I HAVE BEEN FASCINATED by the liturgy since, aged perhaps 4 or 5, I sat on my father's lap in the Adath Yisroel Synagogue, London, where he was rabbi, dimly aware of the emotional intensity generated by ritual words and song. This was particularly the case on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with their mesmerizingly recurrent melodies and verbal patterns, but was also true of sabbath services and of Passover at home. I could not then begin to understand what this compellingly evocative power was, and even when I came in later years to share the narratives and values on which Jewish ceremonies are based, the liturgy seemed to contribute a voice of its own, independent of the sense of occasion or the beliefs I brought to the synagogue, with tension seeming to arise out of the very encounter with the words on the page and their public use.

I subsequently came to recognize that this had little to do with what could be understood as their obvious ‘meaning’. Even with the help of translations the prayer-book seemed teasingly opaque, and the few commentaries I could find in English—including one by my grandfather, Rabbi Dr J. H. Hertz—reinforced my view that the prayer-book could not be ‘read’ like other works. Although at first I tried to supplement my misty impressions with hard facts, such as who wrote each prayer and where and when it was first used, I finally turned to collecting old prayer-books, relishing their feel, smell, archaic translations, and flyleaf annotations of births, deaths, and marriages, as though antiquarianism might open the door to the meaning of the liturgy.

It has taken me years to return to the texts themselves, in part because of the complexity of what appears on the page, and in part because, as I now recognize, the themes embedded there would not have occurred to the person I then was. When I was studying literature as an undergraduate, the idea that liturgy might be a literary genre seemed not to have occurred to the scholars I encountered, and this discouraged me from treating it as such myself.