Selichot pose a challenge for even religious Jews today. We know why we say them, and we know how important it is to say them—but when it comes to understanding them we often (and, for most of us, usually) struggle. This is a pity. Sometimes the Hebrew of the Selichot possesses a power, a resonance and a momentum of its own, something that cannot easily be translated or appreciated in real time as we grapple with the unfamiliar verses in our haste to reach the safety of the next familiar, oft-repeated passage.
What are we missing when we recite poetry at a time when most folk are comfortably asleep in bed? Here is an example, taken from the selichah “אִם עֲוֹנֵינוּ רַבּוּ לְהַגְדִּיל (Im avoneinu rabu lehagdil)”, attributed to the early Italian paytan Shlomo haBavli (Solomon ben Judah). In many compilations of Selichot this work is listed for recitation on the first day (or night, if you are that way inclined). If you read the Hebrew slowly, its sonorous, stately rhyme possesses great dignity:
מֵרֹב פְּקֻדּוֹת וּבֶהָלָה מְחַלְחֶלֶת
נָקְטָה נַפְשִׁי לֶעָפָר בּוֹחֶלֶת
סָמְכָה בֶּטֶן לָאָרֶץ נִשְׁחֶלֶת
עוּרָה, לָמָּה תִּישַׁן תּוֹחֶלֶת
פְּקַח כֹּחַ; קְרָא אֲסִירֶיךָ חָפֹץ
צוּק הָעִתִּים—חֶשְׁבּוֹנָם קְפֹּץ
קַבֵּץ פְּזוּרֶיךָ, עֵדֶר הַנָּפוֹץ
רְאוֹת עַוְלָתָה—פִּיהָ תִקְפֹּץ
But what does it mean? The following is a heavily edited composite of two English translations—one by Rabbi Abraham Rosenfeld, the other by ChatGPT—that both opt for accuracy over elegance and produce a result that is wordy, clumsy and obtuse.
From a multitude of visitations and terrors that have infested it,
my soul has shrivelled, sickened, in the dust;
it crawls and grovels on the ground.
Awake, our hope! Why should you sleep?
Unleash Your might; call Your prisoners—Your desired ones.
Cut short Your reckoning of their troubled times.
Gather up Your scattered ones, the flock dispersed.
Let oppression see this—but clamp her mouth tight shut.
The paytan had nothing but his pen with which to create his evocative imagery. But nowadays we capture terror and despair, suffering and the abandonment of hope, on a wide variety of media including video clips, photo stills and sound recordings.
Hostage Square in Tel-Aviv is a place of frightening, haunting images, a place to evoke the sort of emotions that a paytan might have aimed for in earlier times. Our member Heshy Engelsberg has sought to capture this in a short video clip on Hostage Square that is uncomfortable to view and hard to forget. You can check it out here.
