Enigmatic Selichot – Tradition, Song, and Soul 

Over the start of the school year, there are seemingly inevitably always the ice breakers along the lines of, ‘when I say ___, what one word comes to mind?’ 

Sitting to write this shortly after one of those rounds – I realized – I think my word for Selichot would be enigmatic: as in, a little difficult to understand or even with a mysterious quality. 

Before my Rabbi-life, I went to Selichot at my congregation in Connecticut.  It was the service that kids attended if they behaved well and “earned” staying up super late past their bedtime.  There was unfamiliar liturgy, a tradition of drawing a card with a step in changing to the Torah covers and bimah to its High Holiday ‘whites” – but done in a solemn silence as you figure out who had the step before and after yours. 

At Columbia University’s Hillel, it was, significantly less decorum for an after-sundown Saturday night service attended by college students.  Amid this Selichot worship, and with the backdrop of actually learning to understand Hebrew, the liturgy came more alive with more spirited renditions of ancient poetry. 

Entering HUC Cincinnati, the unofficial battle for who had the best dessert buffet was a hallmark, and if you timed it right and were willing to pray multiple times – you could hit up multiple buffets, I mean, services.  Wise Temple held theirs at Plum Street.  Where, in stark contrast to the feeling in college, the small little Reform prayerbooks called me back to my first selichot services, the majesty of Plum Street Synagogue held the feeling of voices of generations past.  And the chocolate was really good too.

Here in Dayton, I’ve only experienced Selichot as a joint endeavor between congregations – thus taking on a little flavor of the hosting congregation each year, while maintaining predictability too.  We come together as one Jewish community to begin reciting these ancient petitionary prayers leading into Rosh Hashanah.  But I will confess, there is a piece of liturgy that we don’t generally include, but I blast on the way home each year in the car (This is the version I have saved in Spotify – though there are others too).  It is called, Adon Haselichot, Master of Pardons.  Pretty much any rendition of it I feel reverberating in my soul – from the most reflective and meditative to essentially rock band versions.  So, I wanted to share it with you, and thus needed to look into its history.  Laura Duhan-Kaplan, many years ago wrote about this piyyut, a liturgical poem of a specific format.  These are usually easy to identify by their features, and often the author’s name, or his patron, embedded in the lines.  Laura writes of Adon Haselichot “A piyyut written somewhere in the Middle East sometime between the eleventh and thirtheenth centuries by some really skilled paytan (poet) placed somewhere in the Yom Kippur liturgy by the editor of your machzor (High Holiday prayerbook).”  Yep, that narrows it down. 

So here we are with this incredibly powerful piece, put to musical settings by dozens, if not more, musicians and cantors over the last roughly 1,000 years.  Laura ties the alphabetic acrostic to early and deep memories of learning the Hebrew alphabet.  The plural language reiterates that we are all in this together, with our flaws, secrets, and errors, and must find forgiveness together, all while hinting “honorific after honorific” hinting at aspects of this “great power just beyond our mind’s reach.”  With a predictable pattern of stresses, rhyme, and more, it reminds us that God has a vision, and that vision will evolve as we do, and calling to have mercy as we evolve to the best forms of ourselves. 

This piyyut – however and wherever rendered – along with others that make up selichot prayers, takes the diversity of selichot practices from Ashkenaz and Sefarad, to modern differences across geographic, demographic, and Movement lines, and brings together a raw, honest, message of the heart: we collectively are responsible for the wrongs we have committed, and only through our own inner work and collective endeavors will we be able to shift the vision of the future to be brighter.  From the depths of the night we pray to have the humility to repair ourselves and the world – to be the light.  So as I blast several renderings of this piyyut, and others, through Elul, I will keep alive a vision of a world without hostages, without starvation, without war.  And maybe, just maybe, if we will it, like the Foundation of the State of Israel, it will not be a dream, but a reality.