Two Anthem-Like Views of What Judaism Boils Down To

Two great liturgical songs perch together in the early pages of the daily prayer book. Most often recited at the end rather than at the beginning of the service, they represent rival attempts to summarize Judaism under a single handy rubric. Since, in both cases, the history behind the rubric is not so simple, looking at where each came from and what it draws upon can tell us a great deal about both Judaism and Jewish liturgy.

One of the poems, known from its opening word as Yigdal (“May [God’s Name] Grow Great”), owes its existence to Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) and specifically to his Arabic-language commentary on the Mishnah. There, in an introductory essay to the tenth chapter of the tractate Sanhedrin, Maimonides presents thirteen “principles and foundations of our law.”

In general, as his biographer Herbert Davidson notes, Maimonides had a philosopher’s weakness for identifying principles. (In that vein, he came up with a cluster of three principles regarding culpability in transferring items from private to public premises on the Sabbath, four principles underlying the laws of Levirate marriage, and so on.) But that’s not all. In formulating at least one of his thirteen major principles, the one concerning prophecy, he had, Davidson writes, “no apparent qualms” about “mandating that every good Jew conceptualize prophecy as it was conceptualized by the Arabic Aristotelian school of philosophy.”