Jonathan Sacks and the Case of the Suppressed Stanza

How many stanzas of the candle-lighting song Ma’oz Tsur Y’shu’ati are you familiar with? If you’re like most people who light Hanukkah candles, the answer is one. If you grew up in a home like mine, it’s two. If you’ve seen Ma’oz Tsur as it is generally printed in a non-Orthodox siddur, or some older Orthodox ones, it’s five. If you know its full story, it’s six—and it’s the sixth that is the most interesting.

But let’s start with the first, the one we all know. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s rendering of it in the compendious Koren Siddur (2009) that he edited and translated reads: “Refuge, Rock of my salvation,/ to You it is a delight to give praise./ Restore my house of prayer,/ so that there I may offer You thanksgiving./ When You silence the loud-mouthed foe,/ Then will I complete, with song and psalm, the altar’s dedication.”

Sacks’s version is not singable, since it lacks the metrics of the Hebrew stanza, which has four lines as opposed to Sacks’s six. Moreover, all four of these lines rhyme with one another, and the last of them—az egmor b’shir mizmor ḥanukkat ha-mizbeaḥ—has an internal rhyme as well, a pattern that is followed by the subsequent stanzas.