It seems that before that they bring the whole verse, “And the Lord shall be seen over them… and shall go with whirlwinds of the south.”
So this really is the continuation of the next verse, “The Lord of Hosts shall defend them,” and not just borrowing language from the verse?

To my mind this is one of the most brutal verses in the Hebrew Bible. On the High Holidays you really have to work during prayer to push that image out of your head, because it doesn’t fit the pleading melody. In rhetorical usage, it’s well known that people sometimes used phrases detached from their original imagery as well (for example, “and Rabbi So-and-so insisted to the point of death,” “I do not have the leisure to delight in his holy words, but love presses the flesh,” and similar illustrations). There’s also the Talmudic phrase “and the piggul awoke as one asleep,” where in the verse the original subject is the Holy One, blessed be He. As is well known.

With God’s help, Rosh Chodesh Sivan 5782

To Pitmah in Halves — greetings,

As a citation as one of the “shofar verses,” the first verse is enough: “And the Lord shall be seen over them, and His arrow shall go forth like lightning; and the Lord God shall blow the shofar, and shall go with whirlwinds of the south” (Zechariah 9:14). Verse 15 does not mention the sounding of the shofar.

However, since this shofar blast is one of calamity for the nations (as explained in the Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 32b), they add by way of prayer, according to the Sephardic custom (already mentioned in Abudarham): “The Lord of Hosts shall defend them, the Lord of Hosts shall defend you, the Lord of Hosts shall defend us,” and in the Ashkenazic version: “The Lord of Hosts shall defend them; so defend Your people Israel with Your peace.” In this way we ask the Creator of the world that the Jewish people be saved from the calamities that will come upon the nations.

And so too in the order of the Sanctification of the Moon, after saying regarding the enemies of Israel, “Terror and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of Your arm they shall be still as a stone,” we then ask to exempt the Jewish people in general, and the congregation in particular, by saying: “Peace unto you; unto you be peace.”

With blessings,
Hasdai Shraga Feibesh Lichtman

And see further in Rabbi Boaz Shalom’s responsum, “Why do we add in the shofar verses of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf — ‘The Lord of Hosts shall defend you,’ etc.” (on the Ta’amu U-Re’u website), and in Rabbi Yuval Cherlow’s answer to the question “The meaning of the verse: ‘And the Lord shall be seen over them,’ etc.” (on the Moreshet website).

You reminded me of something Nadav Shnerb once showed me in an approbation to a book (I don’t remember which one): “To this great man, struck by blessing…”

(When you used that turn of phrase in one of the Purim columns, I thought you were hinting at this issue.)

With God’s help, 1 Sivan 5782

To Tirgitz — greetings,

Witty turns of phrase that reverse a curse into a blessing, and a negative expression into something positive and praiseworthy, are very common among Sephardic sages. For example, in the approbation by the sages of Livorno to “Tosafot of Rabbenu Peretz on tractate Bava Kamma,” they open: “How honored is this day, as revealed things are revealed — the revealing of nakedness, those who reveal faces in the Torah, not according to Jewish law — according to Jewish law!”

This continues the blessings with which “men of form” blessed the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: “May it be Your will that you sow and not reap, that you bring out and not bring in, that you bring in and not bring out, and that your table be confused” — their intent being: that his children should not die in his lifetime, that there be no separation among his sons and daughters when they marry, and that his many grandchildren should always make a ‘balagan’ around his table.

One of the curiosities is that we find this method also in the piyyut in the Sabbath songs, “Keep My Sabbaths so that you may suck and be satisfied,” common דווקא in Ashkenazic prayer books, where there appears: “A woman to her sister to rival, to reveal on the day of my joy,” and “Hurry the count to do the matter of Esther.” Perhaps for that reason Dr. Jacob Rothschild conjectured that the author was Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol?

Among the German Jews too there was a common witty blessing: “And you shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters” — meaning, that your sons and daughters should be faithful observers of the commandments, and therefore you’ll be able to eat meat in their homes. 🙂

May it be God’s will that blessings surround you like the snake of Akhnai, blessings without end,
as blessed by Hasdai Shraga Feibesh, may he live long, of the house of Lichtman (named after my coats)

It may be that the addition of “The Lord of Hosts shall defend them” was also made in order to conclude the shofar verses with something good; and so as not to end in the middle of a verse, they turned the citation into “a citation in the form of prayer” (as I explained above).

With blessings,
Hasdal

Hasdal, nice.
But to attribute “Keep My Sabbaths” to Ibn Gabirol just because of the embedded biblical phrases (and the acrostic) sounds dubious. You can’t prove it either way, but my feeling is that the gap is vast and enormous, not only because of the lacking meter. Not every notebook of novellae on Berakhot 2a that turns up in the Genizah can be attributed to Rashba.
It’s hard to pin the feeling down in words, but here’s one characteristic point, for example. I’ll risk a generalization: with Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol, significant embedded phrases carry the atmosphere of the place they came from. When he laments over himself, “And before the balm of Gilead comes, mortals will die in pain, whose soul is stricken,” he is drawing from the mournful verses in Jeremiah: “Is there no balm in Gilead? … why then has the health of the daughter of my people not arisen?” When he longs for a supporter, “If only there were one who consoles and has mercy on me and would hold my right hand,” he draws from the great support verses in Psalms: “But I am continually with You; You have held my right hand. You guide me with Your counsel, and afterward You will receive me with honor.” When he describes someone who died dishonorably, he says, “He dies burdened with swords and sharpened things, who in fire and skins…,” taking it from Isaiah’s verses of contempt and mockery about the king of Babylon: “But you are cast out of your grave like an abominable branch, clothed with the slain, thrust through with the sword, that go down to the stones of the pit, like a trampled carcass.” And there are many, many more like this. Someone who knows the verses gets a gust of the whole atmosphere from there, because the embedded phrase has absorbed the scent and passes it along in a subtle perfume — and that’s a special spice the poet adds. But the embedded phrases in “Keep My Sabbaths,” though they’re a witty flourish, beyond that they have no flavor, and they fit in only rather awkwardly.
Of course there are also plain, neutral embedded phrases, and there are many of those too; and there is also something I call “uprooted embeddings,” in which Ibn Gabirol transfers something from one atmosphere to a completely different one. For example, in his magnificent elegy on Yekutiel he praises him, among other things: “Yekutiel was like a king in a troop; to his tent the camps chirped. There vultures gathered and there nested, every winged bird, and there they brooded” — meaning, everyone gathered around the great Yekutiel. But the source for the gathering of vultures is in the description of destruction in Edom: “And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in her fortresses… there shall the vultures gather, each one with her mate” — that is, it describes a ruined and desolate place, and therefore birds will roam there. And here, for some reason, Ibn Gabirol didn’t take material for his embedding from the great cedar in Ezekiel, “in whose boughs all the birds of heaven nested and under whose shadow many nations dwelt,” or from the great tree in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, “under it the beasts of the field found shade and in its branches the birds of heaven dwelt.” Or when he praises some Torah scholar for his wisdom and says, “And he released the bound, and gathered the scattered, and brought down the mighty, and opened the closed,” the source for “bringing down the mighty” is in the cruel boastful words attributed to the king of Assyria: “By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am prudent; and I have removed the bounds of peoples, and plundered their treasures, and I brought down the mighty as one seated; and my hand has found as a nest the riches of the peoples, and as one gathers abandoned eggs, so have I gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved a wing, or opened the mouth, or chirped.” In my youth I collected quite a few examples like these, and most of them have been blown away by the wind, and I don’t know whether researchers of piyyut have dealt with this point.
[And sometimes even in his embedded phrases he gives the verses a new emotional charge. There’s no room to expand here, but see for example in the poem “Choose from sickness the chosen,” in the line based on “The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib” — and there are more.]

With God’s help, 1 Sivan 5782

To Tirgitz — greetings,

In my humble opinion as well, it does not seem that “Keep My Sabbaths” was composed by Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol. The absence of meter is no proof, because in sacred poetry the poets of Spain were not strict about the meter of pegs and motions (“Dror Yikra,” the metrical poem of Dunash ben Labrat, is the exception). But the self-reversing rhetorical turn strikes me as more characteristic of later rabbinic style.

To solve the question of the time and place of composition of “Keep My Sabbaths,” one could make use of Professor Israel Davidson’s Treasury of Hebrew Poetry and Piyyut, which is available electronically on the Schocken Institute website. For each poem he notes the early sources in which it appears, and that gives some indication that the place and period of its circulation may teach us something about the place and time of its composition.

As for your illuminating discussion of the ways biblical phrases are embedded in the poetry of Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ze’ev Breuer’s book, The Sacred Poetry of Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol — Content and Form, may help you; an electronic edition can be purchased on the Magnes Press website.

With wishes for a joyous month,
Tzatach Karshkash HaBadrashi

On the Otzar HaHokhma forum there is a discussion about the explanation of “a woman to her sister to rival, to reveal on the day of my joy.” Some explained that it refers to “and I will command My blessing,” which comes before it — to bind and add blessing to blessing. Others explained that it refers to “garments of fine linen with scarlet,” the women competing with one another over who will wear the finer garment. And Rabbi Gershon Edelstein explained the opposite: that the women gather together and go to buy themselves fine clothes for the Sabbath.

But in my humble opinion, as I suggested above, “a woman to her sister” means “one loaf to another loaf to bundle” — double bread, which symbolizes the extra blessing of the Sabbath day.

Now another direction has occurred to me: “to bundle loaf to loaf” in order to have the required amount for separating challah, according to the well-known custom of baking the quantity requiring challah so as to merit, every Sabbath eve, the commandment of separating challah.

With blessings,
Uziel Badrashi Beit-Halachmi

Thanks for the suggestion of the book on content and form in Ibn Gabirol — you tempted me, and I was enticed; I bought the book and I’ll set time aside for it when the chance comes up in the near future. [It’s been many years since I read scholars’ books on Spanish Hebrew poetry. Those books are excessively dry for me — the analyses succeed and the poem dies. But maybe it really is time to give them another chance.] In any case, from the table of contents I see that the book deals with the structure of the poem and rhyme, not with embedded phrases.

As for “Keep My Sabbaths,” my simple sense is that “a woman to her sister to bundle” refers generally to all the people who on the Sabbath rest and gather together, rather than each going off to his own work. Just as the curtains of the Tabernacle are called “joined one to another,” so too people are called that. [And one may also explain “bundle” in the sense of a money-pouch, as in “he took the money-bag in his hand,” because “and I will command My blessing” in the Sabbatical year really is about economic blessing; and in the Exodus from Egypt “each woman asked of her neighbor vessels of silver and vessels of gold and garments.” So perhaps the meaning is: let one person deal generously with another through the money-pouch, to give, so that even a poor person in Israel is given food for three meals, in order to show that this is the day of my joy and everyone should delight in it.]

As for a reversing rhetorical flourish, I once heard from Rabbi Meir Mazuz that the embedded phrases at the ends of the stanzas in the warnings poem by the early Rabbi Isaac bar Reuven, roughly from Ibn Gabirol’s period, are especially beautiful. When he deals with uncovered water and meat left out of sight, he says: “When you see the naked, cover him, and do not hide yourself from your own flesh.” In the law that a rival wife in a forbidden relation is permitted to the general public but forbidden in levirate marriage, she becomes like one saying to a groom from the marketplace: “Do not keep far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help.” And there are several more clever embeddings there, though they are not many, as may be seen there.

And with God’s help, 1 Sivan 5782

Since the discussion here began with a question about the Rosh Hashanah prayer, we can “close the circle” with Judah Halevi’s piyyut for Rosh Hashanah, “O Lord, Your name I will exalt,” where he says: “Search out His deeds, only to Him, do not stretch out your hand; for you inquire into the end and the beginning, and into the wondrous and the hidden.”

As is well known, the great Rabbi Yosef Chaim, head of the exile of Babylonia, was shocked by the use of the phrase “do not stretch out your hand” in reference to the Holy One, blessed be He, and instituted the reading: “Search out His work, but His greatness, set before your eyes; do not inquire into the end and the beginning, and into the wondrous and the hidden.”

With blessings,
Elazar Achikar HaBadrashi

And since we have mentioned Rabbi Yosef Chaim, of blessed memory, and may Rabbi Ne’eman continue to live long — let us mention that in the piyyut “Bar Yochai,” Rabbi Yosef Chaim reads “You looked inward for his honor,” whereas Rabbi Meir Mazuz reads “for her honor inward,” as written in Psalms 45: “The king’s daughter is all glorious within.”

Years ago Rabbi Meir Mazuz asked me to photograph for him the first edition in which the poem “Bar Yochai” was printed, found in the library of Professor Meir Benayahu of blessed memory; and at his request I did so, and indeed in the first printing it says: “You looked inward for her honor.” Another important variant in the first printing is that there it reads “the cherub anointed, the radiance of your treading,” which also fits the language better than “the radiance of your light,” and ever since I have sung according to the first-edition version, “the radiance of your treading.”

Two more emendations I have proposed in the Sabbath songs:

A. In “I Shall Magnify You, God of Every Soul,” by Abraham Ibn Ezra, in my humble opinion it should be, according to the meter: “Can a man investigate the secret of the God who formed him?”

B. In “Whoever Sanctifies the Seventh,” I suggested: “The holy ones shall inherit it and sanctify it, by the word with which He made all,” meaning, “by the word of the Creator with which He made all.” For we have not found any expression “all that He made.”

With blessings,
A. A. H. B.

B.

I didn’t know any of the above — thank you. In “Agadlekha” it seems to me this is a known emendation.

However, there’s an interesting point here regarding emendations, and I was stirred to it by Rami Reiner’s book on Rabbenu Tam (pages 184–185). This is what he writes there. Tosafot in Chagigah 13b bring that some people emend a piyyut by Kalir in accordance with the conclusion in the Babylonian Talmud, and their answer is from Rabbenu Tam (in Sefer HaYashar), who said one should not emend it, because the Jerusalem Talmud disagrees on this point and Kalir followed the view of the Jerusalem Talmud. [Reiner, true to form, tilts the matter into power games and exceptional behavior: “Contrary to his systematic preference for the Babylonian Talmud in cases of dispute and contradiction with the Jerusalem Talmud, here Rabbenu Tam preferred the tradition of the Jerusalem Talmud over that of the Babylonian, to the point that it seems that only Kalir’s status and Rabbenu Tam’s esteem for him are what stood up for the Jerusalem Talmud.” End quote.]

The question is what exactly Rabbenu Tam was answering here, and why should it matter whether Kalir followed the Jerusalem Talmud or not? The person singing the poem ought to say what is correct in his own eyes. True, the poet composed his words according to the Jerusalem Talmud, but now the words of the piyyut have been transmitted to us as the property of one acting within his own domain. It seems to me that what is being expressed here is an interesting principle — almost a moral one — that the work should remain as it is, and a person has only the option either to take it as a whole or to leave it in the corner, but not to adapt it to his own opinion. It’s a kind of spirit of respect for the creator’s work. And therefore, once Rabbenu Tam established the original version, there is no longer any place, in his view, for emendation. It has nothing to do with the idea of preferring the Jerusalem Talmud because of “the god of Kalir answer us,” but rather with the idea that in Kalir’s poem one should sing as it came from Kalir’s hand, or else omit it altogether. Minor emendations, of course, are known to have been made (for example in “My God, do not judge me like my deeds,” where it is written “Support me, please; desire me, God of faith,” and people say Ibn Ezra emended it to “Turn to me, please; desire me, God of faith,” because the verb “to turn” takes the preposition “to.” I think this appears in the Ish Matzliach machzor.)

Rabbi Michi, if your eyes happen to wander here, can you say what you think about this semi-moral question (if a poem followed a certain view, is it proper to adapt it and then sing the adapted poem, or not)?

I don’t see any problem at all. Sing whatever you want to sing. Obviously you can’t publish the poem under your own name, but even publishing the poem with corrections and noting what your corrections are doesn’t seem problematic to me.

Hmm. So maybe Reiner really was right in his interpretation. [Just to clarify: obviously the issue is when people sing publicly a poem attributed to a certain person, and insert all kinds of small changes into it in order to fit the current view of the community, and not everyone even knows about the emendation. I’m not talking about someone singing to himself in the shower. I thought it was obvious that that was the topic. If you meant shower-singing or singing with friends, then the rest is unnecessary.]

Here is the language of Tosafot on Chagigah 13b that Reiner cites (and in Sefer HaYashar one can see that the content comes from Rabbenu Tam):
There are those who emend the kedushta composed by Kalir, “and living creatures which are square to the throne,” etc., and erase the vav, etc. But they erased it for no reason, for he composed his words in accordance with the Jerusalem Talmud, etc. And so was his way, that in many places he would leave the method of our Talmud in order to adopt the method of the Jerusalem Talmud, for he was a tanna and he was Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon, etc.

They did not emend Kalir because they found that this was apparently his view, meaning this is the original wording. Why do they care about the original wording?

Because if you’re singing and not issuing a halakhic ruling, and the poem isn’t a mistake but merely follows a different view, then he sees no reason to erase and change it.

At the next stage you could erase the Jerusalem Talmud too, because it doesn’t follow the Babylonian Talmud. The text remains as it is, and you will use it according to your understanding. This is not a moral question but a practical one. There’s no reason to change it.

What’s the difference between a different view and a mistake? If Kalir had been an early authority and had simply misunderstood the Talmud and therefore written what he wrote, then Tosafot would emend it so that the public would not sing things considered incorrect. And if Rabbenu Tam himself were composing a piyyut, he would compose it in accordance with the Babylonian Talmud. So why not compose now a new piyyut inspired by Kalir’s kedushta, with the tiny difference of one letter, a vav? (The text is welcome to remain in the library stacks. The question is what the public should say.)

Let him compose it — there’s just no need for it. All right, we’ve pilpul-ed this quite a bit.