THIS CHAPTER discusses the second of the two preliminary liturgical sequences of the morning, Pesukei Dezimra (‘sections of songs’), leading the speaker to the brink of the statutory morning service. Its mostly poetic texts, the majority related to King David—psalms or other writings—involve the speaker in a virtual rebuilding of the Temple planned by David, but completed only by his son Solomon. They also point towards its destruction. The Temple symbolizes communication with God and the happiness resulting from this, while its absence is experienced as the transcendent difficulty of achieving such contact, leaving the exiled speaker no option but to hope for miraculous intervention.

EXTRACT 43. The Introductory Blessing of Pesukei Dezimra

The Kaddish that ended the previous sequence suggests that this passage might constitute a new liturgical opening to the day, without links to what has gone before. But the emphasis on God's blessedness in the first lines resembles phrases in the preceding Kaddish (Extract 41, lines 6–7), while the reference to ‘psalms of David’ (lines 8–9) glances back at the previous psalm and forward at those to come. The earlier psalm now emerges as a preview of others, the speaker quasiauthorially reconciling multi-layered significances to produce kaleidoscopic literary effects in which here and now meets there and then in repeating and constantly renewed harmonies.

Developmentally speaking, this passage is distinct from everything that has gone before. In Amram Gaon's version it begins morning prayer, opening a