Summarizing the Analysis of Birkhot Hashaḥar and Pesukei Dezimra

This analysis of Birkhot Hashah.ar and Pesukei Dezimra, the opening elements of the morning liturgy, has taken into account not only the words on the page but also their subtexts. Each educated worshipper's experience of the prayer-book is coloured, if only unconsciously, by an awareness of the original contexts of those scriptural and rabbinic citations out of which the liturgy is largely constructed. However extraneous these original contexts might seem, they provide a countertext to the words on the page, and this is as much part of the liturgy as the superficial meaning. The sources of embedded texts have for the most part been identified by commentators and are well documented, but their effect on the liturgy has never been systematically examined before.

Interpreting the effect of such embedded citations, allusions, and echoes is far from straightforward, however, since they are drawn from diverse genres and periods and interact not only with the surface meaning but with each other, demanding multidirectional decoding: vertical reading, which relates each citation to the surface meaning, and horizontal reading, which attempts to assess its impact on adjacent citations, at all their levels. The fact that the surface and subtextual meanings are often at odds with one another makes these composite texts especially difficult to summarize. In the opening passages of the liturgy, for instance, the surface meaning appears to blend petition, thanks, and study in a conventionally devotional way, while the multi-layered subtext analyses the problematic nature of divine promises to humans.

The resulting liturgical document can be understood as a whole only by assessing the status of each element in an intricate and often contradictory network of text and subtext. Wherever the speaker is unable to bridge the dissonances and extrapolate a meaning, however, it is necessary to accept not only that the composite text is ambivalent and fluid and that its meaning must constantly be renegotiated, but that literary ambivalence may reflect the nature of the emotional experience being described. This is particularly the case in elegiac hymns related to 9 Av, in which, although the speaker occasionally feels that confusion is clearing and meaning is about to emerge, glimpses of coherence frequently lead to disappointment and to the need for still more revision.