partisan to uphold it.  It was
Pere Hardouin- Mansart, who with fearless logic did nor hesitate to
denounce Virgil, Horace, Cicero as well as Philo and Homer as
mere pseudonyms assumed by unemployed monks of Byzantium or
Gaul to cover up their own elaborate literary endeavors. It is true
that the author of this astonishing theory, as erudite as he was
ingenious, was to end his days in an insane asylum ...

     The same external cross checking and internal criticism that
destroy his specious argumentation in the case of the classical
authors are equally valid in regard to the Jewish Liturgy.  Even
though we do not have any compete copy of the texts going back
further than Amran Gaon, we have too many precise and
undeniable anterior allusions and citations for us to be able seriously
to doubt that these texts in their entirely, are much more ancient
than their oldest copes surviving today.  And this is corroborated by
their content, their style, their language which cannot seriously be
look upon as medieval.  The texts of Jewish prayers that may be put
on a parallel with the most ancient texts of the Christian Eucharist
do not reflect the Jewish theology of the High Middle Ages, but
that of the Judaism that was contemporary with the origins of
Christianity.  And both their style and their language are related to
the prayers and the hymns discovered at Qumran much more than
to the Hebrew of the later piyutim, not to mention medieval
Hebrew.  But above all, the rabbinical sayings, the prescriptions or
the citations of the Mishnah or the Toseftah, which are undeniably
very early and which in one way or another make reference to them,
are far too numerous to permit any serious doubt at least in regard
to the general tenor of the prayers.

     To this a counter-proof must be added.  The astonishing
closeness of the texts in the Seder Amran Gaon and texts still in use
in the Synagogue of our own day attests to the liturgical
conservatism of the Jews, which is even more noticeable than with
the Christians; this assures us that here less than elsewhere we can
not deduce the date of a text from that of a manuscript or a
collection.  Furthermore we know on good authority that, if the
Jews did in fact modify their Liturgy after the beginning of the
Christian era, when these modifications were not the simple
addition of new factors, they were generally motivated by a concern
for removing from Jewish worship what might have been reused
and reinterpreted by the Christians.  This is especially the case of
the calendar of biblical reading.  Hence it follows that those parts of
the Jewish Liturgy that are undeniably parallel to the most
characteristic Christian texts enjoy a special safety.  It they are still
there it is so because the Jews themselves judged them to be too
essential and basic for the polemical concern behind the reform of
their own Liturgy not to have been held in check at the very point
where it would have had the best opportunity to manifest itself.

     Finally, we must add (and this a capital point) that it is not only
in prayer text that the Church's dependence on the Synagogue
seems to be noticeable.  It is also in all aspects of worship;
architecture, sacred music, and even in an area which up until
recent discoveries was never even considered, iconography.

     Archaeology has shown what might be called an obvious kinship
between the arrangement of the synagogues contemporary with the
origin of Christianity and that of the primitive places of worship like
those that still exist, particularly in Syria. 

     Like Christian churches the old synagogues are, domus
ecclesiae, the house where the faithful assembly comes together. 
They remain closely connected with the Temple of Jerusalem (or
the memory of it).  They are oriented toward the Temple for prayer. 
The direction of the debir, the "Holy of Holies" where the Divine
Presence, the Shekinah was thought to reside, is marked out by a
porch, behind an "ark" where the Holy Scriptures are kept, which in
turn is furnished in imitation of the Temple with a veil and the seven
branched candlestick, the Memorah.  Later, the porch which in fact
had not been used for a long time, was to be replaced by an apse
where the ark was finally placed.  The assembly itself is centered
around the "chair of Moses" where the presiding rabbi sits, in the
midst of the benches of the "elders".  The congregation is grouped
around the bema. a platform supplied with a lectern, which the
lector ascends to read, as we see in the Gospel, the texts that the
hazan, the "minister" (ancestor of our deacon) had taken from the
ark.  Then all turn toward Jerusalem for prayer.

     In the ancient Syrian churches the chair of Moses has become
the episcopal seat, and the semi- circular bench that surrounds it the
seat of the Christian "presbyters".  But as in the synagogue they
remain in the midst of the congregation.  The bema is also there,
not far from the ark of the Scriptures which is still in its ancient
place, not at the far end, but some distance from the apse.  It is still
veiled with its curtain and the candlestick is still beside it.  The
apse, however, is no longer turned toward Jerusalem but to the
East, a symbol of the expectation of Christ's coming in His
parousia.  While it was empty in the old synagogues (later the ark
was installed there), in the Syrian church this eastward apse now
contains the Altar before which hangs a second curtain, as if to
signify that form now it is the only "Holy of Holies" in the
expectation of the parousia.

     Along with the Jewish origin of Christian worship a comparison
of these two arrangements illustrates better than any commentary,
the newness of Christianity. The Eucharist has replaced the Temple
sacrifices and henceforth the Shekinah resides in the humanity of
the risen Christ, who has no earthly dwelling place, but will return
on the last day as the definitive East that each Eucharist anticipates.

     Iconographical comparison corroborates this genealogy of
Christian worship. When the Dura Europos synagogue was
discovered and its frescoes could be admired, it seemed to be an
exception, in contradiction to Jewish iconoclasm.  Actually, as
Sukenik in his study on the ancient synagogues shows, the Dura
Europos synagogue is an exception only because of the unique
preservation of its decor. But in practically all of the ancient
synagogues there are vestiges of a very similar decoration.  We
must conclude, he emphasizes, that it was only a late date and out
of an undoubted reaction against Christianity that the synagogues
came to forbid any figurative ornamentation.

     Moreover, the similarity between the selection of biblical themes
in the synagogues and that which is found in paleo-Christian
frescoes or mosaics is striking.  The same episodes are kept by
both.  Their treatment attest that in the synagogue and the church
they were interpreted in the sense of an actual application to the
People of God celebrating their "memorial" in its Liturgy.  We shall
return to this point later, but we must emphasize that the analogies,
indeed the identities, are so striking, for example at Dura Europos
itself between the synagogue which has just been mentioned and the
church which was also discovered in the same locality, that some
have come to ask whether what had been taken to be a synagogue
was not rather a Judeo-Christian church.  This supposition seemed
to find support in the fact that among the manuscript fragments
discovered in the supposed synagogue one was found which gives
us one the Eucharistic Prayers from the Didache, but in Hebrew! 
Actually too many signs indicate that we are indeed dealing with a
synagogue, although it is still true that the continuity from the
synagogue to the church is proved to be so strict that there is some
excuse for being mistaken about it.

     This discovery of a Hebrew original of a Eucharistic Prayer from
the Didache emphasizes one final fact that leaves no longer any
room for doubting the genesis of the Christian Eucharistic Prayer
from Jewish prayers.  We have a series of particularly valuable texts
which form the connecting link between the Jewish and Christian
Liturgies.  First there are texts, like those in the Didache, that are
Jewish texts which the Christians were able to use for a certain time
with hardly any revision.  They simply gave a renewed meaning to
certain essential themes, like qahal-ecclesia, berakoh-eucharist, and
others.

     But we soon observe other texts succeeding these, like those
whose Jewish origin can be found in the 7th book of the Apostolic
Constitutions,and which Goodenough studied in great detail. Here,
the essence and the body of the text remain Jewish, and only a few
words were added to specify the Christian interpretation and
transposition.

     Go one step further and we find, as in the 8th book of the same
collection, prayers that are undeniably of  Christian composition,
but which are still dominated by Jewish models, and even continue
to incorporate fragments of Jewish prayers.

     When all of these facts are taken into account, it becomes very
hard still to reject textual comparisons.  Therefore, in examining
these texts point by point and following their evolution step by step,
we believe that it will become obvious that the Eucharistic Prayer,
like all the "novelties" introduced by Christianity, is something new
that is rooted not only in the Old Testament in general, but
immediately in the prehistory of the Gospel that is the prayer of
those who "were awaiting the consolation of Israel."















                               CHAPTER  TWO

                   THE  WORD  OF  GOD  AND  THE  BERAKAH

When investigating the origins of the Christian Eucharist, the
element of the synagogal Liturgy that immediately attracts our
attention is the type of prayers called berakoth in Hebrew a term for
which the Greek word eucharistia was the first translation.  In
English, eucharistia is generally translated "thanksgiving", as in
berakah, although the Jewish usage would be to call the berakoth,
"blessings".  "Thanksgiving", in our current use of the term, has
come merely to signify gratitude.  We give thanks in the sense that
we express to God our gratitude for a particular favor the He has
done for us.  On the other hand, the primitive eucharistia, like the
Jewish berakah before it, is  basically a proclamation, a confession
of the mirabilia Dei.  Its object is in no way limited to a gift
received and to the more or less egocentric attitude that it may
awaken.

             THE  WORD  OF  GOD  AND  THE  KNOWLEDGE 
OF  GOD

However justified this remark may be, it should not be made as
hard and fast as some do and tend to do.  Neither the Jewish
berakah nor the Christian eucharistia could be in any way likened to
disinterested praise, at least in appearance, as is found for example
in the hymns of worship in classical antiquity, in the already more
literary Homeric hymns, or in the philosophical hymns of the
Hellenistic era like the famous hymn of Clenathes. Actually the
berakah, and especially the liturgical berakoth which are the
immediate antecedents of the Christian Eucharist, is always the
prayer proper to the Jew as a member of the Chosen People, who
does not bless God in general, in the manner of a neo-Platonist
philosopher, for mirabilia Dei that would not concern himself.  On
the contrary, his is the "blessing" for the God who revealed Himself
to Israel, who has communicated Himself to him in a unique way,
who "knew" him, and consequently made Himself "known" to him. 
This means that God created between Himself and His People a sui
generis relationship, which always remains at the very least
subjacent to the praise, whatever its precise object may be.

     If we wish to keep from straying too far afield, either by
restricting or wrongly overextending the precise sense of an
expression that designates a prayer of a very special type, we must
begin by putting it back in it literary and historical context. 
Actually the berakah is a distinctive element of the specific
character of all of Jewish piety.  This piety is one which never
considers God in general, in the abstract, but always in correlation
with a basic fact: God's Covenant with His People. Still more
precisely, the berakah is a prayer whose essential characteristic is to
be a response: the response which finally emerges as the
pre-eminent response to the Word of God.

     The indispensable preliminary to every study of the Jewish
berakah is therefore a study of what the Word of God came to
mean for the Jews who composed and used them.  And what first
should be pointed out, is that for the Jews contemporary with the
origins of Christianity, "Word of God" meant something much more
and something quite different from the way it is understood by the
majority of modern Christians.  Most of the time our theological
manuals prefer to speak of "revelation" rather than "Word of God". 
The Word of God seems to interest them only to the extent that it
reveals certain truths inaccessible to human reason. These "truths"
themselves are conceived as separate doctrinal statements, and the
Word of God finally is reduced to a collection of formulas.  They
are detached from it, moreover, so that they can be reorganized into
a more logically satisfactory sequence, even to the point of
retouching them or remodelling them to make them clearer and
more precise.  After that the only thing that remains of the divine
Word seems to be a sort of residuum, a kind of conjunctive material
that of itself has no interest.  Whether we realize it or not, the result
is that the Word of God appears as a sort of nondescript
hodg-podge from which the professional theologian extracts, like a
mineral out of its matrix, small but precious bits of knowledge
which it is his job to clarify and systematize.  In this view the Word
of God is no longer anything but an elementary, rough and
confused presentation of more or less shrouded truth; the
theologians' task is to bring them out and to put them in order.

     But even for those who are not at all affected directly by this
professional bias, the fruit of a theology conceived as an abstract
science, the Word of God, considered at the very first as "Holy
Scripture", remains all too frequently a mere communication of
ideas.  For us today,the word, and especially the written word,
tends to be little else.  A scholastic bias which is practically
universal persuades us that people listen and above all read only to
learn something that was not known before.  The rest, if there is a
"rest", passes for entertainment or superfluous flights of
imagination.

     For the pious Jews and to the utmost for those Jews who
mediated the divine Word at the end of all that we call the Old
Testament, the divine Word signified an intensely living reality. 
From the outset it is not merely basic ideas that are to be shaped,
but a fact, an event, a personal intervention in their existence.  For
them the temptation to identify the religion of the Word with an
intellectualistic religion would have seemed absurd to them, and
even bereft of meaning.

     In the first place, when they used the term "Word of God" they
stayed very close to the primitive sense of the human word,  but in
addition they were submissive to what this Word said of itself in the
manner in which it still presented to us in the Bible.

     Men did not begin to speak in order to give courses or
conferences.  And God, in speaking to us, does not make Himself a
theology professor.  The first experience of the human word is that
of someone else entering into our life.  And the still fresh and in a
certain sense already complete experience of the divine Word at the
end of the Old Covenant, was that of an analogous intervention, but
one that was still infinitely more gripping and more vital: the
intervention of Almighty God in the life of men.

     "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone." For the
Jew this is not only the summary of the whole Word of God.  God
here bursts into our world to impress us by His Presence which has
become a tangible one.  But on every page of the Bible the divine
Word defines itself or better manifests itself in this way.  It is not a
discourse, but an action: the action whereby God intervenes as the
master in our existence, "the lion has roared," says Amos, "who will
not fear?  The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy?" This
means that the word, once it has made itself heard, takes possession
of man to accomplish its plan. For his part, Isaiah says:

     "For as the rain and the snow came down from 
         heaven, and return not thither
         but water the earth.
     making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to
         the sower and bread to the eater,
     so shall m word be that goes forth from my mouth;
          it shall not return to me empty,
     but it shall accomplish tat which I purpose,
          and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

For Israel, not only is the divine Word, like every word worthy of
the name, an action, a personal intervention, a presence which
asserts and imposes itself, but since it is the Word of the Almighty,
it produces what it proclaims by its own power.  God is  "true" not
only in the sense that He never lies, but in the sense that what He
says is the source of all reality.  It is enough that He says it for it to
be done.

     This conviction is so strong that even the ungodly in Israel could
not escape it.  The unfaithful kings torment the Prophets to
prophesy what pleases them or at least to keep silent because they
are persuaded that the moment the divine Word makes itself heard,
even through the mouth of simple shepherd like Amos, its goes
straight toward its fulfillment.

     For their part, the Prophets illustrate their conviction about this
power of  the word  which surpasses them.  Ezekiel does nor
hesitate to act out in advance the events that he is announcing, in
symbolic actions that recall the machinations of the magicians, in
order to point up their ineluctable accomplishment.  Yet this is
magic no longer, since there is no question of an attempt by man to
force events to follow his own wishes.  Quite the contrary.  As in a
sacramental sign, it is the concrete assertion of the power of God
who speaks of doing what He says by His expressed Word alone.

     The end of all of this will be the certitude conveyed in the
priestly account of the creation: the Word of God does not
intervene simply in the course of pre-existing things in order to
modify it.  All things in a radical way exist only through a Word of
God which has cause them to be.  And they are good only to the
extent that they remain what the divine Word planned them to be.

     As long as this is not understood, or as long as we refuse to
accept it, the Bible has no meaning.  Or else if we find one for it, it
is not its own; it is not the one which the People of God recognized
in the Word of God.  But to say this does not mean that the Word
of God is bereft of intellectual content, or that it appeared so to the
Jews.  To come to that conclusion would make an absurdity of the
necessary reaction against the preceding error.  In fact, it is merely
giving in to the permanent temptation to agnosticism which too
often paralyses modern religious thought (especially, but not
exclusively, in Protestant circles), but which was as unknown to
ancient Judaism just as our own anemic intellectualism was foreign
to it.

     The Word of God in Israel has as its correlative the knowledge
of God.  It is quite true that his knowledge has nothing to do with
abstractions.  But it is no less a knowledge, in the richest sense that
the word is capable of having.   The knowledge of God which
results from the Word, which is its pre-eminent fruit, a knowledge
of which God is the object, itself proceeds from a knowledge that is
anterior to the word and which is expressed there: the knowledge
of which God is the subject.  The first can proceed and he
understood only from the second.  "I shall know, even as I have
been known." this sentence of St. Paul expresses the compass and
the efficacy of the divine Word, mentioned by Isaiah.

     The "knowledge of God" in the radical sense of the knowledge
that God has of us, is something quite different from a simple
impassible merely contemplative omniscience.  In the Bible, for God
to "know" a being, means that He is concerned with that being,
attaches Himself to it, loves it and showers His gifts upon it.  "You
only have I known of all the families of the earth," God tells the
Israelites through Amos, "therefore I will punish you for all your
iniquities".  In other words: I have done for you what I have done
for no one else; I will require of you therefore what I could not
demand of any one else.

     The knowledge of God (let us always understand the knowledge
that He has of us) will therefore go hand in hand with His
preferential election: the choice that he has made of some men in
order that His plan might have its fulfillment in or through them. It
implies His compassion, His sympathy for our misfortunes, even
our weaknesses, and this results not only from the fact that He
made us, but that He remains for us a Father full of understanding:

     "As a father pities his children,
         so the Lord pities those who fear Him.
     For He knows our weakness;
         He remembers that we are dust."

Ultimately, this knowledge is love: a merciful love which
condescends to unite itself, and in order to do so, to lower itself to
the level of one who is farthest from it, as much and more by his
unworthiness as by his weakness.  This what is expressed in the
marriage image applied to the Lord and His People.  More
precisely, according to Hosea, God behaves towards Israel as a man
who falls in love with an unworthy woman, a harlot; yet she is made
worthy by the boundlessness of the love bestowed on her. For
Ezekiel, it is to a child of adultery, abandoned form birth, a true
waif, that the unmerited love of God goes out, in order to set her
on her feet, bring her up, and finally make her into a queen.  The
royal epithalamion of Psalm 45 gives a figured description of this
union under the guise of a marriage between an Israelite king and
foreign princess. And the Song of Solomon was receive in turn into
the canon of inspired books only as a result of an interpretation that
sees in the shulammite woman the daughter of Zion called to a
union with a king who is the King of Heaven.

     The nuptial imagery is the counterpart of a typically Hebrew
expression which we encounter from the first pages of Genesis. 
The union of the spouses, in their bodily oneness where the union
of two lives in one is expressed and accomplished, is "knowledge"
par excellence.  Reciprocally, because of this, sexuality will receive
a supreme meaning in discovering its mystery, which is that of the
reciprocal "knowledge" in which the love dialogue between the
God who speaks and the man who responds to Him is to reach its
full flower in faith in His Word.

     As a consequence of the knowledge God has of us, the
knowledge that we are called to have of Him through the Word will
be modeled upon its source.  First of all it will be an obedient faith
as Isaiah in particular will explain. We know God only by believing
in Him with the result that everything that is not God, everything
that does not proceed from His Word, will fade away.   But such a
faith is not possible unless we effectively commit ourselves to
obedience to His Word.

     Yet this obedience is not just any obedience to any word.  As
Amos and Hosea have shown, if God requires righteousness form
us,  it is because He is the pre-eminent righteous Person.  And we
could not benefit from His boundless mercy, or even recognize it,
without  becoming merciful ourselves.  This is why in God';s eyes
"mercy is worth more than sacrifice." Obedient faith, inherent in the
knowledge of God to which man is called, is in fact a conforming of
our selves to Him.

     But this conforming of ourselves is possible only because God
(and this is the ultimate secret of His Word) willed to descend to
unite Himself with us in order to unite us to Him.  It is in following
this path that to know God will come down to loving Him, loving
Him as He loved us, responding to His love by the very force of this
communicated love.

     It is here that the intellectual content of this "knowledge" takes
shape and here that we see what is unique about it.  To know God
as we have been known is ultimately to acknowledge the love with
which He loves us and pursues us to the ends of the earth.  And
precisely because we acknowledge it, it is also, in our
acknowledgement of it, consent to it, to surrender to it an to
abandon ourselves to it.

     We can therefore unmistakably understand how the Word of
God in Jewish piety, as expressed in Psalm 119, came to be
identified with the Law, the Torah.  Of itself this identification in no
way signifies mere legalism.  For the Torah as Israel has understood
it is something quite different from a law in the narrow sense of the
Latin lex.  Nor is the Torah primarily a series of formal
prescriptions, enjoining a certain form of behavior.  And it is even
much more than an interior rule, corresponding to some eternal
nature of things.  The Torah is a revelation of what God Himself is
in which He wills to do with His own People, those whom He has
chosen, whom He has "known" in the sense that He has loved them
to the point of uniting Himself with them as in the indissoluble
union of a man and a woman.  How revealing in this Leitmotiv from
Leviticus: "Be Holy as I am Holy", to which Jesus will return and
explicate" Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect!"

     The faithful observance of the Torah is to mark the People of
God with its seal, a seal whose impression reproduces the very
image of the One who communicates it.  In Exodus the revelation
of the Torah on Sinai has it prelude in the revelation of the Divine
Name to Moses on Mount Horeb.  This revelation of the Name of
God, which signifies the revelation, the communication of Himself,
remains the basis of the Covenant between Him and His People. 
Reciprocally, they will be His witnesses through the practice of the
Law, because for other peoples they will thereby constitute the
living witness of what He does, and, though what He has made out
of man, of what He is.

     In this sense, the Torah, in its moral prescriptions but also down
to the detail of its ceremonial ordinances, becomes like the very
expression of a common life between God and His People, a
Presence which is a union.  Therefore, we may already say of the
Torah what Jesus was to say of the Law of the Gospel: it is an easy
yoke and a light burden. For it is a yoke of love.  It is God who
through it is placed in the life of those whom He has known and
who know Him in return.

     The mediation developed by the Wisdom writers will show all
the implications of the Word thus understood and accepted.  In all
of the ancient East,Wisdom was a practical knowledge, nourished
by mediated experience, and focusing on the supreme art, the art of
living.  Kingly Wisdom in particular was nothing but the art of
sustaining not a single individual but a whole people.  Received in
Israel along with the kingship, this Wisdom, like the kingship,
became impregnated with the teachings of the Word.  Just as the
king is merely an epiphany of the only true King, God known in His
Torah, so Wisdom appears as the gift of God to the king
representing Him, the gift that will make him reign in accordance
with the divine directions.  The principle of true Wisdom will
therefore be the mediation of the divine Word under the inspiration
of the Spirit.  Wisdom will therefore project the light of Heaven
onto the experience and rational reflection of man.

     Over the course of the historical experience of Israel, conducted
and enlightened by the Word, it will become quickly evident that
since God is the only true King, He remains the only "Sage" worthy
of the name.  Wisdom, identified with the essential content of the
Word, the Torah, thus comes to signify the Divine Plan after which 
man's history is to take shape, in order to realize a people, a
mankind after the heart of God.  Just as the revealed Torah
appeared as inseparable form a special Presence of God with His
People, the Shekinah through which He Himself dwells under the
tent with them during their pilgrimage, so Wisdom comes to be
identified with this Shekinah. But from now on the Shekinah no
longer simply dwells in a Sanctuary in the midst of its People: it
makes their reconciled hearts its Sanctuary.

     This interiorization and humanization of the Divine Word in
Wisdom, a preparation for its universalization, will be found in the
last visions and supreme promises of the Prophets.  For Ezekiel as
for Jeremiah, the new and Eternal Covenant that the exiles are to
await, carrying with them and in them the Presence of the Shekinah,
is a Law engraved upon their hearts and no longer on tablets of
stone.  This is how "the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth
as the waters cover the depth of the seas."

     At this moment the mysterious character of the Divine Wisdom
will assert itself.  It surpasses the thought of the wisest of men as
the thoughts of God surpass man's thoughts.  God alone knows it. 
For God it is like another self, to such an extent that to know it is
to know God in the strongest sense.  Man can achieve it only
through the preeminent revelation.  And so, from the Wisdom that
seemed to come from the earth, fashioned by man's applying his
reason to earthly experiences, although it did rise to Heaven, we
pass over to the apocalypse; to the revelation of God's impenetrable
ultimate plans in which He will reveal Himself to His People, so
that he might soon be revealed to the whole world in a final way.

     Hence, at the end of the Old Covenant we have this expectation
of a supreme revelation of the Word in an unprecendentd
outpouring of the Spirit. With the Messiah, the heavenly Anointed
coming to save his People, it is God in person who is to come
openly so that the People will recognize Him and receive Him, in a
world which the unveiled Presence will consume in its temporal and
temporary aspects, in order to consummate it in everlasting bliss.

                                     
                THE  BERAKOTH, THE  RESPONSE  TO  THE 
WORD

It is to the Word so understood that the prayers of the berakoth will
bring their response.  They are the gradually evolving response of
obedient faith to the Word which progressively manifests itself in its
mysterious fullness, loftiness and depth.  They are therefore the
completed expression of the knowledge of God in the heart of the
People whom He knew,"alone among all the people of the earth."

     It may be said that the Psalms, the canticles of the People of
God, which themselves have come to be acknowledged as inspired,
as being part of the Word of God, have progressively nourished and
prepared the full flowering of Israel's prayer in the berakoth.  Let us
note the significance of the fact that the Psalms, the great prayers of
Israel, have come to be accepted as an integral and central part at
the very heart of the Bible, the Holy Scripture in which the inspired
Word has been set down.  No fact could better illustrate the
significance of the Word of God for Israel as a creative word.  Its
pre-eminent creative action is that of placing a new heart in man, so
that, upon the tablets of his own flesh, the Torah has been
engraved.  The result is that man responds in his whole being and
above all in his heart to the great design of the divine Word. By
intervening in his life, it patiently but all-powerfully peruses its
place which is the fulfillment of a people in whom it has modeled
this design over the course of history. It has the intention of
forming a man who knows God as he has been known by Him, who
respond to His Word with a response that is nothing but the final
key to the Word uttered within man himself.  "My heart said unto
Thee, Let my face seek Thy face.  Turn not away Thy face from
me, O Lord."  (Psalm 27:8), even if only a conjecture,, it translates
marvelously the whole plan of the Word.

     Considered in their variety and their totality, the Psalms
constitute a great berakah, as it were, even though they go beyond
the precise form that Jewish tradition defined only after they had
been composed and arranged into their present collection.  But the
berakah schema, as a spontaneous schema of prayer responding to
the Word, predates them.  It is found in Israel's most ancient
tradition.  In turn, the Psalms nourish the berakah with their
substance so that it may finally be said that the later tradition will
evolve the fully explicated theory, out of their constant recitation. 
This explains why the Jewish Liturgy was to do afterwards.  If the
Jewish berakoth or the Christian Liturgy as well were isolated from
the psalter, they would be cutting themselves off from their roots. 
Before long both of them would see their sense weakened and
watered down, and run the risk of being reduced to an empty
framework.

     The berakah schema makes its  appearance already in Genesis
and Exodus.  The examples given to us by these books are already
of such a surprising clearness that we should be tempted to see in
them a refection of the late piety of the priestly scribes who were
the last editors or revisers of these writings.  Yet these formulas
there are so simple and so spontaneous that it is quite likely that
they are rather remote models, retained and preserved, of the
immediate response to the Word; models which the development 
of this Word would only have further substantiated.  In the Psalms,
where this enriching action of the primitive prayer by the
increasingly revelatory word  is everywhere evident, the berakah
schema seems frequently to be subjacent, even though it is rarely
clear cut.  We may say that it is like a crystal forming in its matrix,
still invisible to a superficial glance, but ready to shape its whole
substance into the form which it demands.

     In Genesis, When Elizer meets Rebekah and becomes aware of
the way in which the God who revealed Himself to Abraham
managed everything, he cries out: "Blessed  be the Lord, the God of
my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and
His faithfulness toward my master.  As for me, the Lord has let me
in the way to the house of my master's kinsmen."
In other words, God is praise for having kept His promises toward
one who had believed in His Word.  The object of this blessing of
God, as rudimentary as it is, is already the gratitude about which St.
Paul was to say: "We know that those who love God are helped by
Him in everything for good."

     Perhaps even more striking is the berakah uttered by Jethro,
Moses' father-in-law, especially if looked at in its whole context. 
Jethro sees as with his own eyes that God acutally did  speak to
Israel through Moses and that he fulfilled His promises.  Then he
cries out: "Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you out of the
hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh. Now I know
that the lord is greater than all gods, because he delivered the
people form under the hands of the Egyptians."  The text goes on:
"And Jethro, Moses'  father-in-law, offered a burnt offering and
sacrifices to God; and Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to
eat bread with Moses's father-in law before God."

     This berakah from the mouth of a stranger to God's people is
therefore the expression of his association with their faith.  Jethro
acknowledges here that the divine Word has made itself heard in
Israel and that it kept its promises toward them.  This proclaiming
of God, acknowledged in his mirabilia, resulted in the offering of
the sacrifice, and as a consequence, his entrance into fellowship
with the people which the Word has formed, in the Presence of
God.

     A number of Psalms are just amplified berakoth of this kind. 
They manifest the full sense of these expression: bless (benedicere),
sing (cantare), avow (confieri), proclaim (praedicare) when applied
to the mirabilia Dei, as announced, manifested and produced by the
Almighty Word.  Whether their specific object is creation in general
or some benefit received by an individual, Israel's own experience is
always implied in their praise: God who is first of all manifested in
the history of His People and who will then be acknowledged
everywhere and in all things.  This is so true that everything for the
believing Israelite is but an echo of His Word, the work that bears
witness to it.

     Those Psalms which are prayers of petition always presuppose
that background of this praise; it is the basis for every prayer: the
God to whom Israel prays is in no way unknown.  He is the God
who is well known through His Word, the God who is
acknowledged in the great deeds accompanying it and resulting
from it.  Even when this presupposition is still implicit, it always
underlies the entreaty: the God who has done these wonders, in
whom we believe, is the only one from whom we may expect
everything.

     But many of them already give a glimpse and often more than a
glimpse in the great liturgical berakoth of the synagogue.
Particularly in the Psalms composed to accompany the sacrifices
(and these seem to be one of the oldest and most constant types in
its structure), there is a primary phase which joyfully evokes the
great deeds God has performed in the past for His People in a
confession of jubilant faith. Then, the sacrifice is offered amid
supplication that He renew and therefore confirm His past
wonderful works.  Frequently, a priest oracle, undoubtedly arising
from omens detected during the course of the rite, appears at this
point and promises deliverance or the hoped for favor.  Therefore
the Psalm which begins in praise and develops in supplication, ends
with a doxology: God is always the same; today and tomorrow, as
in the past, He will gratify His People. 

     This schema is particularly obvious in a Psalm like the 40th.  It
opens with the announcement of past deliverance:

     I waited patiently for the Lord; He inclined to
         me and heard my cry.
     He drew me up from the desolate pit,
         out of the miry bog,
     and set my feet upon a rock,
         making my steps secure.
     He put a new song in my mouth,
         a song of praise t our God.

     Then comes the sacrificial offering with the prayer that God
always shows Himself in a like manner, that He continue to do and
to accomplish what He began for the person who invokes Him. 
But at the same time it is a consecration of the one praying, and his
sacrifice, and above and beyond that material oblation which merely
represents the gift or rather the abandonment of self to the divine
will.

     Sacrifice and offering Thou dost not desire;
        but Thou hast given me an open ear.
     Burnt offering and sin offering
        Thou hast not required.
     Then I said "Lo, I come;   
        in the roll of the book it written of me;
     I delight to do Thy will, O my God'
        Thy Law is within my heart.
     I have told the glad news of deliverance
        in the great congregation;
     Lo, I have not restrained my lips.
        as Thou knowest, O Lord.
     I have not hid Thy saving help within my heart,
        I have spoken of Thy faithfulness
        and Thy salvation; ...
     Do not Thou, O Lord, withold
        Thy mercy from me,
     Let Thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness
        ever preserve me!

     It is on this basis of a consecration to God's will that the prayer
is sent up to Him.  It does with such certitude that the supplication,
of itself, turns into renewed and definite praise.

     ...Be please, O Lord, to deliver me!
        O Lord, make haste to help me!
     Let them be put to shame and confusion altogether
        who seek to snatch way my life; ...
     But may all who seek Thee
        rejoice and be glad in thee;
     may those who love Thy salvation   
       say continually, "Great is the Lord!"

     The core of this Psalm is a thought which recurs many times in
the Psalter, and which is a central teaching of the Prophets, and
Isaiah in particular.  It is not the material substance of any offering
that can satisfy the Lord, but the offering of one's self.   Only a
consecration of our will to this, acknowledged in His Word, gives
meaning to our sacrifices.

     Under the influence of Protestant prejudices, nineteenth century
exegesis wished to see a repudiation of sacrifice in these formulas,
which would be expressed with greatest clarity in the phrase of
Hosea which Jesus was to use again: "I desire steadfast love, and
not sacrifice." But as the contemporary Scandinavian school has
well shown, this is false literalism, and misunderstands the
deliberate paradoxical style of the Prophets.  They are not
premature Protestants or anticlericals who wished to substitute the
idle dream of a secular religion for the unavoidably ritual reality of
the actual religion.  They simply state the meaning that sacrifice
must assume in the religion of the word: a consecration of man and
his entire life through the ritual itself. The result is not a morality
into which religion which consecrates moral requisites in such a
way hat it makes one's whole life one act of religion.

     What remains true in this perspective is that the consecratory
prayer accompanying the sacrifice assumes a place of increasing
importance as it expresses more forcibly the consecration of man
himself.  There is nothing more typical in this regard than the
evolution of the sense given to a liturgical expression: shevah todah
("sacrifice of praise", or "of thanksgiving").  In the beginning it
designated a special kind of sacrifice whose meaning was expressed
by the accompanying Psalm of praise.  But little by little the
"sacrifice of praise" came to mean the praise itself, which became
not only an integral part of the sacrificial ritual, but the pre-eminent
sacrifice. Hence we have such telling expressions as that which we
find again in Hosea: "sacrifice of our lips". This "sacrifice of our
lips" where the heart's oblation is expressed, is one with the "broken
and contrite heart" that is expressed, is one with the "broken and
contrite heart" that the conclusion of Psalm 51 opposes to empty
ritualism.

     Nothing voices the sentiment that this is not an outgrowing but
an interiorization of sacrifice better than a particular expression of
St. Paul.  It comes so naturally to him that it must have already
passed into common usage among the Jews, despite the act that is
very paradoxical character verges on misconstruction.  In one of the
oldest texts expressing the sacrificial sense given by Christians to
the Cross, he says that Christ handed Himself over for us as a
fragrant offering and sacrifice To God. The reference to the 40th
Psalm which we have quoted is obvious.  But the Psalm says
literally: "sacrifice and offering thou dost not want,"  but
acceptance of the divine will.  St. Paul translates, or rather
transposes the sense by saying something which in its expression is
almost the contrary: This accepting of the divine will is the offering
that God desires.

     The progressive introduction into the heart of the sacrifice of the
prayer of offering of one's self, under the specific form of a berakah,
will draw its ultimate inferences in the Synagogue worship. Since
the Jews of the exile and the diaspora could no longer offer
sacrifices, a prayer of this type, as a response to the reading of the
Word, came to take the place of sacrificial worship. When the
Temple was rebuilt, it accompanied the morning and evening
sacrifices.  And in all the synagogues it will be pronounced facing
Jerusalem, or more precisely, facing the Holy of Holies where the
High Priest once a year brought the Blood of Atonement.

     All of this sheds light on the description given in the Book of
Nehemiah of the qahal, i.e., the liturgical assembly of the People
back from captivity int he ruins of the Temple. At the first qahal,
when the Covenant was made on Sinai, the people had responded
with unanimous acceptance of the ten Sentences of the basic Torah,
and then the first sacrifices of the Covenant were offered.  At the
scarcely less solemn qahal which marked Josiah's reform, after the
reading of  Deuteronomy, i.e., the Law enlightened by the Prophets
and renewing the prohibition of idols, this acceptance was similarly
renewed, and the renewed Covenant was sealed in the Passover
sacrifice, the memorial of the deliverance from Egypt. At the third
great qahal, of the scribe Ezra, which the synagogue of latter
Judaism was to look upon as its foundation or consecration, it is the
whole priestly Torah of the scribes which is read, the Pentateuch
completed in its definitive form in exile.  At this time it was still not
possible to offer sacrifices: there was no longer any Temple, nor
Altar, nor undoubtedly any victim that could be found to be offered. 
But in committing themselves to the rebuilding of the holy place
and to the restoration of its services, the "elders" pronounced the
berakah which is the most explicit in its form and most exhaustive
in its content found in the Bible.

     The Levites began by exhorting the people to thanksgiving:

     Stand p and bless the Lord your God form everlasting to
everlasting.
     Blessed be Thy glorious Name which is exalted above all
blessing and praise.
     
     Thereafter follows a great prayer which passes the entire history
of creation in review and then the whole history of the People of
God up to the present.  It concludes with a formal consecration to
God's plans together with an emphatic supplication that He
accomplish His work for and in His People.

     It may be said that here we have a model of the two great
prayers of the synagogue service: the blessing which lead to the
Qdushah and the recitation of the Shemah, and later the great
prayer of the Amidah or Tefillah (the pre-eminent prayer). 
Throughout the entire life of the pious Jew the piety of Judaism
extends the ramifications of these berakah, which are found in detail
in the tractates with this title in the Mishnah and Tosefiah.  From
the time he awakens, through each of his actions of the day, to the
moment of his retirement and falling asleep, they consecrate the
totality of his acts.  And at the same time they consecrate the world
in restoring it in praise to the word which created it in the
beginning, for each and every one of them are but so many acts of
"acknowledgement" of this Word as being the beginning and end of
all things.  As Rabbi Trypho, echoing the whole of rabbinical
tradition,told St. Justin, it is through the constant offering of these
berakoth that the Jews in diaspora among the Gentiles are
conscious of offering everywhere to God the"pure offering" 
spoken of by the Prophet Malachi. And it is thus that all of Israel
believes it is accomplishing the promise of the book of Exodus: they
will be made an entirely priestly people, a kingdom of priests, of
consecrators of the entire universe to the one divine will revealed in
the Torah.

     With this ultimate understanding that Israel came to have of its
own role, it is certain that we have gone definitively past the old
ritual borrowed from Canaan. Whatever transformations in meaning
and content that it may have undergone, it has now been surpassed. 
And this is why the destruction of the Temple and its sacrifices in
the year 70 of our era can no longer destroy Israel nor the Torah
worship.
       
     But, as we have emphasized, this means not so much a
moralization of the sacrifices as a sacralization of morality, or rather
of the "righteousness" of the Torah.  It would be a mistake to
believe that this religion of the ultimate Israel would have escaped
every particular ritual act, and more especially every definite
sacrifice.  Nothing is more significant than to observe the new ritual
which, on the contrary, was then to arise spontaneously, and to
which the ritual communities awaiting the Messiah, the haburoth as
they were later to be called, were to give its full meaning.  We mean
the meal rituals, particularly the community meals on the evening of
the Sabbath or a feastday.  For the priests of Qumran or Damascus,
as for the Essenes or the Therapeutes mentioned by Philo or
Josephus, this meal came to constitute not only a new equivalent of
the old sacrifices, but ultimately the only sacrifice remaining in the
expectation of the new and Eternal Covenant.  The great berakah
pronounced by the president of the assembly over the last cup,
which was to be shared by all, invoked the imminent coming of the
Messiah and consecrated in this expectation the "remnant" which
had remained faithful to the hoped for Kingdom.  With this new
sacrifice we arrive at the Last Supper, and the immediate prehistory
of the Christian Eucharist.
















                              CHAPTER  THREE

                           THE  JEWISH  BERAKOTH


The best medieval commentary of the Jewish Liturgy, the Sefer
Abudharam, a work of Rabbi David ben Joseph Abudharam, who
lived in Seville,.Spain around 1340, rightly observes that there are
two types of berakoth in Jewish tradition..  One type is a brief
formula that became very soon stereotyped and is composed merely
of a praise-thanksgiving, a "blessing" in the narrowest sense.  The
other is a more developed formula in which the prayer of
supplication has it place, although always in a "blessing" context. 
The first is destined to accompany every action of the pious Jews
form his awakening in the morning to the moment that sleep
overtakes him in the evening.  The second has it place either in the
synagogue service (in the morning, at noon and at night) or in the
meal prayers, particularly those accompanying the final cup shared
by all the participants.

             THE  TRANSMISSION  OF  THE  TRADITIONAL 
FORMULAS

A whole chapter in the Mishnah and an entire corresponding
section in the Toseftah (the two parts of the Talmud) are devoted
to all these berakoth.  The berakoth chapter is the first in the
Mishnah and the material it quotes and discusses is incontestably of
the greatest age.  There we find the formulas for the short berakoth
in their entirety.  On the other hand, since the long formulas were
supposed to be known by everyone, they are generally cited or
recalled merely by their first words.  Yet, frequently the discussions
of which they are the object allows us to have a sufficient notion of
their content, and even about the debated details of their
development.

     The complete text of these formulas had come down to us
through the prayer books, the Siddurim as they are called today.
But these collections only began to be assembled in the time of the
Gaonim, the presidents of the Jewish academies which served
simultaneously as courts of justice.  In the ninth century the Gaonim
and their academies were the successor of our era of the Amoriam
who since the third century had been the commentators of the
oldest oral traditions of  Judaism, those of the Tanaim, of which the
Talmud  (in its two editions, Jerusalem and Babylonia) is the
compilation.
     
     Moreover, these collections of the Gaonim are not and do not in
any degree claim to be original works.  As is forcefully expressed in
the introduction of the most valuable of them, the Seder Rab'
Amram Gaon, they were assembled only to fix an immemorial
tradition whose origins were then considered to be inspired. This
stabilization, as is shown by the divergences in the Medieval
manuscripts of the Seder Amran Gaon themselves, was never
absolute. Elogen thought it possible to conclude from this fact that
in the beginning this Seder did not contain the text of the prayers,
but only their explanation. This view is rejected by most
contemporary specialist, particularly by David Hegegard who
provided the critical edition of the collection in question.  The text
of  Rabbi  Amram's explanations, and even more so his introduction
suppose with utmost clarity that what he was asked to do by some
Jewish communities (undoubtedly Spanish) was first of all to make
an authorized edition of those prayers.  Furthermore the text of
these prayers is found also in a somewhat later book of the same
type, the Seder of the famous Sandia Gaon.

     The divergences in the text of the prayers are noticeable in each
other three principal manuscripts of  the Seder Amra," the Codex
613 of the British Museum, dating from the end of the 14th or the
beginning of the 15th century and serving as a basis for the Coronel
edition (1865), the Codex 1095 of the Bodleian Library at Oxford,
completed January 3, 1426, edited by Frumkin (1912), and the
Sulzberger Codex of the Jewish theological Seminary in New York,
completed November 8, 1516, and edited (with a re-edition of the
other two) by Hedegard in 1951.  Let us point out immediately that
these differences are almost insignificant and even non-existent for
our study: the meal prayers and the central prayers of the
synagogue service.  The texts that are still in use today in the
various synagogues and given in the modern editions printed for
liturgical use, like Singer's, follow the formulas of the Gaon very
closely.

     Still, the first thing to do is to explain these variations.  In doing
do, we shall be elucidating a basic problem for the correct
understanding of the liturgical tradition of the Synagogue, as a
problem which at least has its analogy in the liturgical tradition of
Christianity.

     Frequently, modern historians of Synagogue worship, like those
who study Christian worship, imagine that at a more or less late
date a rigid written formulation must have been substituted for the
original freedom of the prayer formulas, and that this formulation
consequently became ne varietur.  This twofold presupposition is
based on nothing but a ready made view that reflects the
Protestantism of the historians who first circulated it.

     In the first place, it is a constant characteristic of oral tradition
among the most varied of peoples, but especially among the
Semites, that it be handed on in the form of a very definite schema,
accompanied by well determined coupling formulas. But this
freedom is strictly governed by the awareness of the underlying
schema and controlled by religiously preserving the key
expressions. On the other hand, when a need came to be felt for
setting the formulas down completely in written form, it was still
felt for a rather long time that it was above all the schema and the
key expression that were to be fixed.  The result, at least with texts
thought to be more or less peripheral, was that the copyist, at least
up to the age of the printing press, never had scruples about
substituting oral variants which had persisted and with which they
were more familiar, for the details in the formularies they were
reproducing.

     Thus we see a double chimera dissolving: the primitive
improvisation of the prayers, and their ultimate crystallization in a
rigid literalism.  Whether or not they were fixed in their detail from
the beginning and down to our own day, the Jewish prayers had a
content, a structure and key terms that were perfectly defined from
the outset.  And, even in their set forms, these elements are the
ones that first attracted attention.  Of course, in Judaism as in every
religion, there is the ever present threat of formalism.  Everyone
who is accustomed to the "ex tempore" prayers dear to certain
Protestant groups knows how easily they become mere catch
phrases, a constant and tedious rehash of repeated cliches.  On the
other hand we must acknowledge that there is scarcely any religion
in which the spiritual teachers have shown themselves to be more
careful to avoid a formalism that empties the prayers of their
meaning than in Judaism.  This is one of the most constant themes
of the teaching of the Rabbis in regard to the recitation of the
prescribed prayers: they are bereft of any worth and are no longer
prayers properly so-called, when they are recited without being
accompanied by what they call Kawannah.  This rabbinical Hebrew
term, corresponding to a verb with the root kwn, meaning "to be
attentive", expresses the interior attitude of one whose intelligence
and heart are kept constantly awake through an act of living faith, a
cleaving of one's whole being to what is being said, and beyond the
words themselves to the sacred realities they recall.

     The Rabbis teach that to arrive at this state the prayers should
be recited deliberately, with care to observe the pauses indicated,
and by enunciating with vigor in order to rivet the attention. They
insist that their formulas should be meditated upon and their
meaning probed as deeply as possible.  With this last objective in
mind they encourage the practice of preceding the recitation,
particularly of the great berakoth of the synagogue Liturgy, with a
moment of quiet meditation in which each person would think over
by himself what is to be recited publicly.  The result would be that
the kawannah haleb, the "attention of the heart" becomes the soul
and the fruit of Liturgical Prayer.

     The whole teaching of the Sermon on the Mount on prayer, with
its necessary introduction of the idea of being "alone" with God, the
absorption in His Presence, in order to offer a prayer worthy of the
Name, far from being a contradiction of the rabbinical tradition on
this point is actually its purest expression.  As has been rightly
pointed out, Jesus' teaching against the Pharisee doctors whose
prayer deteriorates into an empty formalism coincides with the
teaching of the most revered of the Pharisee doctors themselves. 
Moreover it is quite noteworthy that Jesus' criticism leveled against
a devitalized practice is never turned against the synagogue prayer
itself, which Christ undoubtedly made His own without a shadow of
reticence up to His last hours on earth.

     While the Rabbis multiply warnings and counsels in order that
prayer may become the most personalized act possible, they are no
less watchful to keep it from any sort of individualism. Collective
prayer, in the midst of  God's People assembled for that purpose,
must be prepared for by personal prayer and mediation.  But it is
always and everywhere in union with the people that the faithful
individual must pray, and it is in his heart's adhesion to the
traditional expressions of collective, liturgical prayer that his prayer
is to find its rule.  Without this, they say, man would then to ask for
what his selfish impulses suggest to him. He could bless God only a
perspective that focuses on his own self-interest, and he would ask
God for his own satisfaction.  In contrast to this, in adhering to the
prayer of the faithful people, he will come to ask nothing which is
not the sole accomplishment of  God's will, and to praise God no
longer for what touches him personally but for the fulfillment of His
Plan alone.  Every other prayer is but a masked idolatry.  The only
genuine prayer is that which makes us, within the People of God
and its teaching, the worshippers of the God who has spoken and
never ceases to speak to us, worshippers who themselves never
cease bringing to His Word the "fiat" of their exultant faith.

                          THE  SHORT  FORMULARIES

The study of the short berakoth enumerated and commented upon
by the Mishnah and the Toseftah, especially if they are retread in
the light of the interpretations constantly given to them by later
rabbinic tradition, shows that they have no other tendency than this.
They contribute to making the whole life of the pious Jew an
unceasingly renewed act of awareness of God in all things, and of
His Word in all human actions.  The classic form of these prayers
begins with an invocation of the God of Israel which is practically
always the same: "Blessed (art) Thou, Adoni, our God, king of the
ages (or "of the universe")."  It is therefore the Divine Name
revealed to Moses on Horeb that is immediately evoked, under the
traditional periphrase "Adoni" (Lord) since respect for the Sacred
Name renders it unutterable.  It is this revealed God, still the Deus
absconditius, the hidden God, mysterious in His revelation, who is
acknowledged in every circumstance as the Master of our life as
well as of the whole universe.  In the exultant acknowledgement of
His People, He is praised, "blessed" as their God, as the One who
made a covenant with them in this exchange of ineffable
"knowledge", which is implied by the revelation of the Sacred
Name and the correlative acceptance of the easy yoke and the light
burden of the Torah.  But it is not as an ordinary tribal divinity, one
of the countless "lords of the covenant" of the Canaanites that this
God is confessed by His People.  It is as the hidden King of all
things, the One who holds the ages in His hand by His almighty
Wisdom: the Master of the world throughout all its history.  And it
can be said that the faithful soul who so confesses Him, by that very
fact, accomplishes the coming of His Kingdom here and now.

     The variable continuation of the prayer, usually through an
explicit reference to a Scripture passage, proclaims the lordship of
the God of Israel over the reality of the moment, the action in the
world that is about to be undertaken.  Thus the world, darkened by
man's sin, rediscovers its original significance, and from now on
man's action will be but the accomplishment of God's Plan.

     Upon awakening, the morning ablution will be sanctified by the
formula:

     Blessed be Thou JHWH, our God, King of the universe, who
hast sanctified us by Thy   commandments, and given us command
concerning the washing of the hands.

     Once he has completely awakened, the faithful Israelite adds:

     Blessed be Thou ... who restorest the souls to the dead corpses
(connecting awakening with     the resurrection).

     At cock-crow he says:

     Blessed be Thou ... who hast given the cock intelligence to
distinguish between day and   night.

     Then come the three blessing in which the Israelite praises God
for nothing made him a pagan, a slave or a woman.  their sense, as
the Rabbis have always explained, is not to gloat over a merit that
others would not have, but to become again aware of the
undeserved grace of knowing God, of being able and having to
observe the prescriptions of the Law. The misogyny that a too
imaginative antisemitism thought it could fin in the last of these
three formulas simply overlooks what the woman will be required
to say:

     Blessed be Thou ... who hast created me according to Thy will.

     The Rabbis explain both blessing by saying that it is a grace both
for the man to be called to fulfill the ceremonial obligations and for
the woman to be freed from them in order to attend to the chores of
her home.

     The man then straightens up, saying:

     Blessed be Thou ... who exaltest them that are lowly.

     For the first time he looks at his surroundings and cries out:

     Blessed be Thou ... who openest the eyes of the blind.

     He dresses and says:

     Blessed be Thou ... who clothest the naked.

     he gets up and puts his feet on the ground, saying:

     Blessed art Thou ... who spreadest the earth above the waters.

     And throughout the whole day there will no object or being
which will not remind him of God and His Word of love, who has
created all things for His People, no action in which he will not
surrender himself in the same way to the revealed will of God.

     In the light of these hundred blessings and their symbolic
number on which the Rabbis delight in commending, we can under
stand the exact significance of this passage from St. Paul:"For
everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if
it received with thanksgiving (berakah, blessing) for then it is
consecrated by the Word of God and prayer." The constant practice
of the berakoth actually becomes an all-embracing prayer, involving
the life of man and the world, whereby all thing are brought back to
the creative Word and restored to the original goodness which it
had conferred upon them.  As the Rabbis again tell us, this is how
the whole faithful life of the People of Israel,even in its apparently
most mundane occupations, is clothed with a character that is not
only sacred but also priestly.  They are thereby that priest-people
spoken of in the book of Exodus, because their whole, taken in the
framework of the berakoth, reconsecrates the entire universe to its
author through the Word of God and prayer. thus we can
understand why Rabbi Trypho in the dialogue with Justin explains
Malachi 1: 11 (on the pure offering offered at all times and
everywhere among the pagans) by saying that this what is
accomplished by the Jews of the diaspora, when they cease to bless
God in all things in the midst of those who do not know him. 

     Again, the same Rabbis who repeated that the Shekinah dwells
invisibly with every group of Jews, that has come together to
mediate on the Torah, do not hesitate to say that by pronouncing
the berakoth over everything he sees or touches with his hands
every faithful Jew makes these same things a consecrated dwelling
place for the shekinah itself.


           THE  BERAKOTH  PRECEDING  THE  SHEMA:  THE 
QEDUSHAH

It is against this general background of the manifold berakoth which
make the entire existence of the pious Jew a universal and constant
sacrificial blessing", that the great berakoth of the synagogue
service and the meals (particularly in the communities awaiting the
Messiah) stand out in high relief.  They lead us to the source of the
priestly life of the People of God in a detailed supplication for the
hallowing of His Name, the coming of His Kingdom, the
accomplishment of His entire will, between a great berakah for the
light and another for the gift of life. These then, respectively, are
the three themes of the berakoth preceding the central act of
synagogue worship: the recitation of the Shema, - of the great
Tefillah, the pre-eminent prayer of the Eighteen (actually today,
nineteen) Blessings that follow it, - and finally the meal berakoth.

     The morning service of the synagogue, as we have said, was to
be preceded by a prolonged moment (one hour say the Rabbis) of
meditation and private prayer, in the synagogue itself insofar as
possible. From the earliest,this preparatory payer was nurtured by
the recitation of the Psalter.  It seems that some particularly fervent
communities of pre-Christian antiquity already knew the practice,
renewed in modern times by the Hasidim of Poland, of preceding
the public service at least on some day with a recitation of the
whole Psalter.  But they were very soon to introduce the custom or
reserving the 145th to 150th Psalms that is, the great cosmic praise
on which the Psalter concludes, especially to this hour of morning
meditation. In a parallel way, after the evening meal, they soon
introduced the custom of reciting the entire Hallel (Psalm 113
through 118).  This is the "hymn" which as the Last supper
accounts tell us was sung by the disciples after they had eaten.
There is scarcely any need to point out that this is the origin of the
Lauds and Vespers of Christianity.  Baumstark has correctly
pointed out that all the ancient Christian Rites, whether Eastern or
Western, made use of these same Psalms.

     The Pesque de zimra. i.e., the "passages from the Psalms", still
make up an obligatory prelude to the synagogue service of today. 
Some Berakoth precede there recitation, which are like a summary
of the themes contained in the Psalms that follow: praising God for
His creation, and for the way that He has made all things to be for
the good of His elect, those whom God "knows" and loves.

     However interesting their preliminary service may be, we have
to restrict our study to the synagogue service proper and to its
characteristic berakoth, for, as we shall soon discover, they lead us
directly to the Eucharistic service of the Christian Church. 

     As we have said, the first group of berakoth that we find
purposes to prepare for the central act of daily Jewish piety: the
recitation of the Shemah, i.e., principally these words from
Deuteronomy:

     Hear, O Israel, The Lord your God is the Lord alone; 
     you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, 
     with all your soul and with all your thought, 
     and Him alone shall you serve.

     In the repetition of this sentence, in its assimilation by the Prayer
of Faith, the People of God renew themselves in this knowledge of
God corresponding to the knowledge he has of his own prayers
which is at the heart of Israel's piety.  The preceding prayers are
aimed at expressing this very knowledge.

     On the Sabbath day as well as Monday and Thursday of every
week they originally followed the solemn reading of the Law and
the Prophets.  Towards the Patristic Age, this reading was
transferred from the beginning to the end of the service and it now
constitutes its conclusion.  It seems clear that this transfer came
about as a reaction against the Christians who in the meantime had
given this supreme place to Eucharistic Banquet.  It is possible also
that prescinding from the Christians this reaction aimed at tall the
Jewish communities who had tended already to consider the
community meals the equivalent, and in their eyes a superior one, to
the Temple sacrifices. The minim, to which at this same period the
12th of the present prayers of the Tefillah refers (it was introduced
at this time), are certainly indiscriminately both the Christians and
those Jews whose messianic leaning were seen to be leading them
straight to Christianity.


     Even today at the beginning of the synagogue service there is a
vestige of the reading that was once used here in the beginning.  It
is the Qaddish prayer which was the original conclusion of the
tarum, i.e., the paraphrastic Aramaic translation that followed the
ritual Hebrew reading of the Holy Scriptures. In fact, alone in this
central composite of these immutably Hebraic prayers, it is still
recited in our day in Aramaic.  Its first part which is also the oldest
and certainly anterior to the Christian era must be quoted.  it is
evident that it is the direct source of the first part of the Lord's
prayer:

     Magnified and sanctified be His great Name,  Amen.  In the
world which he has created     according to His will.  And may He
establish His Kingdom during your life and during      your days and
during the life of all the House of Israel, e ven speedily and at a
near time.  Amen.

     After this begin the berakoth that introduced the recitation of
the Shema.  As we see again in the final meal prayer, the Sheliach
sibbur. i.e., the member of the community designated for saying the
prayer in the name of all invites the community to the "blessing. 
(Today, and since the 6th century, it is always the hazan, the
"minister" who is the ancestor of the Christian Deacon.

     Bless ye JHWH, who is to be blessed, for ever and ever.

     All answer:

     Blessed be JHWH, who is to be blessed, for ever and ever.

     The Sheliach sibbur says, or rather chants, as is the rule for all
these solemn prayers this great blessing called Yozer:

      Blessed be thou, JHWH,  our God, kin g of  the u niverse, who
form est light an d createst      darkness, who ma kest peace  and
cre a test all things: Who in merc y gives t light to the earth     and 
to them  that dwell t herein and in His goodness renewe st the
creation every day continually.  How manifold are Thy works,
JHWH.  In wisdom hast Thou made than all, the earth is full of Thy
possessions. King who alone wast exalted from aforetime, praised,
glorified and exalted from days of old.  Everlasting God, in thine
abundant mercies have mercy upon us, Lord of our strength, Rock
of stronghold, Shield of our salvation, Thou stronghold of ours. 
The blessed God, great in knowledge, prepared and formed the rays
of the sum: it was a boon He produced about His strength.  the
chiefs of His hosts are holy beings, they exalt the Almighty,
continually declare the glory of God and His holiness.  Be Thou
blessed  JHWH, our God, in the heavens above and on the earth
beneath.  Be Thou blessed, our rock, our King and our Redeemer,
Creator of ministering spirits, and all of His ministering spirits stand
in the height of the universe, and with awe proclaim aloud in unison
the words of the living God and everlasting King.  All of them are
beloved, all of them are pure, all of  them are mighty, all of them in
dread do the will of their Master, all of them open their mouths in
holiness and purity and praise and glorify and sanctify the Name of
the great King, the mighty and dreaded One, holy is He.  They all
take upon themselves the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, one
from the other, and give leave one to another to hallow their
Creator: in tranquil joy of spirit, with pure speech and with holy
melody they all respond in unison in fear, and say with awe ...

     Here all join the Sheliach sibbur in chanting the Qedushah: 

     Holy, holy. holy is  JHWH of hosts; the whole earth is full of his
glory.

     The Sheliach sibbur resumes:

     And the Ophanim and the holy Chayoth with a noise of great
rushing,
     upraising themselves toward them praise and say:

and again all chant:

     blessed be the glory of JHWH from his place.

     He continues and concludes:

                     To the blessed God they offer pleasant melodies, to 
the King, the living and ever-   enduring God they utter hymns and
make their praise he ard, for He alone performeth   mighty deeds
and maketh new things, the Lord of battles,  He soweth
righteousness, causeth salvation to spring forth, createth remedies,
is revered in praises, the Lord of wonders who in His goodness
reneweth the creation every day continually, as it is said: (Give
thanks) to Him that maketh great lights for His grace endureth
forever.  Blessed be Thou JHWH, Creator of the luminaries.

     Whereupon he immediately proceeds to the second berakah,
Ahabah:

     With abounding love hast Thou loved us, JHWH, o ur Go d,
with great an d exc eeding pity      hast Thou pitted us, our Father,
our King,  fo r the sake of our father  s who trusted in thee,    and
whom thou didst teach the s tatues of life, be gr aciou s  also unto
us.  Our Father, merciful Father, have mercy upon us, and put it
into our hearts to understand, and to discern, and to hear, and to
learn, and to do all the words of instruction in Thy Torah in love. 
And enlighten our eyes in thy commandments, and let our hearts
cleave to Thy fear, and unite our hearts to love Thy Name because
we have been called by Thy Holy, truly great Name.  Do unto us
for the sake of Thy great and fearful Name, soon in love exalt our
horn and be Thou our king and save us for the sake of Thy Name,
for we have trusted in Thee, that we be not put to shame, and we
trust in Thy Name that we be not abashed nor tumble for ever and
ever because Thou, O God, art our Father, our God, and let not
Thy mercy abandon us for ever and ever.  Let peace come over us
from the four corners of the earth and cause us soon to go upright
to our land, for Thou hast chosen us from all peoples and tongues
an hast brought us near unto thy great Name in love.  Blessed be
Thou, JHWH, who hast chosen Thy People Israel in love.

     At this point there finally follows the collective recitation of the 
Shemah ...

     This double berakah opens then with a praise of God the
Creator, within the general perspective of Jewish morning payers. 
This is immediately specified in an act of thanksgiving for light. 
But from physical light we make the transition to the spiritual light
of the knowledge of God and therefore to an act of thanksgiving for
the gift of the Torah which will lead directly to the recitation of the
Shemah.  At the same time we go from the praise of God the
Creator to that of God the Savior who has intervened in history to
bring together the Chosen People.

     The transition from the berakah for visible light to the berakah
for the invisible light of the Torah is promised by the mention of the
Angels who unceasingly contemplate and praise the divine glory. 
This makes us aware that the two lights, visible and invisible, in the
Jewish mind, are not separated and opposed as in the Hellenistic
notions.  They are but two successive aspects of one reality into
which we are only penetrating more profoundly. For Judaism,
faithful to biblical notion, the world, the creation of the unique God,
is itself unique.  The angelic word is not a world different from the
material world.  it is the same, although seen in its deepest or most
exalted aspect.  Or, better, if we may borrow an excellent
expression of Newman's, what we call the visible world is but the
fringe of a world the rest of which remains invisible for us.
Reciprocally as in the vision of the 6th chapter of Isaiah underlying
the whole of this text, God Himself is described as luminous in a
sense which even though physical is not solely so.  In the biblical
and Jewish sense His glory is a radiation of His being which is
reflected in all creation, visible as well as invisible. The higher
Angels, the seraphim, as their name indicates, are themselves
products of a mysterious fire which is like a first reflection of the
glowing heart of the divine life, and the altar fire and sanctuary
lamps act as reminder of it. This fire recalls the illumination, the
transfiguration of all things that is the product of the descent of the
Shekinah., the Divine Presence, in the luminous cloud in which it is
enveloped.  The glory given to God by the Seraphim's singing of
the Qedushah is this reflection of divine glory returning to its 
source.  But in them it is a conscious reflection expressed in song,
just as in God, the igneous light is that of the Spirit expressed in the
Word.  Man will be associated both with this relation of glory and
this glorification of praise responding to it, first by contemplating
the visible light in creation, and then by making the conscious
homage of the Angelic Qedushah his own thanks to the Torah he
has received and accepted.

     The second berakah develops this vision of the gift of the Torah
and its acceptance, as a supreme act of divine love eliciting the
reciprocal love of creatures for the One Holy One, the one Lord,
whose lordship and holiness are those of love.  Hence the place
given in this prayer to the heart, i.e. not the sense faculty but this
core of man's whole being which is the loving intelligence,
consumed by its adherence to the Torah in this knowledge of love
which in man responds to that knowledge with which God has
enveloped him.  Moreover, this explains the place given by this
same prayer to the divine fatherhood over Israel.

     Dalman somewhat exaggerates when he states that the
expression "Our Father" is often applied to God in the prayers of
the synagogue. This is true to a certain extent with the modern
formulas, but is less so in regard to the more ancient ones.  On the
other hand, there is no question that the insistence on this title,
repeated twice in the climax of the Ahabah prayer, just before the
recitation of the Shema, is quite significant.  These words addressed
to God by Israel in such a context are far more than a formulation
of a faith in a simple and commonplace adoption. They express the
emergence of a faith in a genuine assimilation to His life, through
His love creating our own, in the Torah given to believing hearts. 
Once again, and more now than ever, we find ourselves at this point
on the brink, as it were, of evangelical revelation.  And it is
superfluous to conjure up some later Christian influence in order to
account for the increased use of this expression "Our Father:" in the
Jewish Liturgy.  It must have been the natural result of a daily
repetition and a constant mediation on the prayer we have just
analyzed.

     The Qedushah of the Seraphim, with its extension in the berakah
of the Ophanim and the Hayoth, requires some special comment.

     In the first place it must be pointed out that even in the of
Amram Gaon and probably for a very long time before, the
Qedushah was not only sung at this point in the synagogue service,
but in two other instances: before the third berakah of the Tefillah
(as we shall see later), and after the reading  form the Prophets
which today comes at the end of the service. Hence the classical
distinction  between the Qedushah of Yozer (the one which has its
place in the prayer we have just studied), the Qedushah of the
Tefillah and the Qedushah of Sidrah.  The question has arisen as to
whether the three recitations are all equally ancient, and if not, then
which is the oldest?  The majority of specialists (particularly Kohler
and Ginzberg) consider the Qedushah of Yozer as certainly dating
from the earliest antiquity.  Elobogen is practically alone in holding
another opinion and maintaining that the Qedushah of Sidrah is the
most ancient.  the argument is actually quite futile.  What is sure is
that the Tannaim already were familiar with the Qedushah of Yozer
and considered it to be traditional, although they do not have such
explicit references to the other two.  The apocalyptic books
attribute to Henoch made the Qedushah the central element of
heavenly worship, which they describe manifestly on the model of
the synagogue worship as it was known to their authors. From this
Odeberg wanted to conclude - obviously wrongly - that in the
beginning the Shema itself would not have been the high point of
Synagogue worship, and could even have been absent from it since
this place originally belonged to the Qedushah of Yozer.
Nevertheless, the rabbinical commentaries on Yozer underline that
this text present the singing of the Qedushah by the Angels as the
heavenly equivalent of the acceptance of the Torah, signified for the
Israelites by the reciting of the Shemah. In both cases, the Kingdom
of God is accomplished in the adoring and loving acknowledgement
on the part of creatures, and the entire world becomes a harmony
by attuning itself to God.

     We must add that there are two zones or aspects of the spiritual
world corresponding to the Angelic Qedushah and berakah.  The
Qedushah,expressly associated with the elders of the Angelic
armies, represents the glorification of God in the heavenly world,
completely engrossed in and filled with His Presence, either by the
Seraphim as in the vision of Isaiah or by the Archangels like
Michael or Gabriel whom later Jewish speculation tends to identify
with them.  The second chant brings to mind the initial vision of 
Ezekiel in al allusion to the spirits who sustain the visible universe:
they are the four Cherubim or Hayoth, the "Living Creatures",
spirits of the element of the world (the "principle" spoken of by St.
Paul) and the four Ophanim, the "Wheels" spangled with eyes, the
spirits of the astral spheres.  The song of these other Angelic spirits
therefore expresses God's glory, no longer considered in its
inaccessible majesty as in the Qedushah,  but in its presence
manifested in this world, especially in the Temple of Jerusalem, the
"place" where it dwells.  This song which is presented by Ezekiel as
the hymn of the Hayoth and the Ophanim is an equivalent of the
Liturgical chant for the setting up of the Ark in the Tabernacle
mentioned in Numbers 10:36.  it is permissible to think that the
Qedushah itself that Isaiah gives as the song of the Seraphim must
have already been a chant accompanying the The incense sacrifice
in the Temple of his time, long before it was taken into the prayer
of the 
Synagogue.
     
     The importance of the themes of light and knowledge in all these
prayers must be emphasized. At times people have wanted to
oppose Jewish piety to  what is called Hellenic mysticism, as a
spirituality of the word nurturing life, opposed to a luminous
contemplation that satisfies knowledge alone. It is beyond question
that the unfolding of the divine Word and the progressive revelation
of the God of Israel as the living God intervening in the course of
events to give life to those who hear Him, are characteristics of
biblical and Jewish religion.  But the prayers we have just examined
and the biblical themes with which they are woven give evidence
that this unfolding of the Word of the living God who gives life
need not be opposed to a knowledge-light mysticism: one envelops
the other both in Jewish piety and in the Bible.

     It is true that scholars have at times wanted to reduce these
developments of the igneous light theme in the Bible to late Iranian
influences.  But to do so is to forget that possible even the latest of
these developments of priestly themes, particularly the Divine
Presence in the luminous cloud, are connected with the most
arachic traditions of Israel concerning the Sinai Covenant. The Lord
who revealed Himself to Moses on Horeb appears at the very first
as the God of the wild mountain where He revealed Himself in a
thunderstorm in order to give the Torah of the Covenant to His
People.  Similarly the "knowledge", explicitly a knowledge of love,
which is expressed in these berakoth, is evidently the flower of the
Prophets' "knowledge of God".  With these themes, we therefore
find ourselves at the heart of a Jewish mysticism that remains
basically biblical, even if it is true that we must expect from other
texts, which we shall soon be examining, the complementary
aspects of Israel's piety where the Word and life will come into the
limelight.

     A final remark with regard to the berakoth preceding the Shema
should show how the last one of these, the Ahabah, already
manifest a tendency to pass from thanksgiving to supplication, in
order finally to return to praise in a brief doxology.  This is a
movement which we have seen in the Psalter and which reaches its
fullness in the Tefillah of the eighteen blessing.  In accordance with
the last perspective of Israel's faith, the entire gift of God, and most
especially His love, has in one sense already accorded us. Yet this
gift is also awaiting its full eschatological realization which will
cause prayer to come to full flower in pure praise forever. 
Supplication is therefore naturally introduced  to the praise itself, 
as a prayer which is already the object of praise and may be
accomplished fully so that this supplication in its turn will be finally
consumed in the praise form which it proceeds.

     We shall not dwell at this point on the Shema since it was to
disappear in the Christian Liturgy where, as we shall see, the
Eucharistic banquet takes on its focal position.  Let us simply
specify that the present three-part-formula of the Shema, adding
Deuteronomy 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41 to Deuteronomy
6:4-9, must have developed in three stages.  It seems that the first
citation alone was already part of the Temple service from which it
must have passed over into the Synagogue service. the two others
were added in turn.  A parallel development must have followed for
the concluding prayer that was added to it, the Gehullah as it is
called today in reference to each of the three biblical texts to the
point of quoting expressions from them.

     On the other hand, in the beginning at least in the Synagogue
worship if not in the Temple, Deuteronomy 6:4-9 was preceded by
the recitation of the Ten Commandments.  Their disappearance is
another result of anti-Christian polemics, which is at least hinted at
in the Berakoth tractate (12a) of  the Mishnah.  Undoubtedly there
was a wish to counter the Christians' assertion that only the
decalogue had any permanent importance among the legal
prescriptions.

                  THE  TEFILLAH  OF  THE  SHEMONEH  ESREH


After the Shema and the following prayer, which purposes merely
to impress its meaning on the mind of the faithful, there comes the
Tefillah of the 18 blessings (Shemoneh Esreh). Its name itself
signifies that it is the prayer par excellence.  It is actually the
formula which gave gradual definition to the totality of the objects
of prayer to which the Israelite was commanded and obliged to give
his full attention.

     Although basically a prayer of supplication (the substantive
tefillah like the verb hithaplpel in rabbinical Hebrew is only used for
this type of prayer), it is considered to be a series of "blessing"
because three proper berakoth precede it and three others follow its
twelve petitions.  Furthermore each of these concludes with a short
berakah.  The tefillah has come down to us in two forms
Babylonian and Jerusalemite.  It is the Babylonian one that is given
in the Sedar Amaram Gaon and which we shall reproduce.  The
Jerusalemite recension was edited for the first time by Salomon
Shechter.  Which of the two most closely corresponds to the usage
at the time of Christ is still being argued.  But this dispute is
perhaps not as important as might be thought.  Even Abudharam
pointed out that there were no two Jewish communities of his time
where it was recited in exactly the same words.  Of the great
prayers of the Synagogue, it seems actually to have been the one
which in the details of its formulation retained for the longest time
the greatest elasticity, as is the case today in the Churches of
Byzantine Rite with the ektenias which seem, as we shall see, to
have been directly derived from the tefillah.  Still, the content of
these eighteen (or now nineteen) prayers became fixed at a very
early date, as is evidenced by the abundant and manifold
commentaries to which they have given rise in rabbinical literature.

     Contrary to the berakoth before the Shema, it has always been
the role of the hazan (Like the deacon for the Christian ektenias) to
recite them, standing before the Ark of the Scriptures and facing
Jerusalem.  But custom demands even today that the hazan, along
with each of the faithful, recite it first mentally in silence, before he
alone chants it from beginning to end.  The faithful then answer
Amen after each berakah, and the Qedushah is again sung between
the second and third berakoth preceded by an introductory prayer
of which we know three different forms.

     It seems certain that originally the period of quiet which
preceded the recitation aloud was not accompanied by a first
recitation in a low voice but by individual silent prayers, inspired by
the familiar themes of the public prayer that was to follow, but
without any special required formula.  The disciples' request of
Jesus to "teach them to pray", usually translation of hithpalpel)
seems precisely to be aimed at this personal tefillah, and the Lord's
Prayer appears to constitute its synthetic formulation. Later we
shall return to this point.  Here are the three initial berakoth as
found in the Sedar Amram Gaon, following the Babylonian
tradition, with the Qedushah and its most solemn introduction
which seems also to be the most ancient.

     They are preceded by an introductory verse which was to pass
over into the Christian office:
     jhwh, open my lips,
     and my mouth shall declare Thy praise!
     
     The three inial berakoth follow immediately:

     1. (Aboth) Blessed be Thou, jhwh, our God and God of our
fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob, the
great, mighty and revered God, the most high God, who bestowest
loving kindness, possesset all things and rememberest the pious
deeds of the fathers, and wilt bring a redeemer in their children's
children, for Thy Name's sake, in love, King, Helper, Savior and
shield, blessed be Thou, jhwh, the shield of Abraham.
     2. (Geburoth) Thou art mighty forever, jhwh, Thou quickened
the dead, Thou art mighty to save, and Thou causest the dew to fall
(who causest the wind to blow and the rain to fall), who sustainest
the living with loving kindness, quickenest the dead with great
mercy, supportest the falling, healest the sick, loosest them that are
bound and keepest faith to them that sleep in the dust.  Who is like
unto Thee, Lord of mighty acts, and who resembeth Thee, King,
who killest and quickenest and causest salvation to spring forth. 
And faithful art Thou to quicken the dead, Blessed be Thou, jhwh,
who quickenest the dead.

     (Keter) Unto Thee  shall the multitudes above with all the
gatherings below give a crown, all with one accord shall thrice
repeat the holy praise unto thee, according to what is said through
the Prophet: and one cried unto another and said, holy, holy, holy is
jhwh of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.  Then with noise
of great rushing, mighty and strong, they make their voices heard,
and upraising themselves toward them, they say: blessed, blessed,
be the glory of jhwh from his place.

     From thy place shine forth, our King, and reign over us, for we
wait upon Thee. When wilt Thou reign?  Reign in Zion speedily,
even in our days and in our lives do Thou dwell (there).  Myaest
Thou be magnified and sanctified in the midst of Jerusalem Thy city
throughout all generations and to al eternity.  And let our eyes
behold Thy Kingdom, according to the word that was spoken in the
songs of Thy might by David, Thy righteous anointed; jhwh shall
reign for ever, Thy God Zion, unto all generations.   Hallelujah.

     (2) (Qedushat ha-Shem) From generation to generation give
homage to God for He alone is high an holy, and Thy praise, our
God, shall not depart from our mouth for ever, for a great and holy
King art Thou.  Blessed be Thou jhwh,Thou holy God.

     The first berakah is therefore a commemoration of the Fathers
with whom the Covenant was made, essentially Abraham and the
Patriarchs (hence the name Aboth, "Fathers" which is given to it). 
At the same time it is an act of thanksgiving anticipating the future
coming of the Messiah who will redeem their children.  

     The second (Geruroth) goes on to give thanks for life and its
fecundity; similarly it unfolds into a blessing for the hoped for
resurrection.

     The third (the Qedushat ha-Shem) can be considered as the
blessing, for it is the blessing of the Divine Name, revealed to the
fathers and kept upon the lips of the sons.  Hence the solemnity of
its introduction, with the chant of the Qedushah.  In the Divine
Name it is actually in the person who communicate Himself to His
People, above and beyond all of His gifts.

     After these we come to the twelve (now thirteen) prayers.

     4.  (Binah) Thou favorest man with knowledge and teachest a
human being understanding.  Favor us with knowledge,
understanding and discernment form Thee, Blessed be thou, jhwh,
who graciously bestowest knowledge.

     5. (Teshubah) Cause us to return, our Father, unto Thy Torah,
and draw us near, our King, unto Thy service, and bring us back in
perfect repentance before Thee.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who
delightest in repentance.

     6. (Selishah) Forgive us, our Father, for we have sinned; pardon
us, our King, for we have transgressed, for Thou art good and
forgiving.  Blessed be thou, jhwh, who art gracious and dost
abundantly forgive.

     7. (Geullah) Look upon our affliction and plead our cause, and
redeem us speedily for thy Name's sake; for thou art a mighty
Redeemer.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, the redeemer of Israel.

     8. (Refnah) Heal us, jhwh, and we shall be healed; save us and
we shall be saved, and grant a perfect healing to all our wounds, for
Thou art a merciful Physician.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who healest
the sick of Thy People Israel.

     9.  (Birkat ha-shanin) Bless this year unto us, jhwh, our God for
(our) welfare (and give dew and rain for blessing upon the face of
the earth, and wind on land and satisfy the whole world by Thy
goodness and fill our hands from Thy blessings and from the riches
of the gifts of Thy hands, and watch and recuse all calamity, and
make it a hope, and let the end of it be peace.  Spare us, and have
mercy upon us and upon all the produce of it, and upon all the fruits
of it, and bless it like [a good] year with blessing of dew, and life,
and plenty and peace).  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who blessed the
years.

     10. (Qibbus galuyoth)  Sound the great horn for our freedom,
and lift up the ensign, to gather our exiles, and proclaim liberty to
gather us from the four quarters of the earth to our land.  Blessed
be Thou, jhwh, who gatherest the dispersed of Thy People Israel.

     11. (Birtkat mishpat)  Restore our judges as at the first, and our
counsellors as at the beginning, and reign Thou alone over us, jhwh,
in grace and mercy and righteousness and judgment.  Blessed art
Thou, jhwh, the King who lovest righteousness and judgment.

     12. (Birkatha-minim) And for the slanderers let there be no
hope, and let all the wicked perish in a moment and let all our
enemies be speedily cut off, and the dominion of arrogance do
Thou speedily uproot and crush and humblest in our days.  Blessed
be thou, jhwh, who breakest the wicked and humblest the arrogant.
     13. (Birkat saddiqim) Towards the righteous and the pious and
the true proselytes may Thy mercies be stirred, jhwh, our God, and
grant a good reward unto all who faithfully trust in Thy Name and
set our portion with them, so that we may never be put to shame. 
Blessed  be Thou, jhwh, the stay and trust of the righteous.

     14. (Birkat Yerushalem) To Jerusalem, Thy city, return in
mercy, and dwell in it as Thou hast spoken; and rebuild it as an
everlasting building in our days.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who
rebuildest Jerusalem.

     15. (Birkat David) Speedily cause the offspring of David to
flourish, and let his horn be exalted by Thy salvation, because we
wait for Thy salvation all the day.  Blessed be thou, jhwh, who
causeth the horn of salvation to flourish.

     16.  (Tefillah) Hear our voice, jhwh, have mercy upon us and
accept our prayer in mercy and favor; for Thou art a God who
harkenest unto our payers and supplications: from Thy Presence,
our King, turn us not empty away, for Thou harkenest to the prayer
of every mouth.  blessed be Thou, jhwh, who harkenest unto
prayer.

     The first prayer (called Binah, "understanding" or Dehah'
"Knowledge," or Birkat Hokmah, "blessing of wisdom", echoing
the blessing of the Name which precedes it) is quite naturally a
prayer for the "knowledge of  God."  It obviously is first directed
toward the knowledge of the Torah, the divine exigencies over
man.  But in this context it is clear that the knowledge of the Torah
and of God Himself are but one. It is a question of reaching this
relationship of mutual intimacy which His revelation is aimed at
producing,with the result that the Torah imprints the seal of the
Divine Name upon us, and that the sanctification of the Name
sanctifies us by its own holiness.

     The following prayer (Teshubah) is a prayer of repentance, or
more precisely an entreaty that God Himself grant us repentance,
this teshubah which may also be translated as a return (to God), a
conversion.

     The third (Selichah, "pardon") consequently begs for
forgiveness.

     The fourth (Geullah, "redemption") them asks for redemption,
i.e., the deliverance from the tribulations which have befallen the
people on account to their sins.  The Talmud sees an allusion here
to the eschatological redemption by the expected Messiah. 
Following this there is a plea for good weather during the year (the
Birkat ha-shanin, "prayer for the years" - "good years" being
understood), abundant harvests, and more generally "peace" (the
Hebrew shalom includes material prosperity in this idea).
     Then follows the Qibbus galuyoth (the gathering of the exiles)
which a prayer for the bringing together of the exiles of the whole
diaspora of Israel.

     Then comes the Birkat mispat (the prayer for righteousness)
which is a prayer for the authorities, asking that they be faithful to
the divine will, so that the reign of the Lord over His People will be
assured.

     It is after this and prior to a prayer for proselytes that the berkah
was introduced as a later addition which brought the number of
traditional "blessings: from eighteen up to nineteen.  It is the
famous prayer against the Apostles and slanderers of the People of
Israel.  These minim are certainly the Christians, especially the
Jewish Christians, and all those among the Jewish people who were
in league with them or thought to be.  The formulas are more
variable than any of the others, probably in part because of the
censure that the Christian authorities could bring against it, or,
simply out of fear os such a censure.

     The Birkat saddiqim, a prayer for the "righteous", is in fact a
prayer conceived for the proselytes who have decided to become
members of the People of  God.

     The Birkat Yesushalem which follows it is obviously, since the
year 70 A.D., aimed at the rebuilding of Jerusalem which Titus has
destroyed.  The original formulas must have been not on the
rebuilding but on the building of Jerusalem and on her perpetual
possession of the Divine Presence.

     After this the Birkat David expressly implores the coming of the
Davidic Messiah.

     A  last and particularly solemn petition to which the name
Tefillah ("prayer" par excellence) is given, together with the whole
eighteen, beseeches God to hear all the prayers of Israel.

     From here we come to the three final blessings where the theme
of praise again becomes dominant.

     17.  (Abodah)  Accept, jhwh, our God, Thy people Israel and
their prayer and restore the service to the Holy of Holies of Thy
House and receive speedily in love and favor the fire--offerings of
Israel and their prayer, and may the service of Thy People Israel
ever be acceptable unto Thee, and let our eyes behold Thy return 
to Zion in mercy.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who restoreth Thy
presence to Zion.

     18.  (Hodah)  We give thanks unto Thee, our God and the God
of our fathers; Thou art the Rock of our lives, the shield of our
salvation through every generation.  We will give thanks unto Thee
and declare Thy praise for our lives which are committed unto Thy
hand, and for our souls which are in Thy charge.  Thou art all-good
for Thy mercies fail not, Thou art merciful for Thy loving
kindnesses never cease, we have ever hoped in Thee.  And bring us
not to shame, jhwh, our God, abandon us not and hide not Thy face
from us, and for all Thy Name be blessed and exalted, our King, for
ever and ever.  Everything that liveth should thank Thee, Selah, and
praise Thy  Name, All- good, in truth.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh,
whose Name is all-good, and unto whom it is becoming to give
thanks.

     19.  (Birkat kohanim) Grant peace, welfare, blessing,
loving-kindness and mercy unto us and unto all Israel, Thy People,
of Thy countenance; for by the light of Thy countenance Thou hast
given us, jhwh, our God, the Torah of life, love and grace, and
righteousness and mercy, and may it be good in Thy sight to bless
Thy People Israel in mercy at all times.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh,
who blesseth Thy People Israel with peace.

     Although the first of these last three berakoth does not begin
with the classic formula "blessed be Thou ..." it is considered to be
a berakoth of praise, for its sole object is the praise of God by
Israel.  It is called Abodah, "service" and it is generally admitted
that it proceeds directly from the prayer that was recited in the
Temple of Jerusalem for the daily offering of the holocaust.  Later it
was revised so that it could be applied to the restoration of the
sacrifices interrupted by Titus.

     It is followed by a prayer called Hodah, "thanksgiving" in a
pre-eminent sense, for it sums up all the motives of the blessing of
the Lord in a final doxology.

     The last berakoth s merely a preparation for the Aaronic blessing
which in the beginning must have closed the service.

     We have already pointed out the close kinship between the first
three petitions of the Our Father and the Qaddish which (in the
beginning) concluded the Scripture readings.  We may now add that
both are a kind of expansion of the principal initial berakah, the one
which focuses on the Name.  The rest of the Our Father seems in
turn to be a kind of summary of the twelve central petitions.  But
we must still consider two facts which arise from the discussion of
the Rabbis.  The first is that the recitation of the Eighteen Blessings
was reburied for everyone each day only by the school of Gamaliel
(contemporary to the time of Christ).  The second is that up to that
time these Eighteen Blessings were used only during the week. On
the Sabbath and on Holy Days there was a formulary of only seven
blessings.  It seems that it is precisely in this framework that the
version of the Our Father in St. Matthew's Gospel, with its seven
verses, is intended to be taken.

                            THE  MEAL  BERAKOTH

We still have to examine another series of Jewish prayers whose
importance for a study of the ancient Eucharist is especially evident:
the meal Liturgy.  In principle, it as required, for every Jewish meal,
even if it were merely a simple individual collation.  But it took on
its greatest importance in the family meals, especially the Holy Day
meals such as at Passover.  We have already had occasion to say
that in the Jewish communities, like Qumran, it come to take on the
place and significance of the ancient sacrifices.  According to many
modern exegetes, the Passover meal in primitive Israel was
probably the only sacrifice.  Similarly, since the community meal
brought together in the expectation of the Messianic Banquet
mentioned by the Prophets, the "remnant: which thought of itself as
forming the kernel of the future and eternal Israel, that meal
become the supreme and unique sacrifice.  On the other hand, it
must be pointed out that the meal prayers, and particularly the great
act of thanksgiving that ends the meal, have always been looked
upon by the Jews as being especially venerable.  The Rabbis
attributed a legendary antiquity to them. Yet even if there is some
exaggeration here, these prayers are certainly among the most
ancient of the Jewish rituals that have come down to us.  Louis
Finkelstein, who devoted a particularly thought-provoking study to
them, observes with reason that this family Liturgy was as
important in sustaining the community religious life in Israel as the
Synagogue service itself.

     The obligatory prelude or the meal was the ritual hand-washing
with which the Jewish also began their day.  Then, in a ceremonial
meal, each person upon arriving drank a first cup of wine, repeating
for himself this following blessing:

     Blessed be Thou, jhwh, our God, King of the universe, who
givest us this fruit of the     vine.

     This is the first cup mentioned by St. Luke in his account of the
Last Supper, and which proved such an embarrassment to the
Christian exegetes who knew nothing about the Jewish meals. The
words of Jesus cited by Luke in this regard on the fruit of the vine
which He would no longer drink with His disciples before they met
again in the Kingdom, are a transparent allusion to this formula.

     But the meal did not officially  begin until the father of the
family or the presiding member of the community had broken the
bread which was to be given to the participants, with his blessing:

     Blessed be Thou, jhwh, our God, King of the universe, who
bringest forth bread from  the earth.

     It was looked upon as a general blessing for the whole meal that
was to follow, and no one who arrived later was allowed to
partake.

     The courses and the cups of wine then followed, and each
person in turn pronounced a series of appropriate blessings.  The
Passover meal was distinguished simply by special foods, bitter
herbs and the lamb, which were used together with the special
corresponding prayers and the dialogue recitation of the haggadah,
i.e., a kind of traditional homily on the origin and the ever fresh
sense of the feast. We shall have occasion to speak again further on
about this haggadah.

     In every case, however, the essential ritual act came at the end
of the meal.  About that time, in the Holy Day meals celebrated on
the eve (like our first Vespers), the lamp was brought in, normally
by the mother of the family who had prepared and lighted it.  It was
blessed in turn by a blessing that recalled the creation of the
luminaries to light up the night. This is the origin of the ancient
Christian use of the lucernarium, which has survived in our own day
in the blessing of the Paschal Candle.  Following this incense was
burned with a proper blessing. Then a second general hand-washing
took place; the one who presided received the water first from the
hands of a servant, or in his absence form the youngest at the table.

     This explains to us the scene described by the Fourth Evangelist.
Probably in this function John brought water to Jesus, who,
conveying in an expressive gesture the teaching of humble love that
He wanted to give His disciples, took the ewer from his hands, and
beginning with Peter, who was considered the most worthy after
Himself, washed not the hands but the feet of His disciples.

     It is after these various preliminaries that the president, with the
cup of wine mixed with water before him, solemnly invited those
assisting to join in with his act of thanksgiving.
     
     "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God," he said, bowing over
in the case where the assembly included the minimum number of
participants to be equivalent to a Synagogue congregation (ten in
principle). They then answer him in a similar vein:

     Blessed be He whose generosity has given us food
     and whose kindness has given us life.

     The Jerusalem Talmud assures that this dialogue goes back at
least to the time of Simon ben Shetah, who lived under Alexander
Jannacus - 103 to 67 B.C.

     The president them chanted a series of berakoth which number
four in all the siddurim, beginning with the SedarAmram Gaon. But
the Mishnah knows only the first three, and the rabbinical
commentaries date the fourth from the rebellion of Bar Kochba. We
shall therefore limit ourselves to the study of the first three which
were certainly used by Christ and seen to be quite anterior to the
Christian era.  According to the Berakoth tractate of the Mishnah,
the first  would back to Moses, the second to Joshua and the third
to David and Solomon.  As Dembitz has point out, this means only
that from then on their origin was immemorial. Finkelstein
established that the third must go back to the second century B.C.,
while the first two could be still older.

     Neither the Mishnah nor the Toseftah give us the complete text,
which is not to be found before the Seder Amram Gaon.  But they
multiply allusions to the content of the formulas from the earliest
times, which act as a guarantee for us of the substantial conformity
between the text still in use today and the ancient practice.

        "Blessed be Thou, jhwh, our God, King of the universe, who
feedest the world with      goodness, with grace and mercy, who
givest food to all flesh for Thou nourishest and      sustainest all
beings and providest food for all Thy creatures.  Blessed be Thou,
jhwh, who givest food unto all.

        "We       thank Thee, jhwh, our God, for a desirable, good and
a mple land which Thou was     pleased to give to our fathers, and
for Thy Covenant w hich Thou hast  marked in our  flesh, and for
the Torah which Thou hast given us, and for life, grace, mercy and
food which Thou hast lent us in every season.  And for all this,
jhwh, our God, we thank Thee and bless Thy Name. Blessed be
Thy Name upon us continually and for ever.  Blessed be Thou,
jhwh, for the land and for the food.

                    "Have mercy, jhwh, our God, upon Thy People Israel,
upon  Thy city J   erusalem, upon      Zion, the abiding place of Thy
glory, upon the kingdom of the     House of David Thine   anointed,
and upon the great and holy house that was called by Thy Name. 
Feed us, nourish  us, sustain us, provide for us, relieve us speedily
from our anxieties, and let us not stand in need of the gifts of
mortals, for their gifts are small and their reproach is great, for we
have trusted in Thy Holy, great and fearful Name.  And may Elijah
and the Messiah, the son of David come in our life-time, and let the
kingdom of the House of David return to its place, and reign Thou
over us, Thou alone, and save us for Thy Name's sake, and bring us
up in it and gladden us in it, and comfort us in Zion Thy city. 
Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who rebuildest Jerusalem.

     The first of these berakoth, as is emphasized by the Jewish
commentators, is a blessing   for nourishment received and it grows
into a cosmic blessing for all of creation, especially   the continued
creation of life.

     Starting with the fact that the food of the Israelite is the fruit of
the Promised Land, the second is a blessing for this promised
country. Parallel to the first, it opens out into a blessing for the
Covenant, sealed by circumcision and gift of the Torah.  Thus it
becomes a blessing for the whole history of salvation.  In fact, in the
formulas of the siddurim that are in use today, to the mention of the
land, the Covenant and the Torah, is joined the deliverance from
Egypt.  This is not found explicitly in Amram Goan, nor in the
somewhat later text of Saadia Gaon, but it can be already observed
in the Machzar Vitry of Rabbi Semchah ben Samuel (ca. 1100
A.D.).

     The third berakah is a supplication that the creative and
redemptive action of  God in olden times be continued and renewed
today, and that it find its ultimate fulfillment in the coming of the
Messiah and the final establishment of the Kingdom of God.  Here
we see the full development of this tenancy, noticeable in all the
extended berakoth, to be prolonged into a payer for the
accomplishment of the divine words which are the object of praise,
before returning to the note of praise in the final doxology.  The
end of the prayer, with its allusion to a Jerusalem rebuilt, may bear
the mark of a Judaism that is posterior to the catastrophe of the
year 70.  But here again the remark made in regard to the fourth
blessing of the Tefillah is applicable: the idea of the construction of
Jerusalem which is to be continued until the fullness of messianic
times is a fully traditional Jewish idea.  The Christian notion of the
Church's continually being built until the parousia merely transposes
it.

     We must add that the Seder Amram Gaon, in conformity with
the oldest rabbinical tradition, prescribes certain variations in the
third berakah,either for the Sabbath of for a High Holy Day.

     The festive form is especially noteworthy, and all the more  so
because it is the object of very specific allusions in the Toeftah.
After the petition for the kingdom of the House of David to return
to its place. it introduces this passage:

     "O          ur God, and the God of our fathers, may the
remembran ce of ours elves and of our    fathers and the
remembrance of Jerusalem, Thy city, and t he remembrance of the
Messiah.   the son of David, Thy servant, and the remembrance of  
Thy People, the whole House of Israel, arise and come, come to
pass, be seen and accepted and heard, be remembered and be
mentioned before Thee for deliverance, for good, for grace, for
loving kindness and for mercy on this such and such a day. 
Remember us, jhwh, our God, on it for good and visit us on it for
blessing and save on it unto life by a word of salvation and mercy,
and spare, for and show us mercy, for Thou art a gracious and
merciful God and King."

     What is remarkable in this text is the so abundant use made of
the term memorial (in Hebrew: zikkaron).It is impossible to imagine
a better confirmation than this text for the thesis already so solidly
established by Jeremias in his book on the Eucharistic words of
Jesus. The "memorial" here is not merely a simple commemoration. 
It is a scared sign, given by God to His People who preserve it as
the pre-eminent spiritual treasure.  This sign or pledge implies a
continuity a mysterious permanence of the great divine actions, the
mirabilia Dei commemorated by the Holy Days.  For it is for the
Lord Himself a permanent attestation of His fidelity to Himself. It is
therefore the basis for a trusting supplication that the unfailing
power of the Word which produced the mirabilia Dei renew them
and accompany them in the present.  It is in this sense that the
"memory" of the divine actions which the people have kept
faithfully can urge Adonai to "remember" His People.  For our
subjective commemoration is merely the reflection of an objective
commemoration, established by  God, which first of all  bears
witness to Himself of His own fidelity.  Hence this prayer formula,
which is so characteristic and which was to pass over from the
Synagogue into the Church: "Remember us, O Lord."

     The meaningful expressions petitioning that "the remembrance
of Thy People, the whole House of Israel, arise and come, come to
pass, be seen and accepted and heard, be remembered and
mentioned before Thee for deliverance, for good, for grace, for
loving kindness and for mercy on such and such a day ..." underline
the objective character rightly attributed by Jeremias to the
memorial understand in this sense. a pledge given by God to His
faithful, precisely so that they will re-present it to Him as the
homage of their faith in His fidelity, and in thus becoming  the basis
of their supplication, the"memorial" therefore becomes, as Max
Thurian emphasizes, as superior form of sacrifice, - the sacrifice
which it arouses in the Word and the act of thanksgiving which it
arouses as a response.

     Nothing proves this better than the fact that this "memorial"
formula was added similarly to the Abodah prayer, which originally
consecrated the Temple sacrifices.  Hence the sacrificial character
attributed to the communal meal.  In blessing God for its meal and
in acknowledging in it through this berakah the memorial of the
mirabilia Dei of creation and redemption, the community
acknowledges it as the efficacious sign of the perpetual actuality
within itself of these mirabilia, and still more precisely of their
eschatological accomplishment in its favor.  The prayer for
everything which leads to this accomplishment finds here the
assurance of  a pledge.  In "acknowledging" the inexhaustible
power of the Word that creates and saves, the faith of Israel, we
may say, becomes one with its object.  The people here is itself
consecrated to the accomplishment of the Divine Plan, while it
welcomes it in a mysterious and real anticipation. Here we have, the
source as it were both of the Christian notion of the Eucharistic
Sacrifice, and more generally, of the efficaciousness of the
Sacraments, as this was understood by the first Christian
generations.  As we shall see, the Sacramental-Sacrificial power of
the Eucharist will actually find the basic development of its
expression in this third berakah, which has become the Eucharistic
anamnesis, together with its further extension in what will be called
the Epiclesis.

     In close correlation with all of this a final question must be
raised in regard to the berakoth of the liturgical tradition of the
Synagogue.

     It has been asked whether the use of the word "blessing" to
translate berakah might not possibly involve a misconstruction.  By
blessing (cf. the blessings of the Roman Ritual) we have come to
understand a prayer that a grace be given to the blessed person or,
if it is a thing, that a grace be attached to the object's use.  In both
cases the object of "to bless" is a creature.  On the other hands, as
has been pointed out, "to bless", barak in the Hebrew berakoth has
never any object other than God.  The blessing is addressed to Him
not so that He will send His grace on us or on our goods but in
order to thank Him for them, to relate ourselves to Him in a
basically disinterested perspective.

     This remark includes an observation of incontestable
correctness.  Yet we should not make it too rigid, nor even less
draw too systematic consequences from it.

     In the first place, we should point out that there are abundant
examples in biblical usage where barak "to bless", has creation as it
object, or in any case men.  We need only think of  Jacobs
exclamation in his nocturnal struggle with the Angel: "I will not let
you go, unless you bless me," or again in that very typical episode
where the same Jacob supplants Easu in order to get his father's
blessing for himself.  Many other cases could be cited.  But the
most important is that of the Aaronic blessing:

     The Lord bless you and keep you:
     The Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be
          gracious unto you:
     The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
          and give you peace.

     Let us recall that its repetition, ends the Tefillah.  There is no
question that the blessing is understood here as a prayer of a very
special kind, reserved, it seems, to a man of God, a priest, a father
or a spiritual teacher.  Through it he is thought able to obtain from
God  special grace for the one who is the object of the blessing with
an authority that is in some way guaranteed by God Himself.

     On the other hand, the twelve central berakoth of the Tefillah 
even it is true that the theocentric blessing concludes them in the
sense of praise and thanksgiving, are first of all and directly prayers
of blessing in the sense that we understand this word today.  They
are actually prayers aimed at obtaining a definite grace for certain
men, and precisely in this case at blessing certain specific elements
(some of which are purely temporal, such as food, welfare, peace)
or, if we prefer, at blessing these men in and through these created
realities.

     What is true, in the view of the most evolved Judaism where the
most profound action of the divine Word has been explicated is that
there is no blessing which does not refer back to God from the very
first and return to Him ultimately.  Any creature is blessed for our
use and man himself is blessed in all that he does only if everything
goes back to God alone, and that he preserves a sovereign power
over all thing.  Nor will the blessing reach its full development
without a consecration of man's whole being to God, together with
all the beings with which his life is associated.  This consecration 
will reach its climax in an ultimate homage in which all things will
be brought together and in a certain sense absorbed in pure
doxology.

     In spite of this it is, however, a characteristic line of
development of the berakah, unfolding in prayers of supplication, to
arrive precisely at this point.  What remains true is that their
supplication itself proceeds form the act of thanksgiving, from the
confession of the one divine kingship. And the supplication also
tends to pervade everything and to immerse everything in this
confession and consecration.  Again, there is no consecration either
of man or the world except in the free "acknowledgement" by man
of God's sovereignty which is at the very foundation of creation.

     This certainly excludes any magical deviation which would
reduce a blessing to a power into an object which man might use to
the infusion of a power into an object which man might use or enjoy
as master.  Nor does this any less exclude all idea, even apparently
more spiritualized, of a blessing of man which would be aimed at
something other than his own good. But, from the authentic biblical
view of the best of Judaism, this does not involve any sort of
quietistic "disinterest".  Quite the contrary is true.  It is one of the
most basic convictions of Jewish piety and of the Bible that man
will find his total happiness, in the unreserved adhesion to God's
will through his exclusive consecration to His glory alone.  There is
no blessing of man or of the world except in an act of thanksgiving,
a homage of praise and confession, that turns all things solely to
God.  But this is indeed the most substantial blessing conceivable
for man and for the world in which God has placed him.