This past Shabbat we studied Parashat Pinchas (the Torah portion known as “Pinchas,” named after a religious zealot who practices a cruel form of vigilante justice early in the portion).
Parashat Pinchas includes the prescribed musaf offering associated with the different holidays, including Shabbat, that are to make up the rhythm of the Jewish year. Musaf means “additional” and it refers to the fact that, in addition to the regular prescribed offering to be performed daily, there is a special musaf offering—which, in ancient times, like most significant offerings, took the form of an animal sacrifice—to be performed in association with the sacred days of the year.
Today, the musaf offering takes the form of a musaf amidah; the sacrificial mode of religious and spiritual expression has been replaced by, along with Torah study and other mitzvot (sacred actions), prayer—most notably in the form of the amidah, a word which means “standing,” and which refers to the extended, standing prayer par excellence in a Jewish prayer service.
On most days, there is one amidah per prayer service, and three prayer services per day: shacharit, minchah, and ma’ariv, referring to the morning, afternoon, and evening prayer services respectively. On Shabbat and holidays, however, there is a fourth amidah—an additional amidah, the musaf amidah, now traditionally held immediately after the Torah service on Shabbat morning.
In our Torah discussion, we joked about the fact that musaf should maybe be translated as “the thing that happens when you think the service should be just about over,” or “the thing that stands between you and your kiddush lunch.” This experience is exacerbated by the fact that many of the blessings within the musaf amidah are repetitions of the earlier morning shacharit amidah.
Still, we reflected on what meaning we might make of the musaf amidah being a part of the traditional Shabbat and holiday service experiences.
For starters, I often name that the musaf amidah signals the different—and dare I say, sacred—relationship that we are invited to have with respect to time on Shabbat. So often, time is our adversary—the thing we don’t have enough of, the thing we worry about wasting, the thing we struggle to remain on top of… On Shabbat, we try to be at peace with time, in relationship with it, reflecting on it. musaf, by inviting us to linger just a little bit longer with the service, giving us one more bite at the apple of prayer experience that morning, helps situate us in that different relationship to time. We’ll resume our struggle with time the next day, but musaf asks us to stay a little while longer with that different relationship to time… to one another… to the Divine…
Further, musaf confronts us with the sacrificial origins of the Jewish prayer experience. Whereas other Jewish prayers don’t necessarily explicitly reference the sacrificial foundations of religious expression for the Israelites, the musaf does. “You instituted Shabbat,” we pray to God in the musaf service, “loved its offerings, commanded us regarding its ceremonies and the order of its libations,” going on to explicitly cite the animal sacrifice offered on Shabbat (“On the day of Shabbat, two perfect year-old lambs, two-tenths of a measure of choice flour, a meal-offering mixed with oil, and its libation”).
What meaning might we take from this, we wondered? Well, we noted the oft-cited Hebrew word for offering, “korban,” as being related to the root “k.r.b.” which means essentially “to draw near.” Sacrifices were seen as the transformation of the physical into the spiritual, or perhaps even of reminding ourselves that it is an illusion that there is a difference between the two; that indeed all comes from God, and doing so was seen as a conduit for drawing near to the presence of the Divine.
Similarly, prayer is in many ways about effecting a similar transformation, of attuning ourselves to the presence of the Divine, which tradition teaches is always there but that sometimes requires ritual acts—like an offering, like prayer—to recognize.
Musaf has the capacity to invite us to linger to recognize that conception, even if only once a week.
