The late Bishop James A. Pike, of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, is reported to have said: ‘The Creed should be sung, not recited!’ Pike was a religious liberal who was unable, in any literalist sense, to believe in the historical creedal formulations of the Church. Nevertheless, in a non-literalist approach, he was able to appreciate the faith of the historic Church which lay behind those formulations. He could appreciate it, and he could identify with it. But he could only do so if the Creed made no claim to be a full and adequate description of theological truth. That is to say, for Pike, the Creed was poetry, not prose; and, therefore, the Creed should be sung, not recited.

It is very doubtful whether the late bishop was at all acquainted with the minor details in the development of the synagogal liturgy. If he had been, he might have found some interesting precedents for his recommendation.

Unlike the liturgy of the Christian Church, Jewish liturgy did not, until fairly recent centuries, contain special rubrics set aside for a Creed. Creedal affirmations were, however, contained within the Jewish liturgy from the very beginning-such as the Shema', proclaiming the Unity of God, and the surrounding prayers devoted to the themes of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, respectively. But those affirmations, which, with the exception of the quoted biblical passages, tended to vary in their wording from community to community and from one period of history to another, are not really comparable to such landmarks of Christian dogmatics and liturgy as the Apostles’ Creed or the Athanasian Creed.

When, however, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, creedal formulations were written for synagogal use, the poetic version, meant for congregational singing, preceded the prose version by a century. Both versions entered the official prayerbook in the second half of the sixteenth century. But, while the poetic version became part and parcel of communal worship, the prose version was relegated to the position of material for optional private meditation after the conclusion of the statutory daily morning service. Thus, the Creed in the synagogue is never recited, but always sung. And for every Jew who silently reads the prose version after the end of communal worship, there are thousands who sing the poetic version as part of their statutory services. Bishop Pike might have liked that.