THIS CHAPTER discusses liturgical texts relating to leaving home and arriving at the synagogue, and examines the tensions between these locations. It encompasses the second series of waking prayers of the morning, now recited in the synagogue rather than the home, including an introduction to Torah study that reveals this to be almost impossibly difficult.

EXTRACT 11. Verses on Entering Synagogue

The liturgy, now in a verbal rather than a gestural mode, begins the transition between home and synagogue. In the edition of the prayer-book used here, the sequence opens with a printed rule across the page, indicating the end of the section devoted to the ritual garments and challenging the speaker to identify the continuity between that and what is to come. In other, larger-format, publications, such as that of Baer, the texts related to each of the ritual garments are introduced by headings suggesting that these form separate chapters. The separation indicated here is relatively slight in comparison with such arrangements, but illustrates the assumption among the editors and publishers of prayer-books that the liturgical theme has fundamentally changed now that the garments have been put on. As a mark of special piety the speaker may wear the symbolic garments for the journey from home to synagogue, which is itself a transitional space between private safety and the dangers of the world, but it is more usual to put them on in synagogue, in which case the previous sequence will be delayed until later. Baer, for whom the opening lines examined here are the first of the morning, assumes the latter to be the case.

If the garments are indeed being worn, the theological problems identified in the previous discussion will already be in play, including the idea of exile alluded to in the echo of the book of Lamentations in the opening statement of the day, followed by the dangers of primogeniture and priestly status suggested by the tefilin. But if they have not been assumed yet, the idea of exile in the opening statement will be concretized instead by the speaker's departure from home and by the fact that the synagogue is a pale reflection of the Temple of Jerusalem.