The traditional Jewish response to adversity has, on the whole, always taken the form of self-blame and self-accusation. Suffering, it was felt, must be the result of sin. The Book of Job did, of course, eloquently argue against such a notion; and, in the case of individual suffering, the lesson of ·the Book of Job may, on occasion, have been taken to heart. But when it came to the suffering of the Jewish people as a whole, to the destruction of Temple and state, to the intolerable conditions of exile, to the burnings of Jewish books and of Jewish lives, to pogroms and to persecutions, the standard reaction has always been: ‘On account of our sins we were exiled from our land, and far removed from our soil.’ Every new persecution brought new fast days and new penitential prayers-new admissions of the conviction that God remained far from Israel on account of Israel's continuous sins.

That attitude is well reflected in poem no. 3, which may already have been included in the very first Jewish prayerbook, the ninth-century Seder Rabh ‘Amram Gaon. ‘More guilty are we than all other peoples,’ it begins; and it ends by saying: ‘But we still have not turned from our error!’ Leopold Zunz devoted his great work on the synagogal poetry of the middle ages largely to the great number of penitential poems which were composed in medieval times. It is quite in accord with the type of devotional literature he catalogued in that volume that Zunz prefaced his technical discussion by a chapter devoted to ‘The Sufferings.’ The connection is clear. Without those sufferings, the vast literature of penitential poems would not have arisen. And the obverse of this, the medieval Jewish response to persecution and suffering, was penitence!

Only in the nineteenth century was that whole attitude called into question-and then primarily because nascent Reform Judaism, child of the emancipation, found no existential meaning in the concept of’ exile.’ Diaspora existence, for Reform Judaism, was not punitive exile on account of Israel's sins, but rather the inevitable consequence of Israel's glorious mission to be a ‘light unto the nations.’ With the concept of ‘exile’ thus banished from its theology, Reform Judaism also had to revise those liturgical expressions which linked diaspora existence to Israel's sins.